Sipsey Street Irregulars: CBS: ATF investigation expands to White House staffers.

Friday, September 9, 2011

CBS: ATF investigation expands to White House staffers.

Today, the Congressional investigation into ATF's Fast and Furious scandal officially expanded to include White House staffers. In a letter to President Obama's National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) asked for records involving three current and former White House staffers.

The staffers are: Kevin O'Reilly, former Director of North American Affairs, National Security Council; Dan Restrepo, Special Assistant to the President, National Security Council; and Greg Gatjanis, Director for Terrorist Finance and Counternarcotics, Counterterrorism Policy, National Security Council.

The information requests were made after revelations that ATF's Special Agent in Charge of Phoenix during Fast and Furious, William Newell, "provided regular updates to Kevin O'Reilly" at the White House..."as early as the summer of 2010." The emails indicate O'Reilly asked to share information about Fast and Furious with Restrepo and Gatjanis.

In addition to the new documents request, the Congressional Republicans also requested to interview O'Reilly by the end of this month.

President Obama has said that neither he nor Justice Department head Eric Holder knew about or approved of the operation. In a statement this afternoon, an administration official told CBS News: "As has already been reported, the emails referenced in this letter affirm that no one at the White House knew about the investigative tactics being used in the operation, let alone any decision to let guns walk. To the extent that some NSS staffers were briefed on the toplines of ongoing federal efforts, so were members of Congress. The Washington Post reported that House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa received a Fast and Furious briefing in April of 2010. These types of top-line briefings would not include a discussion of the investigative tactics like gun-walking. These e-mail exchanges show nothing more than an effort to give local color to a policy initiative that was designed to give more resources to help with the border problem. They don't even contain the name "Fast and Furious" until February 2011, after the indictment was unsealed."

5 comments:

Anonymous said...: This was probably wasn't a good time for the obama backers 'round the globe to piss Fox News off. Ah well. Live and learn.; September 9, 2011 at 3:39 PM
Anonymous said...: Its just a question of time.; September 9, 2011 at 7:39 PM
Anonymous said...: It is interesting that the White House already had an analysis of the emails of those working at the White House, such that they were able to immediately characterize them.; September 9, 2011 at 9:39 PM
Female III said...: Bet there hasn't been a White House seek and destroy email scramble since Clinton was a sperm donor.; September 10, 2011 at 5:53 AM
Hefferman said...: There is a saying about tackling big things. "How do you eat an elephant?"
"One bite at a time."
We have all wanted this thing to blow up in their faces from moment one, however it has taken longer than we hoped for to make progress against the collectivist.

Progress has been made, and now is the time to call your congressman and demand more hearing and more investigation.

Now is the time to start taking bites out of the collectivist elephant till it is consumed and destroyed.; September 10, 2011 at 9:11 AM

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Friday, September 9, 2011

CBS: ATF investigation expands to White House staffers.

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