More on the White House's "modified limited email hangout." "Validating" precisely DICK. (And I don't mean Nixon.)

"I am not a Gunwalker crook!"

From Politico: Emails show some W.H. contact on 'Fast and Furious' My comments scattered throughout.

At least three White House officials had some knowledge of a controversial federal gun-running investigation that resulted in a large number of guns falling into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, according to emails the Justice Department sent to Congress.

However, the emails do not indicate that the White House aides were briefed on the most controversial aspect of Operation Fast and Furious: the practice of allowing guns to “walk” or move across the border with little or no interference by law enforcement officials despite their suspicions that the guns were headed for drug gangs.

The new emails, delivered to Congress Thursday night, (Emphasis supplied, MBV show contacts between William Newell, the head of the Phoenix office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and Kevin O’Reilly, who served as director for North American affairs on the White House National Security Staff. O’Reilly, in turn, briefed Dan Restrepo, the NSS senior director for the Western Hemisphere, and Greg Gatjanis, director for Counterterrorism and Counternarcotics, White House officials confirmed Friday. The emails were first reported by the Los Angeles Times.

(MBV NOTE: That these are not represented even by the White House to be the only emails between Newell and O'Reilly indicates that they were cherry-picked to advance the modified limited hangout meme. According to my sources, there are more emails, phone calls and personal contacts between the two, over an even longer period than admitted here.)

“The emails validate what has been said previously, which is no one at the White House knew about the investigative tactics being used in the operation, let alone any decision to let guns walk,” said a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

(MBV NOTE: As above, they "validate" precisely dick.)

While the emails don’t contain tactical details of the operation, they do show that the White House was in frequent direct contact with the ATF officials directly involved in Fast and Furious. The exchanges also suggest that ATF officials in Phoenix thought White House officials shared their goals and were acutely interested in the bureau’s work aimed at tackling the flow of guns into Mexico.

Newell seemed eager to keep his back-channel communications with the White House away from officials at ATF headquarters, whom he suggested weren’t performing well. “Just don’t want ATF HQ to find out, since this is what they should be doing [briefing you],” the ATF Phoenix chief wrote.

When Newell wrote to O’Reilly in February with details of an indictment in Fast and Furious, the White House staffer seemed enthusiastic, proposing to try to get Newell on Spanish-language TV to talk about it. “Would ATF be willing to put you or others in front of US media that gets pickup in Mexico to tell this story?” Newell wrote.

Fast and Furious appears to have been aimed at figuring out who was purchasing guns from legal dealers in the U.S. and tracking how the weapons ended up with Mexican cartels. During the the operation, as many as 2,000 guns that agents suspected were headed to the cartels traveled to Mexico. The investigative tactics caused internal dissent at ATF. The discord broke into the open after two guns from the operation were discovered at the scene of the shooting death of a Border Patrol agent in Arizona last December.

A spokeswoman for House Government Reform and Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), whose panel received the documents from the Justice Department, suggested that Newell’s contacts with O’Reilly may have been improper.

“The committee is examining the role of White House officials in Operation Fast and Furious, including concerns that their interactions with ATF personnel may have undermined the chain of command in a law enforcement operation and increased risks to public safety,” committee spokeswoman Becca Watkins said.

However, administration officials said the emails simply show that White House officials got the kind of broad-brush information that Issa and others also received last year.

“To the extent that some NSS staffers were briefed on the top-lines of ongoing federal efforts, so were members of Congress,” the administration official said. “These types of top-line briefings would not include a discussion of the investigative tactics like gun-walking. These email 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 [in that case] was unsealed.”

Another lawmaker who has pressed for more answers about Fast and Furious, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), suggested Friday that people in the White House beyond O’Reilly, Restrepo and Gatjanis must have been aware of the operation — possibly including President Barack Obama.

“Presumably, people in the White House want us to think only these three people knew anything about Fast and Furious, but if they’re advisers to the president on national security, wouldn’t they be telling the president about important information in our relationship with Mexico?” Grassley said in an interview with Fox News. “Why wouldn’t they be telling other people?”

White House officials said O’Reilly and Newell have known each other for years from previous work assignments. O’Reilly is a State Department officer who was on detail to the White House. He returned to State in July, an official said. (Emphasis supplied, MBV.)

MBV NOTE: Yes they have and yes he did. Interesting that O'Reilly returned to the State Department just about the same time we began to sniff around his relationship with Newell. I call this the "Shell Game Theory of Cover-ups" Move 'em around and maybe folks won't notice.)

In the emails, Newell describes some of the difficulties ATF was facing in Arizona. He said prosecutors there imposed requirements in gun cases that prosecutors in other states did not. However, he didn’t explicitly object to those tougher procedures.

“I appreciate and respect the struggles the [U.S. Attorney’s Office] has to go through with juries in this State to convince them of the illegality of this. We routinely have ‘straw’ purchasers tell us that ‘yeah, I knew what I was doing was wrong but the money was good and who cares — the guns are going to Mexico right?’” Newell wrote in an Aug. 18, 2010, email to O’Reilly.

The U.S. Attorney for Arizona at the time, Dennis Burke, resigned Tuesday, after acknowledging a series of mistakes by his office “at every level” involved with the Fast and Furious probe. The Justice Department also reassigned acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson this week to a more obscure Justice Department post. No official reason was given for that move.

A previous email chain between Newell and O’Reilly emerged at a House hearing in July. That exchange indicates that O’Reilly was seeking some information about southwest border gun operations for Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan.

“We want John Brennan well prepared to talk GRIT with the Mexicans next Wednesday,” O’Reilly wrote on Sept. 1, referring to a “gunrunner impact team” program to beef up ATF enforcement in particular regions.

An administration official said that email exchange referred to other investigations being conducted by the Phoenix ATF office, not to Fast and Furious. (Emphasis supplied, MBV.

Bovine excrement! Fast and Furious was carried out by some of the same people of the Phoenix "surge" that GRIT represented. Though not all of the GRIT program personnel in Phoenix were part of Fast and Furious, F&F was the principal effort of the surge there.

LATER NOTE: The previous paragraph has been changed to reflect a more perfect understanding of the GRIT program and its relationship in Phoenix to Fast and Furious than I had at the time of writing. I will have more on GRIT in "Meetings, Part 5."