Obstruction of Justice a very serious charge when made against any U.S. citizen. Its even worse when the charge is made against the Justice Department which is charged with enforcing the law. But according to Ken Melson, the acting director of the ATF, the Justice Department is obstructing the congressional investigation of Operation Fast and Furious the ATF operation that allowed Mexican drug cartels to purchase and keep weapons from the United States
Apparently while the rest of us were having hot dogs and beer on July 4th Ken Melson was testifying before Darryl Issa's Government Oversight Committee. As a result of the meeting, Issa along with ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley chair off a letter (embedded below) which passed along the Melson's charge that he had been directed to obstruct the Congressional investigation.
"If his account is accurate, then ATF leadership appears to have been effectively muzzled while the DOJ sent over false denials and buried its head in the sand," Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said in a letter Tuesday to Attorney General Eric Holder. "That approach distorted the truth and obstructed our investigation."
According the the letter Melson testified that he was personally in the dark about the full extent of the Gun Walker program until public controversy erupted, and was “sick to his stomach” when he reviewed the Reports of Investigation.
Melson also confirmed Operation Fast and Furious was never supposed to end up as a giving guns to drug cartels operation, at least from the ATF point of view.
“Specifically, we have very real indications from several sources that some of the gun trafficking ‘higher-ups’ that the ATF sought to identify were already known to other agencies, and may even have been paid as informants,”
Issa and Grassley concluded their letter to Holder with a remarkably stern warning:
Any decision about Mr. Melson's future with the Department would need to be justified solely on the basis of the facts and the needs of the agency, rather than on his decision to speak to us. We encourage you to communicate to us any additional significant information about any such decision so that we can work together to ensure that it would not impede our investigation.
And it gets even worse, according to Fox News, many of those Fast and furious guns were purchased with American tax dollars.
For now, the Office of Inspector General is still conducting its review, and we are still conducting ours. Knowing what we know so far, we believe it would be inappropriate to make Mr. Melson the fall guy in an attempt to prevent further congressional oversight.
According to sources, unbeknown to the ATF, the target of their operation was a FBI confidential informant, a fact that only became known to them in April of this year after an 18-month investigation that cost millions of dollars of tax dollars.Something tells me that pretty soon the DOJ is going to learn that old axiom that the cover-up is worse than the original act. Sadly when you look at the track record of the DOJ including things like the New Black Panther investigation, it seems as if AG Holder has very little regard for the voters right to know.
"They were going after someone they could never have," a source in Washington told Fox News. "The Mr. Big they wanted was using government money to buy guns that went to the cartels. The FBI knew it and didn't tell them."
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