“The U.S. Department of Justice released thousands of subpoenaed documents about the controversial ‘Operation Fast and Furious’ gun trafficking investigation to a congressional committee on Friday,” Reuters reports. “The operation was a failed effort between 2009 and 2011 to stop gun smuggling across the United States’ southwestern border by the department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and federal prosecutors in Arizona.” So much for reporting. The “gun smuggling to stop gun smuggling” justification was revealed as nothing more than a cover story the moment ATF Agent Dobson testified that he’d been ordered to stop following a known gun smuggler smuggling guns. To let the guns walk (hence the scandal’s “Gunwalker” nickname). The question is . . .
Will the documents reveal Fast & Furious’ raison d’être, long rumored to be a government plot to “plant” guns at Mexican crime scenes to motivate Congress to pass a U.S. assault weapons ban? Or supply the then-friendly Sinaloa Cartel with firearms? Or both.
Equally, will the new intel expose the ATF, DOJ, DHS, ICE and (maybe the CIA and DEA) coverup when the black bag job was exposed, following the death of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry [above] at the hands of ATF-enabled drug thugs? Reuters description of the docs does not lead one to believe that the truth about F&F is forthcoming.
A federal judge ordered the department to release the documents to the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The records released on Friday were about the department’s internal deliberations on congressional and media inquiries about the investigation, the Justice Department said.
The documents are critical to the committee’s efforts to “understand and shine light on what was happening inside DOJ during the time of this irresponsible operation,” committee chairman and Utah Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Republican, said in a statement.
As of Friday afternoon, the committee staff had just begun looking through the documents and could not release additional details about them, a spokeswoman said.
The committee sued the department for the documents in August 2012, but the judge’s order in January required the department to release a smaller set of documents than those originally requested by the committee.
The committee appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday for the remaining documents it had requested.
Despite the caveats and obvious ongoing obfuscation, the doc dump could include explosive information about Fast and Furious — including White House involvement in the cover-up. Question: what did then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton know about this illegal international operation and when did she know it? Watch this space.