Justice Dept.: GOP distorts facts in probe

WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department said yesterday that Republican lawmakers are engaging in distortions in a report asserting that Operation Fast and Furious arose from a strategy created by the Obama administration.

In a report after an 18-month probe of the flawed gun-smuggling investigation, Republicans Rep. Darrell Issa of California and Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said that the administration shifted the emphasis in fighting Mexican drug cartels from merely seizing firearms to identifying the networks that traffic them.

Operation Fast and Furious "was born from this strategy," their report concluded.

In Operation Fast and Furious and at least three earlier probes during the administration of Republican President George W. Bush, agents in Arizona allowed low-level "straw" buyers in gun-trafficking networks to leave with loads of weapons purchased at gun shops. The goal was to track the guns to major weapons traffickers and drug cartels in order to bring cases against kingpins who had long eluded prosecution.

But many of the weapons in the operation weren't tracked and wound up at crime scenes in Mexico and the United States.

Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said that the Republican report "reiterates many of the distortions and now-debunked conspiracy theories that Rep. Issa has been advancing for a year and a half."

The gun-walking tactic that Issa and Grassley are linking to the Obama administration has long been against Justice Department policy. The department did adopt a strategy in 2009 for fighting Mexican cartels that said merely seizing firearms through interdiction would not stop gun-running to Mexico. Issa's report says that federal agents and William Newell, head of the Phoenix division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, may have viewed the Justice Department strategy statement as "the green light they had been waiting for" to engage in what became Operation Fast and Furious.

The Republican draft report says that Newell and four other ATF officials share much of the blame for what went wrong with the Arizona gun-smuggling probe. All five were removed from their jobs and reassigned a year ago.