No One Died in Watergate

Frank Miniter at Forbes writes an excellent account of the whole sordid Fast and Furious affair and concludes that the extent of the attempt to cover up Department of Justice responsibility could make this the administration's Watergate scandal.

I respectfully disagree, however, with that comparison. No one was killed as a result of the Watergate break-in, but over 200 Mexicans and two American law enforcement officers have been murdered with some of the thousands of guns the Department of Justice intentionally put into the hands of drug thugs and murderers.

Miniter argues that the only plausible explanation for why the administration compelled gun store owners to violate the law and sell semi-automatic weapons to people who could not pass a background test was to give the president a rationale for imposing stricter gun-control laws.

This is a bit hard to believe because one recoils from thinking that an American president would do something so despicable, so stupid, and so self-serving. Yet, Miniter seems correct in saying that there seems to be no other plausible rationale.

At any rate, here's his lede:

Why a gun-running scandal code-named “Fast and Furious,” a program run secretly by the U.S. government that sent thousands of firearms over an international border and directly into the hands of criminals, hasn’t been pursued by an army of reporters all trying to be the next Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein is a story in itself.

But the state of modern journalism aside, this scandal is so inflammatory few realize that official records show the current director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), B. Todd Jones — yes the individual the Obama administration brought in to replace ATF Director Kenneth Melson Aug. 30 in an effort to deflect congressional criticism — also has questions to answer about his involvement in this gun-running scandal.

Fast and Furious was an operation so cloak-and-dagger Mexican authorities weren’t even notified that thousands of semi-automatic firearms were being sold to people in Arizona thought to have links to Mexican drug cartels. According to ATF whistleblowers, in 2009 the U.S. government began instructing gun store owners to break the law by selling firearms to suspected criminals.

ATF agents then, again according to testimony by ATF agents turned whistleblowers, were ordered not to intercept the smugglers but rather to let the guns “walk” across the U.S.-Mexican border and into the hands of Mexican drug-trafficking organizations.

Read the whole article. If you're too young to remember Watergate and don't know what it was about at least you can get in on the cutting edge of history with this scandal. In an administration that's beginning to look as if it's hip deep in scandals, this one, we better hope, seems to be the worst.