Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Sandside War Radio.
I always love to begin an interview with a confession, which is that I have not done my homework on this case, the fast and furious gun-walking, gun-running scandal.
But I'm here to get a crash course today, and our next guest is going to give it.
Here's how little I knew about this story.
I thought that CBS News broke it.
Oh, no, it was a guy named David Codria and his partner Mike Vanderbog, which I'm probably saying wrong, sorry about that.
Welcome to the show, David.
How are you doing?
Scott, thanks for having me on.
I'm doing fine, thank you.
So, that's my confession.
I hope you accept my apology.
Take your credit for breaking the story.
And then, if you could, give us the crash course.
I see on your great blog here, sipsystreetirregulars.blogspot.com, you have the gun-walker scandal made simple, five key accusations, and I think the Congress is holding hearings on this at some point today, right?
Those hearings are going on as we speak, and some fascinating polarization is taking place, as they generally do when these hearings take place.
The Democrats line up on the side that says that what we really need is more gun control, and we need to give the arsonists more gasoline to pour on the fire.
And the Republicans are saying we need to get to the bottom of this.
And the truth of the matter is, I don't know whether Brian Terry, the murdered Border Patrol agent, or Jaime Zapata, the murdered ICE agent, were Republicans or Democrats.
It shouldn't matter.
They were Americans, and this entire scandalous program has been responsible not just for the deaths of these Border Patrol agents, but also for untold numbers of Mexican human beings.
We must not forget that.
We must not become so nationalistic-centric that we forget that everyone is a human being and equal in the eyes of God.
You were talking about Mike Vanderbilt, and it's a soft ending to that, no hard G on that.
But thank you.
You pronounced my name correctly, which so few do.
And you were correctly referring...
Thanks for the crash course in it before we went on.
You were correctly referring your readers to Mike's blog, which is Sipsy Street Irregulars.
And absolutely, I think that Mike probably has the best summary on what this Fast and Furious scandal was all about.
What it was part of was a larger federal program called Project Gunrunner, which you'll hear that it began in the Bush administration, and you'll hear that there was a previous Bush administration program, Wide Receiver, and those are both true.
What happened, though, was within the auspices of Project Gunrunner, they came up with an operation, Fast and Furious, which I sardonically dubbed Project Gunwalker because it seemed to fit.
And Mike has posted, as you've referenced, five key accusations against ATF and the Department of Justice, and these were made by ATF whistleblowers and other sources within the federal government.
Now let me ask you real quick, is ATF still under Treasury or is it part of the Department of Justice?
No, ATF is part of the Department of Justice.
They broke off, and so it's the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, as my friend Mark Walters, host of Armed American Radio, likes to call it, and Explotives instead of Explosives.
But here's what this is, and the true story in terms of breaking it, really the first indications came up from a whistleblowing website called cleanupatf.org, and I would like to be able to get back into that as we talk further into the segment.
But here are the five essentials that Mike has ably summarized on his Sipsy Street Irregulars blog.
First is that the government instructed U.S. gun dealers to proceed with questionable and illegal sales of firearms to suspected gun runners.
Second, that they allowed or even assisted in those guns crossing the U.S. border into Mexico to boost the numbers of American civilian market firearms seized in Mexico and thereby provide the justification for more firearms restrictions on American citizens and more power and money for ATF.
This is what the opposition wants to describe as conspiracy theory on the part of right-wing bloggers, but we have to remember that the initial allegation of padding statistics came from ATF whistleblowers and people complaining about department corruption and abuse.
The third, that the ATF and DOJ intentionally kept Mexican authorities in the dark about the operation, even over the objections of their own agents.
They kept the U.S. attache down in Mexico, a man by the name of Darren Gill, in the dark.
His objections were overridden.
He was not allowed to go to his Mexican counterparts with it, and he ended up resigning, okay, because he just couldn't do it anymore.
They even locked him out of the computer program so that he could see what was happening with the weapons that were coming south of the border.
He thought, you know, we seem to have an inordinate amount of guns that are being interdicted and intercepted, traceable back to U.S. gun shops, and it looks kind of inflated.
It looks kind of artificial.
What's going on?
Well, they kept him in the dark about that.
The fourth allegation, that weapons that the ATF let walk into Mexico were involved in the deaths of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and ICE agent Jaime Zapata, as well as at least hundreds of Mexican citizens.
We talked about that at the top of the segment.
And fifth, that at least since the death of Brian Terry on 14 December of last year, so we're almost going on a year here, the Obama administration is engaged in a full-press cover-up of the facts behind what has been, or what has come to be known as, the gun walker scandal.
And now, so, at what level is the collusion between the different departments under justice, or the different police agencies, DEA, ATF, and FBI in this?
That's a great question, and the truth of the matter is we don't know because justice has been stonewalling, other people have been stonewalling.
We've been putting together pieces, you know, and they just came out with a news report that looked like DEA money laundering for cartels was going on.
Right, well that's what I was going to ask you.
Is that part of this, or you don't know, or it seems like it, but you don't know?
It looks like it's all part of the same, but in terms of being able to definitively have dots to put together, we're unfortunately stuck with circumstantial evidence, with common sense, and then with holding back on the fact that Chairman Issa is not through with his House Oversight Government Reform Committee hearings, and that there is an Office of Inspector General investigation going on, which I believe to be a sham and a delay, and that what we really need to do is we need to get a special prosecutor, an independent prosecutor, involved to truly go through the facts and have subpoena power, and be able to get justice to stop Stonewalling, because that is, in fact, what they have been doing since the very beginning on this.
But there's strong indication that State Department was involved.
We know that the SAC, the Special Agent in Charge of Phoenix Division at the time, William Newell, the man who was really behind a lot of this fast and furious operation, was communicating with a gentleman by the name of Kevin O'Reilly, who was part of the National Security Council.
We know that statutorily the President of the United States sits on that council and their meetings are held in the White House.
We know that State Department had to be involved because we've seen some WikiLeaks memos that have come out that show that they're aware of things.
How many guns, David?
How many guns?
Well, at this point, they're talking like 2,000 fast and furious guns, but in truth, I don't know.
All right.
Now, we still have a lot to go over and we'll have one more segment after this break coming up, but I wanted to at least, and we can develop this point further on the other side of this break, but I wanted to note, as a footnote here, this CBS News story from yesterday documents ATF used fast and furious to make the case for gun regulations and here they have the actual memos saying that, well, we'll just ignore the fact that we told these gun stores to sell these weapons and we'll just point to all these Mexican weapons that originated in America, these drug gangs' weapons, in order to push for what they call Demand Letter 3 that would, I guess, mandate, if I understand it right, all gun shops to report multiple rifle purchases on anyone from now on.
And so I guess when we get back, we'll talk about whether that's the real motive in the first place.
I guess that's what they like to call a conspiracy theory, but here's the documented proof of your accusation backed up not just by your own journalism, but by officialdom over there at CBS News and they got the paperwork to prove it.
It's right there on their page today.
We'll be right back, everybody, with David Codria, right after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with David Codria.
He and his partner, Mike Vanderbilt, broke this gun-walking scandal, the ATF, B-A-T-F-E, whatever, funneling thousands of weapons to Mexican drug cartels.
And, you know, I was wondering, to what degree does this thing represent a partnership between the federal cops and the Sinaloa cartel?
I was reading something or another, I'm sorry, about how really the Zetas are the bad guys, so we're backing these guys against those guys and fighting this kind of proxy war between drug cartels down in Mexico.
Yeah, there's been some reporting on that, and here's where I have to kind of take a back seat on reporting that I don't do.
This story has turned out, Scott, to be so big that it's tough for any one person to keep up with it, and so I kind of focus on those parts of the story where I have something original that I can bring to the table, where I have sources.
And so my sources have not told me anything about the relationship between the federal government and the cartels.
I do note that, by mentioning Los Zetas, I have written about them in the past.
They were basically rogue military and police officers who went to the other side.
They first became protection and enforcers for the Gulf cartel, and then they decided, you know what?
This is pretty profitable.
We don't need to work for somebody else.
We can strike out on our own, and they've become a force to be reckoned with.
They're basically having a civil war with the Sinaloas right now, and I have seen reports that say that there has been some movement on the part of our government to develop sources within the Sinaloa cartel and to allow things to happen for the purpose of prosecuting an overall drug war, and it just becomes this Gordian knot that's impossible for a guy like me, who's basically got a small piece of this, to really have the wherewithal to knowledgeably speak about.
Right.
Well, it's just, you know, we hear about...
I mean, there...
I'm sorry.
I don't have my footnotes together, but I know I read within the last couple of weeks about cocaine, that the Sinaloa cartel was being allowed to bring cocaine into the country.
Then we've got the New York Times talking about laundering all this drug money.
We've got your angle here talking about selling them guns.
You know, oh, but it's for intelligence purposes so that we can track where the guns go.
Is that plausible at all?
Is that part of the motivation here?
I think at this point, anything is plausible.
Nothing would surprise me, but I would like to go back to the so-called conspiracy theory and just reiterate that this initially came from CleanUpATF.
Now, I encourage your listeners, cleanupatf.org.
It is a website established by so-called dissident ATF agents who are fed up with agency waste, corruption, abuse, and fraud.
This was where the initial indication that a gun found at the Terry murder scene was a walked gun was made back in December of last year.
That was picked up by my friend and co-conspirator Mike Vanderbilt at Sipsy Street Irregulars.
I joined in with Mike on that, and since then we have had a struggle, particularly through January and the first part of February of last year to get anyone to notice.
We finally managed to get our whistleblower sources, these guys contacted us, and we were able to get them under the protection of Senator Charles Grassley and Representative Daryl Issa, and that's a story in and of itself because Mike and I are both very, very committed right-to-keep-and-bear-arms activists.
We have been highly critical of ATF, including any constitutional basis for its existence, and yet somehow or other the whistleblowers end up with no one else to talk to but us, and part of the reason behind that is that we have, before this scandal ever broke, been going after the agency corruption and asking the government to look at these allegations on CleanUpATF.org.
I mean, Scott, look, you have veteran agents, you have people who, you know, regardless of whether we agree with their mission or not, these are valuable assets who know their jobs, and they are complaining about corruption, and the government is turning a deaf ear.
We've since found out that the Office of Inspector General showed deliberate indifference to their claims of gun-walking.
We saw that they were complaining about this and that no one was going to listen to them, and they were actually being retaliated against.
Back in 2009, I was pleading publicly with the House Oversight Committee on Government Reform, this is the one that Issa now chairs, back when it was under the control of the Democrats, to look at these allegations and saying, guys, look, these people are saying that there's management corruption, there's abuse, there's fraud, there's waste, there's all this stuff going on.
You owe it to us to look into it, because that's your job.
You're the House Oversight Committee, for goodness sakes.
And they showed deliberate indifference, and I submit to you and I submit to your listeners, had they done their due diligence at that time, gun-walker would have never happened.
All right, now, the conspiracy theory, so-called, basically is a strawman, it seems to me, and the strawman basically is that some say that the only reason that this happened was so that they could say, see, there's a problem and pass more gun control laws.
Which, as far as I know, nobody says, right?
Only in the mythical, some say, quoted in strawman arguments.
But what's an absolute fact here is at the very least, they said, hey, this would be a great way to push for gun control laws by saying, look at all these American guns in the hands of these Mexican gangsters.
Their own guns that they knew good and well are their own guns, right there in the emails.
They were pushing the 90% of the Mexican crime guns come from American gun shops.
Why?
For a long time, Holder had come out and Eric Holder, Attorney General, had come out and slipped a trial balloon or let the cat out of the bag, depending on how you look at it, that the administration wanted a new, quote-unquote, assault weapons ban.
They were using this as justification to close the gun show loophole to go after this Southwest Border Initiative where they were going to have a multiple rifle cell reporting requirement, which they have now done in the four border states illegally, I might add, with no congressional authorization.
And this is what the report came out by CBS saying that this is what they were doing.
And it kind of bears that out.
Here's the thing.
You don't let guns walk.
You don't let guns just escape into the wild and think that you're going to catch the big fish at the end of the trail.
That's patently absurd.
There is no way for them to do that.
And yet we have memos from them, we have emails from them showing that they were giddy.
That's quote-unquote giddy about the possibility of Mexican crime guns being found and being traced back to American gun shops.
There's only one motive, you know, conspiracy theory or not, whatever you want to call it.
What is it when you let the guns go into the wild and you rely on these guns now being found at crime scenes to be traced back to American gun shops?
What other possible motive could there be?
You know, people calling it a botched sting operation are doing everyone a disservice because there was no attempt to track the weapons.
There was no coordination.
You make a compelling argument, David.
I've got to tell you, you know, the New York Times piece today about the money says the same thing.
Well, we're trying to trace the money back to who's in charge.
They don't know who's in charge of these cartels down in Mexico.
What are they doing?
What kind of drug warriors are they that in the last couple of years they've needed to help funnel a bunch of drug money back there, never mind where the money came from, what got sold for the money.
But anyway, in the New York Times piece that doesn't come up.
But it's all an intelligence operation, they claim.
And I think you make a compelling point that that just isn't credible at all in either case, really.
It belies belief.
Yeah, well, so there you go.
And now, it was actually on C-SPAN 3.
I couldn't find it.
It was on C-SPAN 3, the hearings.
And they were wrapping up just as this interview started.
Were you able to watch them today and find out if anything's going on?
Because I think part of the accusation, I don't know if you've made it or not, but part of what's going around about this story is that Holder may be guilty of criminal obstruction of justice or perjury charges for claiming that he had no idea about all this when apparently it seems like maybe he did know much more about it.
Yeah, I was watching the hearings.
I thought one of the brilliant points was you know, you've released all these memos and all these emails, but gee whiz, not a one of them comes to or from you.
Why is that?
Okay?
You know what?
You're living in a bubble, pal.
And I think that obstruction of justice, I think perjury is certainly a potential down the trail.
I think that there are also other things such as violation of international traffic and arms regulations, ITAR, which is not allowed to be done, you know, for transfers to other countries unless the State Department authorizes it.
Okay?
So, now, is Hillary hiding from this?
Did the State Department in fact authorize the gun-walking operations to happen?
Is there a violation of the Kingpin Act?
Is there, you know, there's all kinds of different laws that can be tied into this up to and including the Mexican government wanting to extradite some of the American officials involved.
Ha ha.
Well, that's the benefit of being the Attorney General.
Laws don't apply to you.
And certainly to anybody you want to protect either.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time.
I hope maybe we can catch up as this story continues to develop.
Great work.
Yeah.
And please keep up with it.
DavidCodria.com and SipsyStreetIrregulars.blogspot.com Thanks, Scott.
