Holder claimed to not have known about F and F becuase there are many operations going on at once and he can not be aware of all of them.....
Holder is a liar and the dates he has testified to, about his learning of the operation don't pass muster.
Holder testified before Congress on May 13th of 2011 that he wasn't, "
sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks."
Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say that equals five weeks; at best then that puts his "first hearing" at or around April 8th . . . Which is 9 weeks after the DOJ's Feb 4th letter of lies to Senator Grassley and over 40 weeks after Holder received a
MEMORANDUM TO THE ATTORNEY GENERAL that updated the AG on the operation called "Fast and Furious" begun in September 2009, summarizing the operation to the date of this memo (July 5, 2010) in which:
______________________________"Manual Celis-Acosta . . . and and [redacted] straw purchasers . . . are responsible for the purchase of 1,500 firearms that were then supplied to Mexican drug trafficking cartels. They also have direct ties to the Sinaloa Cartel which is suspected of providing $1 million for the purchase of firearms in the greater Phoenix area."
______________________________
Which makes the months and months of denials by Holder and his claim of no knowledge of Fast and Furious prior to April of 2011 or thereabouts, quite perplexing. Either he is lying or incompetent.
In reality, Holder lied and continues to lie because he was nothing more than middle management in Fast and Furious. He really was given an impossible task and then managed it terribly.
That the directives came from a level above him is without doubt because the modifications to the Arizona US Attorney's prosecutorial doctrine was not something Holder,
even as Attorney General, could have executed himself.
The Arizona US Attorney's office was directed to completely deny any and all prosecution of Title 18 crimes (purchase & transfer offenses, i.e., strawbuying) and instead demand Phoenix ATF bring indictable evidence of Title 22 international gun trafficking offenses under the Arms Export Control Act, against unknown foreign individual members in the Sinaloa Cartel, citizens of, living in, and operating within Mexico . . .
AND do it without the knowledge, approval or cooperation of the Government of Mexico, without informing the ATF Agents sanctioned to work in Mexico and without making any attempt to actually "track" the guns after they were purchased in the USA.
This gets really complicated here, which proves that it was directed from
above DOJ/AG . . . The State Department is actually in charge of the Arms Export Control Act by way of
International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) because of the international nature (and diplomatic ramifications) of these crimes and the cross border actions required by US Law Enforcement to gather evidence, arrest, charge and prosecute violators who are citizens and residents of a foreign nation. This is assuming of course that the operation being discussed really has as an objective the capture of those individuals (
NOT a safe assumption for Fast and Furious).
Now, since the State Department is in charge of these international gun laws it is Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a department of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that are the legal enforcers of ITAR --
not ATF! Such a switcheroo isn't a small thing explained away by saying Fast and Furious was the actions of a "rogue ATF Agent" or simply a "botched law enforcement operation".
Consider for a moment the domestic and international hurdles to either jump or evade (in the latter, likely violate an international treaty, the Brownsville Agreement), by demanding ATF be the lead investigators for ITAR violations by foreign nationals operating
outside the USA. ICE was told to stand down by DHS (who was told by State/NSC/White House???) and defer to ATF for
anything to do with guns in the border areas of Arizona (does the President invoking Executive Privilege make a bit more sense considering all this interplay of agencies?).
It is clear that Fast and Furious was an operation
engineered to fail as a "law enforcement" initiative so that leaves its only real intention as placing thousands of guns sourced from US FFL's
combined with perhaps tens of thousands of assault weapons sourced from State Department approved direct sales, (another topic entirely) into the hands of narco-terrorist members of various and assorted Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations.
You are on the right track with seeing the international ramifications as too problematic for the pathetic official excuses offered so far. The wiretap applications are of great importance here (which is why the administration tried so hard to keep them under wraps).
