and guns therefore went across the border and reached criminals. katherine eban, fortune magazine reporter, investigative reporter who blew this out of the water before the vote in the house. i m sorry for screwing up your introduction and having a coughing fit which you have to sit through. thank you. tonight for the interview, massachusetts senate candidate elizabeth warren is here. and best new thing in the world has been dually trumpeted. we did a good thing, it ended up. it ended up being a good thing. that s coming up. [ male announcer ] we imagined a vehicle that could adapt to changing road conditions. one that continually monitors and corrects for wheel slip. we imagined a vehicle that can increase emergency braking power
in the fast and furious case which was one investigation into a group of straw purchasers, there was no operational tactic by atf to walk guns. what there was was a protracted struggle to arrest kids, not even old enough to buy beer, who were obviously straw purchasers, and there was a continual struggle with prosecutors because as they interpreted the laws, the sales were legal, the francefers were legal, and the agents did not have grounds to make seizures or arrests. you write about sort of incredible anecdotal stories about the straw purchasers. a person low income enough to be on food stamps, nevertheless, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on weaponry. a young unemployed person spending five figures on a 50 caliber sniper rifle on a tripod. isit illegal to be a straw purchaser, and if it is, why
absolute river of iron onslaught of guns being purchased and pouring across the border. i mean, just to put this in perspective. in arizona where you have 853 licensed fire arms dealer in maricopa count ate, tliz rr a fire arms dealer who has a note on his door which says one ak-47 per customer per day. those are the limits that are peag set by responsible gun dealers. otherwise, it s perfect acceptable for an 18-year-old kid to go into a store, put down cash, and buy 50 ak-47s. to the bottom line here in terms of the way the mainstream media is going to cover this tomorrow. the way this is short-handed by every reputable journalistic association in the country is a wobe gone program in which agents knowingly let weapons according to your reporting, that fundamental description of
you can do that. the gun laws in arizona made it near impossible for the atf to make any arrests orรง stop. they were essentially powerless to stop them. they were held back. from the piece, their greatest difficulty by far was convincing proskurtds they had significant proof to seize guns and arrest straw perchers. by june 2010, the agents had sent the office a list of 31 people they wanted to arrest. for the next seven months, prosecutors did not indict a single suspect. none of the agents doubted the fast and furious guns were being purch purchased to commit crimes in mexico, but that was nearly impossible to prove, and they couldn t arrest suspects after being directed not to do so by a prosecutor. because of what our gun laws are and whou they re enforced in our country, the atf wasn t letting the guns walk. they were frustrated observers
heart of the fast and furious scandal. nobody disputes that straw purchases under surveillance repeatedly bought guns that fell into criminal hands. darrell issa and others charge that the atf intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic, but five agents tell fortune that atf had no such tactic. they insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be trafficked. they said they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws that stymied them at every turn. it s not let s allow these guns to flow freely into mexico. it was the opposite, let s monitor the gun sales, arrest all of the people buying the guns. as atf discovered, there wasn t anything they could do because the purchase of the guns in arizona was seen by prosecutors as legal. as they report, customers can legally buy as many weapons as they want in arizona as long as