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Not Just Guns Walked During Fast and Furious
I love my country, but I fear my government. Fast and Furious has come up in comments about the current Deep State concerns in the Russian collusion investigation. The Los Angeles Times has a series of articles on the ATF Fast and Furious debacle. One article concerning a Glendale, Arizona firearms store owner is pretty revealing that the guns sold to Mexican drug cartels were not followed across the border.
Not just guns walked away, Eric Holder, the Attorney General in the Obama administration also walked away from any responsibility for around 3,000 firearms sold to criminals on the Mexican side of the border.
In the fall of 2009, ATF agents installed a secret phone line and hidden cameras in a ceiling panel and wall at Andre Howard’s Lone Wolf gun store. They gave him one basic instruction: Sell guns to every illegal purchaser who walks through the door.
For 15 months, Howard did as he was told. To customers with phony IDs or wads of cash he normally would have turned away, he sold pistols, rifles and semiautomatics. He was assured by the ATF that they would follow the guns, and that the surveillance would lead the agents to the violent Mexican drug cartels on the Southwest border.
Mr. Andre was not the only gun store owner that had concerns.
Other firearms dealers shared his concerns. At the nearby Scottsdale Gun Club, the proprietor sent an email to Agent David Voth. “I want to help ATF,” he said, “but not at the risk of agents’ safety because I have some very close friends that are U.S. Border Patrol agents in southern AZ.”
Howard recalled that a chubby, bald and “very confident” man named Jaime Avila walked into the store on Jan. 16, 2010, and bought the AK-47s. Under the Fast and Furious protocol, agents were supposed to use the video cameras, surveillance, informants and law enforcement intelligence to follow the weapons and hope they led them to the drug cartels.
But no agents were watching on the hidden cameras or waiting outside to track the firearms when Avila showed up. Howard faxed a copy of the sale paperwork to the ATF “after the firearms were gone,” assuming they would catch up later. They never did.
Between November 2009 and June 2010, according to an ATF agent’s email to William Newell, then the special agent-in-charge in Phoenix, Avila walked away with 52 firearms after he “paid approximately $48,000 cash. The firearms consisted of FN 5.7 pistols, 1 Barrett 50 BMG rifle, AK-47 variant rifles, Ruger 9mm handguns, Colt 38 supers, etc.…”
Jaime Avila was stopped at the border:
Sometime in spring or early summer 2010 — the exact date is unknown — U.S. immigration officers reportedly stopped Avila at the Arizona border with the two semiautomatics and 30 other weapons. According to two sources close to a congressional investigation into Fast and Furious, the authorities checked with the ATF and were told to release him with the weapons because the ATF was still hoping to track the guns to cartel members.
The two semi-automatics would turn up again, this time at the scene of the Terry shooting. According to sources, they were hidden in backpacks and stashed in the desert, ready for Mexican bandits.
A Border Patrol Agent loses his life:
Late in the night on Dec. 14, in a canyon west of Rio Rico, Ariz., Border Patrol agents came across Mexican bandits preying on illegal immigrants.
According to a Border Patrol “Shooting Incident” report, the agents fired two rounds of bean bags from a shotgun. The Mexicans returned fire. One agent fired from his sidearm, another with his M-4 rifle.
One of the alleged bandits, Manuel Osorio-Arellanes, a 33-year-old Mexican from Sinaloa, was wounded in the abdomen and legs. Agent Brian Terry — 40, single, a former Marine — also went down. “I’m hit!” he cried.
A fellow agent cradled his friend. “I can’t feel my legs,” Terry said. “I think I’m paralyzed.” A bullet had pierced his aorta. Tall and nearly 240 pounds, Terry was too heavy to carry. They radioed for a helicopter. But Terry was bleeding badly, and he died in his colleague’s arms.
The bandits left Osorio-Arellanes behind and escaped across the desert, tossing away two AK-47 semiautomatics from Howard’s store.
The stop at the border of Jaime Avila was the moment that defined the idiocy of Fast and Furious. The death of Brian Terry was the defining moment for his family of a callous disregard for his life by a government agency that engaged in a coverup to protect Fast and Furious firearms that were found at the scene of his death, and repeated violations of Federal law, and Arizona state laws. This program put Arizonans at risk, and the Mexican government has stated that firearms sold during Fast and Furious to cartels have been involved in 170 crime scene incidents in Mexico.
You can read the full story by clicking on the link. Betrayal, collusion, and coverup — it’s all there.
Published in Guns
Thanks for the timely reminder @dougwatt. This succinct summary should be enough to scuttle any thought Eric Holder may have of ever collecting a government salary again. And further, put that way – no one should ever hire him in connection with anything connected to the practice of law, nor speaking about it in any circumstance. He should be sitting quietly somewhere way out of the way. What a reprehensible individual, and the company he keeps!
Doug, an excellent, if tragic, summary.
That’s in addition to Holder’s pressure on banks and lenders to squash firearms dealers in Operation Chokepoint.
And there was the DoJ’s dismissal of an open-and-shut case of voter intimidation involving Black Panthers.
Today, we have a grossly political investigation of the President that has gone unchecked for 2 years while creating crimes to nail the President’s associates. And the Democrats’ presidential candidate walks away from felonies.
I can only hope rule of law remains at the local level. But I doubt it.
For years the left used lies about crime in Mexico to attempt to infringe our rights.
They would say things like “x percent of guns used in murders in Mexico are traced back to the US.” If you dove in, the real stat was “y percent” a very much lower number. “x percent” was the percentage of those guns the Mexican government asked us to trace that turned out to come from the US. They only asked us to trace a relatively small number. No reason to ask us to trace guns they already had records of (like guns diverted from the Mexican army and police).
The left got tired of having their lies repeatedly pointed out.
Unlike “Wide Receiver”, F&F was not even plausibly a botched attempt to trace the commerce of illegal guns. Rather it was intended to raise that “y percent” (and the associated absolute number of such murders in Mexico) to the point of crisis to provide momentum to infringe our rights. Might have worked if not for the Terry killing.
There is another scandal that is not as well known as Fast and Furious; Grenade-walker.
Yeah, this wasn’t a good plan that went bad. This was awful from the get go. And no one is held responsible because the government can do whatever it wants?
Then too, if your narrative involves ICE ruining the lives of would-be citizens, it doesn’t do to talk too much about armed drug-dealers coming across our border.
When Fast & Furious first became public, Democrats responded by saying that George W Bush had done the same thing. Truth was that although under Bush there was a similar program there were two distinct difference – (1) the ATF did follow the guns and (2) the Mexican government was informed of the program.
I used to work a lot in Mexico and when the story broke I asked my friends there about it. They were upset and it turns out that during a NAFTA summit the president of Mexico took Obama to task about Fast & Furious. Mexican papers reported on it, but (surprise!) it received no coverage in the U.S. press.
Also, the Wide Receiver guns were supposedly disarmed and there were far fewer.
Just one F&F straw purchaser bought more than a third more guns than were involved in all of Wide Receiver.
When we periodically revisit this horror, I’m always left with a thought along these lines:
These stories are only the ones we know about.
“Scandal-free presidency!”
Disclaimer: Our legal counsel requires that we explain that “no reported scandals” may be substituted for “scandal-free” at our sole discretion.
I continue to disagree, though this is a tentative conclusion. The discussion about this yesterday (on another post) led me to read part of an Inspector General report on the issue (here), which is almost 500 pages. So far, I’ve gotten through the portion about the Bush-era investigation (called “Wide Receiver,” as noted above). Comment #8 above, claiming that ATF followed the guns in Wide Receiver, is incorrect.
My impression so far is that the entire story was driven by misplaced public outrage, and an after-the-fact insistence that this type of sting operation was obviously a dreadful strategy. I haven’t counted them individually, but my impression was that between 15 and 20 ATF investigators and DOJ prosecutors knew of the program, including knowledge that several hundred guns were left in the hands of criminals, and none of them thought that this was improper. They may have been wrong, with hindsight, but this was not obvious at the time.
Incidentally, blaming President Bush is unfair. Not even his AG (Mukasey, at the time) knew of the program. I haven’t read the report far enough to learn whether AG Holder or other high Obama Administration officials knew about Fast & Furious at the relevant time.
I don’t see any plausible causal link between these operations and Agent Terry’s murder. It does appear that a Fast & Furious gun was used to kill him. But in the absence of Fast & Furious, I would expect that the murderer would simply have used a different gun.
I’ve got to head out to work, and will comment a bit more later.
A follow-up on the IG report.
It has some details about the shootout that resulted in Agent Terry’s death. There were at least 5 suspects involved, and at least 2 were carrying rifles. It is not clear how many were shooting, or what weapons were used. Two AK-47s were recovered at the scene, and were traced to the Fast & Furious operation. It was not determined that either of these AK-47s was the weapon used to kill Agent Terry.
This Fox News article indicates that the killer band was a 5-man “rip crew,” a heavily-armed group that would steal the drug loads of competing smugglers. They come across as very, very bad hombres. My impression is that they would have been heavily armed irrespective of anything done in the Fast & Furious operation.
“In January, Avila and 19 others were charged in the straw purchasing. It was the one and only indictment to come out of 15 months of Fast and Furious. Asked at the press conference touting the charges whether the ATF allowed guns to “walk,” Newell, the ATF field supervisor, responded, “Hell no!”
One indictment for the purchase of around 2,000 firearms, but then again we have to rely on the ATF on the number of firearms sold. This is not what I would call a spectacular success.
The IG Report also mentioned coverup efforts:
I’m not a legal type, but if A knowingly sells a gun to a person who he knows will use it in the commission of a crime, is he not guilty of abetting or similar?
Doug, I’m not sure of the point of your #15.
Lying to Agent Terry’s family is terrible. This, however, does not change the fact that it was not established that one of the Fast & Furious guns was used to kill Agent Terry, and does not change the high likelihood that even if there had been no Fast & Furious at all, the killer(s) would have had other comparable weapons.
On the single indictment, it sounds like a big one, though I haven’t found much in the way of details. 20 people were indicted, and I don’t know how many charges there were. A single conspiracy case can involve a great many individual charges.
I certainly agree that Fast & Furious wasn’t a success. I just don’t find it to be a shocking scandal.
On the question of “gunwalking,” this is addressed in the AG report, and it strikes me as a semantic game similar to the John Yoo “torture” memos (in which I think that Yoo’s analysis was correct). It appears that there was not a single, accepted definition of “gunwalking.” The narrow definition was allowing guns provided by ATF itself (as with an undercover seller) to be put in the hands of criminal purchasers, and then taken away from the scene.
This seems a very different situation from monitoring a number of sales by a FFL (i.e. a licensed gun seller), while developing a case.
There are problems with a rule saying that agents must arrest illegal gun purchasers as soon as they have probable cause. First, probable cause is not proof beyond a reasonable doubt, so additional case development and evidence may be needed to secure a conviction. Second, making an arrest as soon as the agents have probable cause could make them unable to identify other members of the conspiracy.
As I mentioned, I’ve only read the Wide Receiver portion of the IG report so far. In this section, it is clear that delayed arrest resulted in substantial additional evidence, both physical (such as the type of cash used, in heat-sealed bags) and testimonial (such as admissions to the informant FFL that the guns were being purchased for transport to Mexico), and also resulted in identification of additional members of the conspiracy.
[Continued]
Actually the FBI said they could not determine if the bullet came from a Fast & Furious gun. They didn’t say it did not. All that means to me the possibility it did cannot be discounted.
It gets even better ATF agents working in Mexico were not informed by their counterparts in Phoenix that weapons were being allowed to cross the border.
My question would be what would the response be if 69 or more Tucsonans had been killed by this program?
This is what I said above. I wrote: “This, however, does not change the fact that it was not established that one of the Fast & Furious guns was used to kill Agent Terry . . ..”
You did not address my main point, which is: “the high likelihood that even if there had been no Fast & Furious at all, the killer(s) would have had other comparable weapons.” I have not seen a shred of contrary evidence or argument.
On a related point — until 2017, our hometown of Tucson had a policy of requiring police to destroy seized guns. Almost 5,000 were destroyed. This is completely irrational. Such guns should be sold to licensed dealers, and the proceeds used for public safety purposes.
Why not do this? Because of fear of an irrational and hysterical accusation of malfeasance if such a gun ended up being used in a murder. Notwithstanding the fact that the killer would almost certainly have been merely bought and used a different gun. Which, I contend, is precisely the source of the unwarranted controversy over Fast & Furious.
The Arizona Supreme Court overturned the City of Tucson’s policy in 2017. Mayor Rothschild complied, and said that he wanted to use the funds for public safety purposes, which sounds very sensible to me. There’s more on the story here.
As a funny personal aside, Tucson being Tucson, I happen to know a bunch of people involved in the case. I know the Mayor. I know Vice Chief Justice Pelander, who wrote the opinion. I know one of the lawyers representing the City and another representing the NRA. Kinda weird, but kinda Tucson, too.
You have not demonstrated that a single person was killed by this program. That is our disagreement. There is not but-for causation.
As a basic matter of economics, F&F shifted the supply curve. If not for F&F, black market gun prices would have been higher and the numbers smaller. The question is only of the elasticities and resulting amounts. On the demand side, we’d have to look at the killers and their marginal utility for weaponry.
Something like F&F is not going to affect El Chapo’s core bodyguard who are probably using high end weaponry.
But the guys who killed Terry were bottom feeders or close thereto. They likely were in the demand zone that was affected by the F&F supply change.
So are you saying that the Mexican government is lying about Fast and Furious guns that were recovered at crime scenes in Mexico? I know you are not saying that Mexican lives lost are acceptable collateral damage.
There is no argument, shred or otherwise. Of course they would have had guns. The fact that they were abetted in the commission of a crime by guns the US government allowed to walk is the issue, and it doesn’t matter the administration.
What if they had shown up with no guns, pointed their fingers, and said “Pew-pew!” at Terry? Would that prove or disprove something?
A small point of order; our officials caused guns to be sold illegally.
Doug, no, I’m not saying that. I’m not getting through to you, so I may not be explaining my argument well.
My basic argument is that if a particular criminal didn’t have a F&F gun, he would almost certainly have had another gun.
There’s an original Star Trek episode about the idea, the one with the cloud creature that drained the hemoglobin from people’s blood (it was called Obsession). Kirk blamed a security ensign for some ensuing deaths, because the ensign froze and failed to fire his phaser at the creature. Kirk had made the same mistake with the same creature years earlier, when serving under the ensign’s father. Later the Enterprise fires its full phasers at the creature, with no effect. So while both Kirk and the ensign had made a mistake, it had no consequence, because it would have made no difference.
Your argument about F&F shifting the supply curve to make guns relatively cheaper is plausible, but unlikely. The volume of gun sales is very large, so while a couple of thousand sounds like a lot, I think that it’s very unlikely that it would have any meaningful effect. I agree that this is an empirical question.
The number of guns sold in the course of the F&F operation was about 2,000. I couldn’t rapidly find data on the number of gun sales, but I did find FBI data on the number of background checks done by state and year (here).
During the F&F years (2009-2011), there were about 672,000 background checks done in Arizona alone. Nationwide, the figure was about 45 million (here). It’s hard to imagine that around 2,000 guns would have had a meaningful effect on prices, given these volumes.
Also, remember the proposed remedy — earlier arrest. This would merely have led to the use of different straw purchasers, which makes early arrest ineffective, the very problem that F&F was trying to solve.