25 March 2011 - Under fire for an operation that allowed smuggling of U.S. weapons across the nation’s border with Mexico, President Obama said in an interview that neither he nor Attorney General Eric Holder authorized the controversial “Operation Fast and Furious.”
...Obama told Univision‘s Jorge Ramos that President Felipe Calderon wasn’t informed of the operation because he — the president of the United States — wasn’t informed either. When asked whether he knew of the weapon smuggling plan, Obama responded that it is “a pretty big government” with “a lot of moving parts.”
...President Obama said ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms enforcement) was behind "Operation Fast and Furious."
Item 2: According to documents obtained by the House Judiciary Committee, Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler was keenly aware of all aspects of Operation Fast and Furious as early as March 2010. In a letter to A.G. Holder, Chairman Issa wrote:
Gary Grindler, the then-Deputy Attorney General and currently your Chief of Staff, received an extremely detailed briefing on Operation Fast and Furious on March 12, 2010. In this briefing, Grindler learned such minutiae as the number of times that Uriel Patino, a straw purchaser on food stamps who ultimately acquired 720 firearms, went in to a cooperating gun store and the amount of guns that he had bought. When former Acting ATF Director Ken Melson, a career federal prosecutor, learned similar information, he became sick to his stomach...
Item 3: Newly released White House Visitor Logs list Grindler as having visited the White House 40 times, but only four times with the President himself. All four meetings with the President occurred over a two-week period, between 7 May 2010 and 19 May 2010.
According to The Los Angeles Times, these dates just so happened to represent the run-up to "the height of [Operation] Fast and Furious":In the U.S., intelligence officials consider the Sinaloa cartel the most powerful drug trafficking organization in the world. Weekly reports from U.S. intelligence authorities to the Justice Department in the summer of 2010, at the height of Fast and Furious, warned about the proliferation of guns reaching the Sinaloa cartel... Under Fast and Furious, begun in fall 2009, the ATF allowed illegal buyers to walk away with weapons in the hope that agents in Phoenix could track the guns and arrest cartel leaders.
Summary: In early 2010, Gary Grindler was intimately involved in all aspects of Operation Fast and Furious. During the height of the operation, Grindler visited the President on four separate occasions in only two weeks -- his only documented meetings with the president at the White House.
So my question is this:
What did President Obama know -- and when did he know it?
Hat tip: Michelle Malkin.
10 comments:
Q: "What did President Obama know -- and when did he know it?"
NBC A: -cricket-
ABC A: -cricket-
CBS A: -cricket-
CNN A: -cricket-
FOX A: Hey, there's this thing called 'Fast and Furious'...
NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN A: Aaaargh! The Right-Wing Smear Machine is at it again!!!!!
...
the stupid - it burns
Hey "The Bad"...
Yeah that "Fast and Furious" thing used to be called "Wide Receiver" when the same thing was done under the previous administration, by the same ATF field office.
*crickets*
That's an astounding timeline if we assume Grindley had nothing else on that month.
Googling his name tell you that in May he was tasked by the AG with US preparedness for WMD threats. Had press conferences about it nshit.
So if he's only had 4 visits with the POTUS, they could either be about....
(A) The WMD threat to the US, which would tend to fall into the sphere of "worthy of bothering the POTUS about", or
(B) An investigation that 1 of the dozens of field offices of the ATF was carrying out, like they'd been doing for years, which wouldn't.
Hmmmm I wonder which one it was.
I have some additional items for the timeline:
Deputy A.G. Gary Grindler was also invited to the White House state dinner for Mexican President Calderon on May 19, 2010 (the same date as the final date he met with Obama privately):
"White House State Dinner: Guests invited to the after-dinner entertainment
"They can't have all their friends to dinner, so the White House invited an extra group of VIPs to join the state dinner crowd for the after-dinner entertainment... Here's who made the exclusive B-list:
...The Honorable Gary Grindler, Acting Deputy Attorney General of the United States
Christine Grindler
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/reliable-source/2010/05/white_house_state_dinner_guest.html
Why was the Deputy A.G. invited to such an event for the Mexican president?
The recent Arizona anti-immigration law had just been signed a few weeks before and was soon to go into effect if the DOJ couldn't prevent it, and (despite "Marcus H's" claims in the comments), was the key concern to the DOJ and Eric Holder in their lawsuit against Gov. Brewer:
• April 23: Brewer signs SB 1070 into law.
• April 29: Three separate lawsuits challenging law's constitutionality are filed in federal court.
• April 30: Brewer signs into law SB 2650, which makes changes to SB 1070.
• July 29: Arizona's new immigration law scheduled to go into effect.
(Source: "Timeline: Immigration and Arizona, May. 9, 2010 12:13 AM, The Arizona Republic)
The odds that President Obama and Deputy A.G. did not actively discuss Fast and Furious in private- in light of everything going on at the time- don't pass the smell test by any stretch of the imagination.
marcus h , i found your comments regarding the possible subject matters in the meetings of grindler and obama a very keen observation on your part. in fact does have me wondering as well. food for thought and grounds for further research
Marcus H, regular readers of this site know "Wide Receiver" and "Fast and Furious" are not comparable operations. A.G. Holder admitted such, directly, during his most recent testimony.
(For sake of argument here, the most obvious differences between the operations are first that Wide Receiver tried to track the guns and second, the the U.S. Government told the Mexican Government about Wide Receiver.)
Now, I'm calling you out as the troll you are. Any denials about your troll status are hereby declared nonsense. Look, the fact is that intelligent informed people read this blog and not the type of people that fall for Obamunist disinformation operations. That is the problem you face here. Your efforts already failed and will continue to fail. Go spread your filth elsewhere.
Finally, you are a sick person. Here you are, trying to cloud and distort information about the despicable acts of Obama and Holder facilitating weapons transfers to Mexican drug cartels, knowing people would be brutally murdered with those weapons, in order to advance a conspiracy against our 2nd Amendment. You know the truth and you still engage in your little disinformation campaign. Sick.
Go visit MundoNarco.com and stick around there for a while. Watch the videos too. See what President Obama and A.G. Holder teamed up with. If you can stomach it.
@Marcus H:
"That's an astounding timeline if we assume Grindley had nothing else on that month.
Googling his name tell you that in May he was tasked by the AG with US preparedness for WMD threats.
That's false: He wasn't notified of that task until after his meetings with Obama (the IG didn't even issue his WMD report until May 28, 2010- and Grindler only acted after the report was issued):
http://kyl.senate.gov/legis_center/subdocs/080410_Baker.pdf
Well done!
Eh, Marcus H: you want some ice for that?
Hey Marcus, if smells like a duck, looks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, tastes like a duck, then pretty certain its a duck! Even a left wing liberal with no logic except to say "It couldn't be a duck" is not going to convince anyone - But hey, nice try!
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