Citizen journalist Mike Vanderboegh, who first broke the Fast and Furious scandal story in December 2010, is reporting this afternoon that a source inside the Justice Department has leaked a series of documents to Congressional officials who are investigating the scandal.
The leak would be a major break in the case and would fuel an escalation in the investigation into the scandal in which the Obama Administration placed U.S. guns directly into the hands of Mexican criminals in order to make a case for new gun control laws.
According to William Lajeunesse at Fox News, the investigation into Fast and Furious now includes the FBI.
Records show that the FBI failed to inform the ATF that its own confidential informants were helping pay for the purchase of the firearms that were sent to Mexico.
As reported previously, the so called ‘big fish’ drug kingpins in Mexico that the Fast and Furious operation supposedly targeted for arrest were in fact paid FBI informants. But apparently the FBI failed to notify ATF agents on the ground that the cartel drug lords were working with the Feds.
However, this does not answer the question as to how much supervisors high in the ATF knew about the FBI operation. Attorney General Eric Holder has not held accountable any of the ATF supervisors who provided oversight to the operation. Instead, they were apparently rewarded for their actions due to the fact that Holder transferred them to cushy jobs inside the Department of Justice.
What, exactly, did these former ATF supervisors know about the FBI’s involvement?
When Senator Charles Grassley, R-IA, was informed of the secret document leak yesterday, he stated,
“You are getting at the very basis of this investigation,” Senator Charles Grassley said Friday.
“But I have to wait till we have all the information before we bring down the hammer.”
Grassley first revealed in September 2011 the FBI, knew, but failed to tell the ATF, it’s informants were part of the gun trafficking ring. Then in February, Grassley called them “the big fish” ATF had been looking for the entire time.
Earlier in the week it was reported that the ATF had captured and released a Mexican criminal with a long history of drug and gun smuggling in May of 2010.
That report, in addition to the leak of secret documents yesterday, prompted one DOJ official to warn Congressman Darrell Issa, R-CA, that “we are deeply disturbed that the sensitive law enforcement information…has entered the public realm.”
Issa is leading the investigation into Fast and Furious in the U.S. House of Representatives.
But according to the Fox News report, Issa made no apology for making public the leak and instead declared that this is the type of information that his committee has been seeking and that the Obama Administration has been hiding.
