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Old October 31, 2011, 11:58 AM   #1451
csmsss
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What is it, exactly, that is going to get underlings to flip? This is not a prosecutorial investigation, and Issa's committee has neither a carrot nor a stick with which to encourage comprehensive and truthful testimony from anyone not otherwise inclined to provide it.
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Old October 31, 2011, 02:34 PM   #1452
Bartholomew Roberts
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Quote:
Originally Posted by csmsss
What is it, exactly, that is going to get underlings to flip? This is not a prosecutorial investigation, and Issa's committee has neither a carrot nor a stick with which to encourage comprehensive and truthful testimony from anyone not otherwise inclined to provide it.
You've posted pretty much that same general theme in previous posts in this thread:

Starting on Page 5, Post #105
Post #134, Page 6
Post #504, Page 21
Post #565, Page 23
Post #569, Page 23
Post #572, Page 23
Post #577, Page 24
Post #586, Page 24
Post 591, Page 24
Post #596, Page 24
Post #604, Page 25
Post #661, Page 27
Post #665, Page 27
Post #1089, Page 44
Post #1225, Page 49
Post #1229, Page 50
Post #1232, Page 50
Post #1290, Page 52
Post #1324, Page 53
Post #1327, Page 54
Post #1336, Page 54

I think by this point, we all understand that you are skeptical Congress has the power to deliver justice on this. I would feel safe saying that even a casual reader of the thread understands your position on this clearly.

What I am having difficulty understanding is why you are once again reiterating that point?

On the bright side, it looks like Melson felt it was in his best interest to testify before Congress with his private attorney's present despite your belief that Issa's Committee has neither carrot nor stick, and it appears AG Holder will testify publicly on December 8th in front of the Committee, despite your earlier skepticism on that point (see Page 54) as well. So who knows? If you wait and see, maybe you'll be pleasantly surprised.
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Old October 31, 2011, 05:02 PM   #1453
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What is it, exactly, that is going to get underlings to flip? This is not a prosecutorial investigation, and Issa's committee has neither a carrot nor a stick with which to encourage comprehensive and truthful testimony from anyone not otherwise inclined to provide it.
Not everyone is willing to perjure themselves, especially if they think they'll get caught. If the Republicans win the Whitehouse next year, there could potentially be criminal indictments if they did. While I don't think that is likely for the cabinet level players, it could happen at fairly senior levels given the right set of facts and circumstances. It's this potential that might spur some to come clean if called to testify.
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Old November 1, 2011, 06:13 AM   #1454
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Lanny Breuer has some regrets

Now that there is proof he knew of the ongoing gunwalking back in April of 2010, he regrets that he learned we were sending thousands of guns to Mexican criminals and responded, apparently, by saying, "Hmmm" and moving on with his day. He did not respond, he says, by putting a stop to this madness, nor by telling his bosses about it, because our government sending thousands of guns to criminals is really a pretty unremarkable event. Or something.
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Old November 1, 2011, 08:59 AM   #1455
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Wait a second, didn't we hear earlier that Lanny Breuer signs off on hundreds of wiretap warrants, sometimes without even reading them, and that he didn't know the specifics of the Fast and Furious investigation or that guns were being allowed to walk?

Now that there is actual documentation where one of his deputies is telling him that guns walked in Wide Receiver and that the case could be embarrassing, Breuer suddenly remembers that ATF in Arizona was walking guns and he has regrets about not informing his superiors?

Looks like Breuer is the latest guy going under the bus in an attempt to stop the contagion from spreading higher into the DOJ - and once again, they try to emphasize the Bush-era connections of Wide Receiver. Are they that stupid? The only way that works as a strategy is if nobody digs any further than "Bush-era" when looking at Wide Receiver. If you actually compare Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious side by side, it makes Fast and Furious look about a thousand times worse. You can at least claim that Wide Receiver tried to track and interdict the weapons and was simply unsuccessful (and was called off after it lost 200 weapons).

With Fast and Furious though, you have no attempts to track at all. Agents ORDERED not to interdict the weapons on several occasions. Agents dealing firearms DIRECT to criminals. And then there is that whole "lost around 2,000 weapons over the course of several years" thing. And since the same agents were involved in both cases, you've got that whole "If Wide Receiver was such a failure, why on earth did you start Fast and Furious?" question.

Surely someone in the Administration has got to realize that is going to be a really ugly comparison if it ever gets made in mainstream press.
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Old November 1, 2011, 09:06 AM   #1456
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I think CBS news got it wrong when they labeled gunwalking an investigative tactic

Quote:
Gunwalking is a controversial investigative tactic in which police allow suspects to traffic guns without stopping them in order to see where they end up.
I guess they are labeling it that because that's what DOJ is telling them it is, but was it ever used before F&F ? They make it sound like it was an existing albeit controversial tactic - when that's not the case. I don't think it was a tactic before F&F. Certainly not a proven tactic.

Could it be said of Operation Wide Reciever that guns "walked" ? They were traced - which is different.

It's semantics, but semantics is sometimes half of the debate, which is why anti-abortion folks want to be knowns as "pro-life" and the other side wants to be known as "pro-choice".

I wish someone would call them to task on exactly how they can call it a investigative tactic.
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Old November 1, 2011, 09:33 AM   #1457
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Also, done during the Bush years.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1011/67303.html

See the top paragraph.

Breuer is Holder's Scooter, it seems.
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Old November 1, 2011, 10:31 AM   #1458
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Isnt it amazing how higher Justice was sacrosanct and in no way involved as recently as September 2011 and now we learn that Breuer knew about gunwalking as early as April 2010 (if you believe his somewhat self-serving account of events); yet it never occurred to him to tell his boss of that knowledge as his boss was eagerly declaring his innocence?

Now Breuer suddenly has an attack of conscience the day before his testimony and declares that he let his boss defend him publically, even though he knew the statements AG Holder made were false, and never thought to tell his boss that he was relaying false info.

And I love the Politico take on Wide Receiver as well... talk about a nasty game of telephone. According to the FFL who participated in Wide Receiver, he sold about 450 guns total during Operations Wide Receiver. In one single case, 279 (going on memory for this number, see earlier in thread for exact number with source) guns were sold and only 47 successfully interdicted. Without knowing the number interdicted in the other cases, it is impossible to say how many guns walked; but Politico went with 400, the maximum possible. OK, fair enough.

Next Politico characterizes Wide Receiver as "allowing" guns to be walked. In fact, Wide Receiver had tracking devices in the weapons and attempted to interdict the guns. They continually failed in this because the smugglers had obtained the numbers of ATF surveillance aircraft and would make their run when the aircraft refueled (dirty ATF employee in Arizona anyone?).

And Politico is remarkably silent on exactly why the Wide Receiver investigation ended in 2007; but the Obama Administration brought charges in 2009. According to the FFL involved in Wide Receiver, this was because the ATF lied to the AUSA and the AUSA refused to bring charges as a result. The Obama Administration's new AUSA made the decision to bring charges in 2009, when they took over. If you read the Politico report, it made it sound as if the Obama administration discovered this nefarious Wide Receiver plot and did the best it could with a bad situation. And yet Politico skips right over the obvious question, "If this was such a bad idea/disaster, why did you remove several of the safeguards in this operation and then let the same exact people run another operation with an even wider reach?"

I'd love to see Lanny Breuer sit down with Sharyl Attkisson and tell his story. That would never happen though because Attkisson has done more than 10 minutes of research on the story and would know when she is being lied to.

Quote:
Breuer is Holder's Scooter, it seems.
Breuer might have done better as Holder's Scooter if they had not tried to make Melson, Newell, Hurley and Burke into Scooter first. And of course the timeline and complexity of this operation mean the likelihood that there is a critical piece of evidence raising awkward questions for someone above Breuer is much higher than it was in Scooter's case (i.e. the Newell-O'Reilly connection). Ultimately, I am thinking this will be more like Dan Restrepo as Obama's Oliver North.

I am enjoying watching the all too predictable pattern of "deny deny deny" and then grabbing the guy who has the most incriminating connections revealed so far and throwing him into the wood chipper in hopes of ending the investigation though. You might almost get the impression that Issa and Grassley were releasing documents in a systematic manner designed to encourage that kind of response.

Last edited by Bartholomew Roberts; November 1, 2011 at 10:39 AM.
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Old November 1, 2011, 11:11 AM   #1459
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Lanny Breuer's "regrets" are like Barney Frank's admission of being "overly optimistic" about Fannie and Freddie's financial condition..."please believe I am just stupid and made a mistake anyone else would have, in the same circumstances".

The country is in the best of hands.

The Obama Administration Echo Chamber that assures every problem results from some other source may begin to crack a little on F+F.
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Old November 2, 2011, 10:19 AM   #1460
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http://dailycaller.com/2011/11/01/se...t-and-furious/

I shouldn't be boggled by anything anymore, but this really takes the cake.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Diane Feinstein
[T]here’s been a lot said about Fast and Furious, and perhaps mistakes were made, but I think this hunt for blame doesn’t really speak about the problem. And the problem is, anybody can walk in and buy anything, .50-caliber weapons, sniper weapons, buy them in large amounts, and send them down to Mexico. So, the question really becomes, what do we do about this?
"Perhaps mistakes were made". Seriously. Apparently the problem is that our lax gun laws allowed thousands of firearms to march across the border, not that the ATF caused the laws to be bypassed. Go figure.
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Old November 2, 2011, 10:46 AM   #1461
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It's often much more than half of the debate.
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Old November 2, 2011, 11:00 AM   #1462
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The audacity- the unmitigated gall ! The mendacity!

They got caught with their hand in the cookie jar, their secret operation to build a case for stricter gun control was exposed and yet they still push for some sort of gun ban to stop weapons from flowing to Mexico.


Ahhhh ! it makes me crazy! Of the weapons going from the U.S. to Mexico, they could have stopped 99% of them just by shutting down the BATFE gun running operations !!!!

I'm living in crazy town and Dianne Feinstein is the mayor!
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Old November 2, 2011, 11:02 AM   #1463
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Does this surprise anybody at all, coming from Feinstein?

California doesn't only have bad gun laws...
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Old November 2, 2011, 01:34 PM   #1464
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So Breuer expects us to believe that he learned about Wide Receiver and was so shocked that he met with ATF and made it clear gunwalking would not be tolerated?

Almost simultaneously, the very same people who started Wide Receiver, started Fast and Furious, and despite being warned by the Deputy AG of the Criminal Division of DOJ not to walk guns, they immediately went out and started walking guns to Mexico even bigger and badder and in violation of several international agreements, basically blowing off Breuer.

We are also supposed to believe that Breuer never realized they were doing this, even as he flew to Mexico and discussed Arizona's gun smuggling efforts and ordered the ATF agent there not to share that info with Mexico. Even when he was signing off on wiretap requests by the same people and hearing about the big case they were building, it never even occurred to Breuer to check up and see that they were not walking guns.

In fact, that thought was so far from Breuer's mind, that even when Brian Terry was killed and CBS News is publishing allegations of gun walking in Fast and Furious by the same people who did Wide Receiver, Breuer never thought to contact anyone in the Justice Department and tell them that he had reprimanded the very same people in Fast and Furious for walking guns in Wide Receiver? That thought didn't even cross his mind when CBS News named him as an accomplice and Eric Holder was defending him in September 2011?

You know, it is no news to me that Feinstein and Breuer both think the American public is unescapably stupid; but come on guys, at least pretend that you respect them enough to come up with a credible story. A 5yr old with chocolate smeared over his mouth and a half-eaten cookie in one hand could come up with something more credible than that.
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Old November 2, 2011, 03:19 PM   #1465
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Old November 2, 2011, 06:32 PM   #1466
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Feinstein is partly right...more strict observance of the law and the Arms Control Export Act by DOJ, ATF, State and FBI would result in fewer guns going to Mexico, and some unknown US gangs.

I am not sure, given the facts of the case that are out there, that Feinstein is playing with a full deck. It's clear laws were at the least ignored by government agents charged with enforcing them, if this fiasco is limited to just the PHX office of ATF. How she gets to her conclusion that more law is needed, she needs a good doctor and a long bit of bed rest in a quiet place. However, the average Democrat narrative out of DC is only a little less contradictory to facts. This goes past her oft-expressed personal need to disarm every law-abiding citizen into lunacy.

To quote Bob Owens, the efforts by Feinstein and Breuer to save Holder are too little, too late, too brazenly insulting. There is no limit they won't sink to, but there is a limit to what will stick on the wall.
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Old November 2, 2011, 07:14 PM   #1467
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Why is Feinstein Yelping Now?

Shucks, I forgot. Most all of her funds for her next reelection campaign are frozen, if not gone...

DiFi got caught by a decades long fraud by the queen-bee of Democrat campaign fund administrators, who finally got too far behind the curve to keep going and is under indictment for misappropriation of funds and filing falacious campaign finance reports for a slew of state Democrats and some national ones, to include DiFi. At this point even if the money is actually there, the accounts under "management" by the perp (and she looks the part, not even the best beer goggles in the world could help) are frozen pending a full accounting and prosecution.

Sooo ...how to make some money, the Chicago way? Carry water for Obama and Holder, silly . Create a diversion. Sure you look stupid, if not outright bonkers...who cares if your campaign gets paid for with other people's money and you get another Senate term. DiFi has plenty of personal money, but she didn't amass it by spending it...she spends OTHER people's money.
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Old November 2, 2011, 07:43 PM   #1468
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The utter rot at the top is amazing... I am by far no legal expert but it seems to me that in addition to the potential criminal charges that ATF, DOJ chiefs could be facing there may be a doorway to some civil litigation for the hyper gross negligence and criminal intent of the agencies policy that to me at least seems intended to kill US citizens as an official goal.
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Old November 2, 2011, 08:01 PM   #1469
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Does anyone want to start a pool on who will end up being sacrificed and which guilty parties will come out smelling like a rose

Our government is becoming the very thing our founding fathers were worried about

I feel sorry for my children, your children and their children!!!!!
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Old November 2, 2011, 08:36 PM   #1470
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Our government is becoming the very thing our founding fathers were worried about
Nope. Sorry. Our national government has long done greater damage to the American people than George III of England could even have imagined.

Say what you will about George III, (I can't think of a single good thing myself,) I'm sure he wouldn't have spent borrowed so-called "stimulus" money to help criminals ship guns to Mexico as a round-about means of subverting the Second Amendment.
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Old November 3, 2011, 07:16 AM   #1471
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SW, if George III didn't like you, he would quarter soldiers in your house. They were subject to some of his rules and none of yours, especially those regarding your daughter. That's how we came to have a third amendment. I'd say that's worse.
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Old November 3, 2011, 07:20 AM   #1472
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Clinton remembers learning about gunwalking from the press

Quote:
Appearing before the House Foreign Affairs committee, Clinton was questioned by Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) about the State Department’s involvement in the controversial Fast and Furious operation that has triggered hearings on Capitol Hill.

Mack asked Clinton if State had issued “the Justice Department a license or a written waiver in order to allow for the transfer of thousands of weapons across the U.S.-Mexico border?”

The secretary testified that State had “no record of any request for coordination. We have no record of any kind of notice or heads up.”

“My recollection is that I heard about it from the press,” Clinton added.

Claiming that it was the first time she had been asked that question, Clinton said that she had seen “no evidence” that such a waiver was granted and promised to investigate the matter further.
So nobody checks with the State Department, Department of Justice, or President before allowing thousands of guns to go to Mexican cartels. That's just the kind of thing that local officials routinely do in a big government like ours, and is easily overlooked. If someone does happen to notice it, it's completely unremarkable and no action is taken.

Really? This is the official line. Our government is that stupid, and has no ability to communicate and coordinate at all, apparently. If I believed it, I would want to dismantle the whole thing, not just parts of it.
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Old November 3, 2011, 07:30 AM   #1473
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Good thing the press found out about it I suppose, good thing the press is there to keep them apprised of progress....or they'd all still be in the dark and totally clueless.
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Old November 3, 2011, 07:39 AM   #1474
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She's on the record for Al Jazeera for real news coverage, too bad they didn't break the story. Maybe next time.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0..._n_830890.html

Are they all out of control?
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Old November 3, 2011, 08:27 PM   #1475
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SW, if George III didn't like you, he would quarter soldiers in your house. They were subject to some of his rules and none of yours, especially those regarding your daughter. That's how we came to have a third amendment. I'd say that's worse.
publius42: I stand corrected. I'd completely forgotten about that.
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