Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Alan Lengel: "There’s got to be an easier way to find the truth from an organization called 'Justice.'”

Alan Lengel, writing at Tickle the Wire on yesterday's hearing, complains: We Didn’t Learn Much New from the Hearing on Controversial ATF Program.

“This is not a love-making process,” Charles Tiefer, former counsel to Congress, emphasized during testimony. In other words, Congress doesn’t have to play too nice.

Rep. Issa already knew that. But he’s very very frustrated.

“The administration has not yet to come to recognize the role this committee plays in preserving the rule of law to eliminate waste and fraud and abuse in the federal government,” Rep. Issa said during the hearing. ”I’ve worked closely with Sen. Chuck Grassley to get to the bottom of the strategy by the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to allow heavy duty arms to traffic into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

“ATF field agents opposed this reckless program, which has been responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians in Mexico and even responsible for the death of a 40-year-old border patrol agent named Brian Terry.”

In the end, we need to know a few things: How was such a poorly thought out program approved and by who? And how many guns were released and how many ended up being used in crimes, including murder?

It’s hard to believe the Justice Department hasn’t yet coughed up that info. Finding out which crimes are linked to the program may take a fair amount of investigative work — something that can’t be produced in a little hearing. And there may be no way of definitively figuring out every crime. Still, investigators can come up with a snapshot.

But finding out who ultimately approved the program ain’t that hard. Really.

Give me a few hours. Let me wander the inner sanctum of the Justice Department on Pennsylvania Avenue and I’ll come up with some answers and eliminate some of these hearings.

Sure, Monday’s hearing may lay the foundation for the committee to get even tougher.

But there’s got to be an easier way to find the truth from an organization called “Justice.”


Lengel has excellent sources in DOJ, to be sure, but I rather think that if he approaches any of them in the hall and asks them about Gunwalker, they'll run the other way as if his hair was on fire.

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