should have been to come forward and explain what happened in wide receiver because the people who were drafting the letter told us it would have made a difference. that s what troubled us. the letter you heard referred to there, was the one that doj sent to republican senator chuck grassley of iowa on february 4, 2011, in which the department falsely claimed it always tried to intercept weapons headed into mexico. it took doj ten months to correct that false information and the i.g. concluded senior holder aides should have done that much sooner. you had people who didn t know information, making substantive edits to a letter, along with people who did know information providing inaccurate information. and sorting out how that letter ended up the way it did and blaming one person or two people for the particular information was the difficulty we had. lannie brewer s deputy, jason weinstein, resigned from the
missteps, poor judgment and an inherent ly reckless strategy. that strategy was to go beyond simply seizing firearms purchased from mexican drug cartels by so-called straw buyers throughout the southwest. instead, says the report, fast and furious was part of a plan to let those buyers and the guns walk in hopes of identifying and busting entire gun running networks. instead, fast and furious guns began turning up at crime scenes in mexico and here at home, including the killing of u.s. border agent brian terry in 2010 right before christmas. according to the report, his death came at the end of a long chain of mistakes starting at gun shops. the gun dealers were reassured atf was closely monitoring the transactions and interdicting the weapons. that was false. the report focuses sharply on this man. william newell. the republican investigators concluding that agent newell authorized and endorsed fast and furious and let it continue ng after atf had the goods on the straw buy
instead, says the report, fast and furious was part of a plan to let those buyers and the guns walk in hopes of identifying and busting entire gun running netwks. instead, fast and furious guns began turning up at crime scenes in mexico and here at home, including the killing of u.s. border agent brian terry in 2010 right before christmas. according to the report, his death came at the end of a long chain of mistakes starting at gun shops. the gun dealers were reassured atf was closely monitoring the transactions and interdicting the weapons. that was false. the report focuses sharply on this man. william newell. the republican investigators concluding that agent newell authorized and endorsed fast and furious and let it continue long after atf had the goods on the straw buyers. quoting again from their report. bill newell had the ability and the duty to end operation fast and furious much sooner than it did. instead, the report states, it ended as a reaction to a foreseeable
i totally disagree. with fortune magazine? yeah. i totally disagree. we had a number of whistle blowers who came to us and provided us this documentation that led to the fact that the guns were running. remember, we were given a letter on february 4, 2011, that roughlyç ten months later department justices had to pull back because it was a lie. let me ask you. are you for tougher enforcement of gun laws? would you like to see a more aggressive atf that stopped anybody who looked to be in anything suspicious? we re two of the most conservative members in congress. gunwalking is wrong. let you answer my question. do you want aggressive enforcement of gun laws? yes. look at straw purchasing. that is absolutely felony wrong. it is absolutely wrong. and of course we need to enforce that. what was wrong here is the department of justice went to
southwest, then those guns, thousands of them, were allowed to walk or be smuggled into mexico with an eye towards tracing their way through the cartels. instead as we, the house oversight committee and ore news organizations were led to believe, the atf lost track of those weapons. some made it back into the country. two were found at the scene where border agent brian terry was gunned down. that was the story as we and nearly everyone thought we knew. now tonight, though, after six months of reporting, fortune magazine reveals a very different fast and furious. the bottom line letting guns walk was not, i repeat not, part of the plan. she writes five law enforcement agents directory involved in fast and furious tell fortune that the atf had no such tactic. she goes on to say, they insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. just the opposite. they say they seized weapons whenever they could, but were ham strung by prosecutors and weak laws, w