by Dave Workman
Congressman Darrell Issa (Photo courtesy House Oversight Committee)
Senior Editor
Congressman Darrell Issa has warned the Justice Department’s Inspector General against delaying release of his report on Operation Fast and Furious, and has asked IG Michael Horowitz to appear before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Sept. 11.
The report was delivered to the Justice Department for review in late August. That review period should run through Sept. 4.
“It would be regrettable if senior Department officials applied political pressure on you to delay publication of this report,” Issa said in a letter to Horowitz dated Aug. 24. “Given the considerable public interest in this case and the Attorney General’s own purported interest in learning the recommendations put forth in your report in order to make important management changes, it is incumbent upon you to release this report as soon as practicable.”
The Inspector General’s report took some 20 months to materialize after the Oversight Committee began its investigation of the gun trafficking scandal.
It comes weeks after a Joint Staff Report produced for Issa and Sen. Charles Grassley, ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was released on the doomed operation. That report, the first of three parts, is harshly critical of fived officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who had direct oversight responsibility.
Launched in the fall of 2009, Fast and Furious was ostensibly designed to allow BATF agents to track the illicit movement of firearms from point of purchase by straw buyers in Arizona to drug cartels in Mexico. It came to an abrupt halt in December 2010 when two guns linked to one of the Fast and Furious suspects were recovered at the scene of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry’s murder in the Arizona desert mountain region north of Nogales.
BATF agents began complaining about the operation and a handful came forward as whistleblowers, first contacting Grassley’s office, and then speaking to investigators from the House committee. By that time, on-line journalists David Codrea at Examiner.com and Mike Vanderboegh at Sipsey Street Irregulars had already published reports about the “gun walking” scheme, and they were instrumental in hooking up confidential sources with Capitol Hill investigators.
The investigation broke wide open when CBS News interviewed one of the whistle-blowers more than a year ago, and ran that story on the evening news about a month after Codrea and Vanderboegh had first written about the case online. Fox News has also steadfastly followed the story, but other mainstream news agencies have paid only intermittent attention to the story.
The Joint Staff Report is a huge document with appendices that contain copies of e-mails and memoranda, and sworn statements from witnesses. Subtitled “The Anatomy of a Failed Operation,” the report contains damning information about how the BATF conducted the investigation, apparently ignoring its own standards and investigative practices.
Carlos Canino, now serving as head of the BATF’s Tucson, AZ field office, was an attaché to Mexico during Fast and Furious, but was kept in the dark about the operation. When he spoke to TGM in July, he stood by his original assessment before Issa’s committee in July 2011 that Fast and Furious was “the perfect storm of idiocy.”
Issa, in an interview with Fox News, said that “we’re positive” the IG’s report will say essentially the same thing that the Joint Staff report says. However, that will not be known until the report is available.
It may become a key political issue if the report is as critical as Issa expects, and becomes public prior to the November election.
Thousands of pages of documents subpoenaed by the Oversight committee are now being withheld by executive privilege, placing President Barack Obama squarely in the midst of what has become a potentially volatile scandal.
