Sometimes the news seems stranger than fiction.
Who could dream up a plot line like this?
Several law enforcement agencies of the federal government, including the FBI, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, got together to hatch a plan to sell guns to Mexican drug cartel members – at least one of which was later used to murder a Border Patrol agent.
Can't be, right?
Wait a minute. It gets worse. It now appears the money used by the known criminals in Mexico was federal "stimulus" money.
I know. It's a nightmare. It's government gone wild.
Yet that is exactly what the aptly named "Project Gunrunner" seems to have been all about – with a scandal and ensuing cover-up big enough to bring down Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.
Members of Congress have been trying to investigate, but are getting no cooperation from Holder and the Justice Department. Apparently, the plan of the Obama administration was for the acting director of the ATF to take the fall. His name is Kenneth Melson – but he has other ideas.
Melson says he first found out about "Project Gunrunner" – also called "Operation Fast and Furious" – after the death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, killed with a gun sold to the Mexican gangs by U.S. law enforcement personnel.
But after checking through the files on the program, Melson said he got "sick to his stomach" by what he found – the direct involvement of the FBI, DEA, Homeland Security, etc.
While Melson is talking to congressional investigators, Obama's buddy Holder is in full stonewalling mode. He won't give Rep. Darrel Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the time of day.
The Obama administration appears to have put together a sophisticated, inter-agency conspiracy to provide money to Mexican gangsters to purchase guns from the U.S. to kill federal agents, but it is not at all happy about explaining itself to the American people, the press or Congress.
Initially, Holder tried to dismiss the operation as a botched sting run by ATF to track and stop cross-border arms-trafficking. But that story is a dead letter after secret testimony provided by Melson on July 4 to congressional investigators.
Melson wanted to testify earlier, but Holder stopped him. Holder pressured Melson to quit his job and go away. But he's not having any part of that. He may have become Obama's worst nightmare after Jerome Corsi.
Try to picture this: Holder, the FBI, Homeland Security, DEA and ATF all get together to run a sting operation at least partly in a foreign country. Is it even conceivable that Obama would not have to be informed of such a plan? Not likely. This was an operation with international consequences. If Obama didn't know, whose fault is that.
And then we get into the question of what really might have motivated such an elaborate plot. Is the explanation we've received really plausible?
Or is it more likely that the ideologically driven Obama administration, which detests the constitutionally protected right of every American to own and bear firearms, was actively participating in a diabolical political program to put U.S. guns into the hands of Mexican gangsters as part of a false flag operation that would be used to seize the guns of U.S. civilians?
The old line is that the cover-up is worse than the crime. Maybe not in this case. What could Holder be so afraid of revealing that he would lie to Congress (a crime in itself) to conceal? Chances are it's pretty bad – probably worse than my scenario.
Just so you don't think I'm making this up, here's what ATF investigators told members of Congress last month – that they wanted to "intervene and interdict" large numbers of guns at the border, but were ordered to step aside and let them fall into the hands of the drug cartel.
"Allowing loads of weapons that we knew to be destined for criminals – this was the plan," John Dodson, an ATF agent, told the panel. "It was so mandated."
Agent Olindo James Casa said that "on several occasions I personally requested to interdict or seize firearms, but I was always ordered to stand down and not to seize the firearms."
Do you see why I say this is another scandal that could bring Obama down?
