Pirate's Cove

I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you!

(Fox News) Democrats investigating the failed gun-running probe known as “Operation Fast and Furious” are laying the blame at the feet of officials in Arizona, saying in a new report that lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have “obtained no evidence” implicating high-level political appointees in Washington.

At the same time, the report reveals that two top Justice Department officials, in previously undisclosed interviews, insisted they would have taken action if they had the relevant details, and said it is “absurd” and unfair to suggest they knew early-on about the tactics of Fast and Furious.

Titled “Fatally Flawed: Five Years of Gunwalking in Arizona,” much of the report is a historical overview of “gunwalking operations” dating back to 2006, and in a letter to Republicans accompanying the report, the ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said he told his staff “to focus on the facts we have discovered rather than the heated and sometimes inaccurate rhetoric.”

“It is clear that ATF agents in Phoenix and prosecutors in the Arizona U.S. Attorney’s Office embarked on a deliberate strategy not to arrest suspected straw purchasers while they attempted to make larger cases against higher-level targets,” the report reads.

“Although these officials claimed they had no probable cause to arrest any straw purchasers at the time, allowing hundreds of illegally purchased military-grade assault weapons to fall into the hands of violent drug cartels over the course of five years created an obvious and inexcusable threat to public safety on both sides of the border.”

What we have here is the Democrats circling the wagons, attempting to protect, basically, Eric Holder, and to some extent, Barack Obama. And to do this, they’ve decided to throw ATF agents and prosecutors in Arizona under the bus. It’ll be interesting to see what happens now with those federal employees, who might take umbrage to being hit by the Democrats giants bus bumper and decide to speak out.

What’s left unsaid in the report is that the program was run by the home office of the ATF, a division of the Department of Justice, and that people in the DoJ were aware of the operation. So, why did the upper echelons of the ATF and DOJ fail to follow the progress of F&F, and express abdication of the duties? The end result is either that Holder and other high ranking DOJ/ATF officials knew exactly what was going on, or that they were negligent in their jobs. Both could be deemed criminal activities, particularly since people were murdered with the untracked weapons, both in Mexico and the United States.