Gordon Witkin stories from The Center for Public Integrity

Gun lobby's money and power still holds sway over Congress

2013-05-01T15:35:06-04:00

In the days leading up to last month’s crucial votes on the most significant gun control legislation to come before the Senate in nearly two decades, polls showed that about 90 percent of Americans supported background checks for all gun purchases. But when the clerk called the roll, the centerpiece amendment — requiring background checks for firearm sales at gun shows, through classified ads and on the Internet — got just 54 “yea’s,” six votes short of the 60 vote super-majority required.

Just four months after Adam Lanza killed 26 people at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and President Obama promised tougher gun laws, the vote proved to be the latest in a long-running string of victories for gun rights activists, the firearms industry and particularly the National Rifle Association, the nation’s pre-eminent gun lobby.

The power of the gun lobby is rooted in multiple factors, among them the pure passion and single-mindedness of many gun owners, the NRA’s demonstrated ability to motivate its most fervent members to swarm their elected representatives, and the lobby’s ability to get out the vote on election day. But there’s little doubt that money, the political power it represents, and the fear of that power and money, which the NRA deftly exploits, have a lot to do with the group’s ability to repeatedly control the national debate about guns. Whether that fear is justified is an intriguing question —but it clearly exists. That has, perhaps, never been clearer than it was last month on Capitol Hill.

Big money, big gaps

For starters, the dollars and cents disparities are nothing short of staggering. The NRA and its allies in the firearms industries, along with the even more militant Gun Owners of America, have together poured nearly $81 million into House, Senate and presidential races since the 2000 election cycle, according to federal disclosures and a Center for Responsive Politics analysis done for the Center for Public Integrity.

The bulk of the cash — more than $46 million — has come in the form of independent expenditures made since court decisions in 2010 (especially the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision) essentially redefined electoral politics. Those decisions allowed individuals, corporations, associations and unions to make unlimited “independent” expenditures aimed at electing or defeating candidates in federal elections, so long as the expenditures were not “coordinated” with a candidate’s actual campaign.

“Members of Congress pay attention to these numbers, and they know that in the last election cycle the NRA spent $18.6 million on various campaigns,” says Lee Drutman, who has studied the role of gun money in politics for the Sunlight Foundation. “They know what the NRA is capable of doing and the kinds of ads they’re capable of running, and especially if you’re someone facing a close election, you don’t want hundreds of thousands and potentially millions of dollars in advertising to go against you.”

In the decade before Citizens United, from the 2000 election cycle to 2010, much of the money was donated directly to campaigns. During that period, pro-gun interests so thoroughly dominated electoral spending as to render gun control forces all but irrelevant, having directly donated fully 28 times the amount of their opponents in House and Senate races, $7 million on the pro-gun side compared to $245,000 on the gun control side. Of the total expended by gun rights interests, fully $3.9 million was delivered by the NRA. Since the Citizens United decision, gun control interests have gained new financial muscle, thanks largely to independent expenditures totaling at least $11.6 million by activist New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and groups tied to Bloomberg — nothing to sneeze at, but still just a fraction of that $46 million in post-2010 gun rights money.

Among the 46 senators who voted to prevent any expansion of background checks, 43 have received help — either direct campaign contributions or independent expenditures — from pro-gun interests since 2000; in aggregate about $8.5 million. NRA expenditures ranged anywhere from a $95 contribution in one race to more than $2.6 million spent on the 2010 election of Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo. A total of 38 of those senators have gotten $15,000 or more in overall NRA help since 2000. Among the leaders: Ron Johnson, R-Wis., $1.2 million, Rob Portman R-Ohio, $1.35 million, Richard Burr, R-N.C., $852,000, John Thune, R-S.D., $717,000, and Saxby Chambliss R-Ga., $355,000. In several races, gun rights groups spent independent money both for one candidate and against his opponent (see chart). Forty-one of the 46 who voted with gun rights groups against expanded background checks were Republican.

Five Democrats also voted against the background check amendment, although Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did so to preserve his right under the Senate’s arcane rules to bring the measure up again. Reid, who has a B rating from the NRA, has benefited from $30,200 from gun rights groups since 2000, including $18,400 from the NRA. The other four Democrats who bucked their party and voted with the NRA, have benefited from a mere $30,830 in total funding from gun rights groups since 2000. Max Baucus of Montana (NRA A+) was the beneficiary of $28,830 while Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor (NRA C-) got $2,000. Mark Begich of Alaska (NRA A) and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota (NRA A) have received no money from gun rights groups.

As for the 54 senators who voted in favor of expanding background checks, at least 18 of them have also benefited from gun rights group help since 2000. By far the largest chunk — $1.7 million — benefited a single NRA “defector,” Sen. Patrick Toomey, R-Pa., the co-author of the background check amendment. The money those 54 have received since 2000 from gun control groups totals just $608,827.

Mayor Mike and his forces

Bloomberg, who founded Mayors Against Illegal Guns in 2006, is a relatively new player in the gun debate but apparently wants to level the playing field. With a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at about $27 billion, he has taken on the issue with great deliberation, organizing political allies, financing sophisticated research and, more recently, spending sizable amounts of his own money on pro-gun control television ads and elections. Prior to the most recent Senate votes Bloomberg said he would spend $12 million on issue ads aimed at 13 key senators, only four of whom ended up supporting his position. He has reportedly made a six-figure donation to Americans for Responsible Solutions, a group run by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and her husband Mark Kelly, which financed television ads encouraging senators to vote for tougher background checks. And Mayors Against Illegal Guns is contemplating an ad campaign to make an example of Arkansas Democrat Mark Pryor because of his vote against the background check proposal.

Most of Bloomberg’s campaign money so far has gone to House races; his Independence USA PAC, a super PAC that can raise and spend unlimited money, has spent more than $11 million on six such races, mostly in 2012, with victories in half. In February, the PAC scored a major victory when it spent $2.8 million in Illinois to defeat NRA-endorsed former Rep. Deborah Halvorson and elect Robin Kelly, both Democrats, in a race to fill the vacant seat of former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. Halvorson had an “A” rating from the NRA during her one term in Congress. Independence USA PAC also scored a victory in California where it spent $3.3 million to defeat an NRA A-rated Republican, Joe Baca, for a House seat; and it helped unseat A-rated and NRA-endorsed Republican Ann Marie Buerkle in New York. In Orlando, Fla., Bloomberg’s super PAC spent $2 million in an unsuccessful effort to unseat Republican Daniel Webster. Webster had an A rating from the NRA, which endorsed his candidacy. His opponent, Val Demings, was rated F. In Illinois, Bloomberg spent nearly $1 million in a failed bid to keep Republican Robert Dold (NRA rating of D) in the House. Dold lost by less than 3000 votes. Bloomberg has also spent nearly $60,000 of his own money on 16 Senate candidates since 2007, and Bloomberg also contributed $500,000 to a political action committee supporting the 2012 Senate election of Maine Independent Angus King.

Bloomberg has said he’s prepared to tap his personal fortune to support gun control — or what he prefers to call “anti-crime” — candidates and defeat those aligned with the NRA. And he recently announced that the mayors’ group will publish its own NRA-style ratings of senators on the gun issue. He hasn’t said how much he’s willing to spend, but if the races he’s gotten involved in so far are any indication, it’s going to be a lot. Stefan Friedman, the spokesman for Bloomberg’s Independence USA PAC, said the NRA has had “a wide open playing field for decades” and that’s no longer the case. “The Mayor’s been relatively clear in the wake of last [month’s] decisions in Washington and in other comments that this is an issue he cares passionately about.” So far, Bloomerg’s Independence USA PAC may only be batting 50 percent, but no one seriously doubts that a few million dollars thrown at a race for a House seat or a state legislative contest could have a huge effect. If Bloomberg is serious about staying in this game, he will undoubtedly make a difference. Says NRA President David Keene, “We can’t outspend Bloomberg.”

Complex calculus

That remains to be seen. But a closer look at the background check vote — and NRA influence generally — reveals that there’s more at play than just cash. A lot more. The backgrounds and histories of the two sponsors of the background check amendment — Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat and Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican — illustrate some of those complexities.

Both Manchin and Toomey have “A” ratings from the NRA — or at least they did until last month. Both represent states with large numbers of gun owners. Pennsylvania has more NRA members than any other state, and sells more hunting licenses each year (2.5 million in 2012) than any state except Wisconsin. And Toomey has been the Senate’s leading beneficiary of NRA largesse. In 2010 the NRA spent more than $1.79 million to elect him and an additional $1.15 million on negative advertising to defeat his Democratic opponent Joe Sestak Jr. Thanks in part to those court decisions that loosened campaign finance limits, the nearly $3 million the NRA spent on the Toomey race was more than three times the total amount spent by the NRA for all of Toomey’s Senate colleagues combined between 2000 and 2010.

Asked about its spending on Toomey — the most the NRA has ever spent on any candidate — NRA President Keene joked, “It just shows what money can do for you.” The reality, however, as Keene acknowledged, is that the NRA’s spending on that particular race — in which Toomey spent a total of $17 million against his opponent’s $12 million — may have very well made a critical difference. Toomey won by only two percent of the vote.

But when it came to Toomey’s vote on expanded background checks, other factors were at play. “The Manchin-Toomey proposal,” says G. Terry Madonna, a political scientist and pollster at Franklin & Marshall College, “is very similar to a Pennsylvania law which was approved by a legislature that was Republican controlled, and signed into law by Republican Governor Tom Ridge with the support of the NRA.” According to Madonna, Pennsylvania’s expanded background checks, first approved in 1995 and amended in 1998, were non-controversial.

Defending his proposal on the Senate floor, Toomey was careful to affirm his pro-gun credentials, insisting that “there is absolutely no way that this can be construed as an infringement on Second Amendment rights.” He argued that his proposal was a modest effort “to make it a little bit more difficult for criminals and the dangerously mentally ill to purchase handguns.” Toomey noted that under current Pennsylvania law, “anyone who buys a handgun anywhere at any time has a background check.” Having lived with such checks for more than a decade, Toomey apparently agrees with Madonna that they have been a non-issue for most of his constituents.

Nevertheless, the history of the background check issue still speaks to the power of the NRA. The organization knows it can’t win every race or every vote. But it can turn what was once a total non-issue — expanded background checks — into a matter of existential concern for senators. Making that case at the national level was particularly audacious because the NRA not only endorsed background checks for Pennsylvania back in 1995, in 1999 it supported them for the nation at large. Testifying before Congress following the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre testified that “it’s reasonable to provide mandatory instant criminal background checks for every sale at every gun show. No loopholes anywhere for anyone.”

Asked about the contradiction at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in January, LaPierre equivocated, but said the NRA believes the current law is not being enforced and therefore should not be expanded. “I think the National Instant [Criminal Background] Check System the way it’s working now is a failure because this administration is not prosecuting the people that they catch” when they fail a background check.

A multi-pronged approach

Whatever the reasoning, clearly the NRA’s gifts were not a key factor for Toomey in deciding to sponsor the background check amendment. A total of 14 other senators who have benefited from gun lobby money also supported his amendment. On the other hand, three senators who never received a single dollar from gun rights interests — Begich and Heitkamp, the two Democrats mentioned earlier, as well as Republican Dan Coats of Indiana — nonetheless voted against expanded background checks last month. Overall, at least 60 of the Senate’s 100 members have benefited from at least $1,000 from the gun lobby during their careers.

Of course the background check amendment was not the only gun control proposal NRA supporters helped defeat. Senators also voted down a ban on assault weapons (40-60), a limit on large capacity magazines (46-54), and what might have seemed a thoroughly noncontroversial measure to make gun trafficking a crime (58-42). On top of that, they nearly passed (57-43) what is probably the NRA’s top legislative priority, a “reciprocity” measure that would have allowed citizens holding concealed weapons permits from any state to legally carry them in any other state that allows for concealed carry, even those with much tougher rules.

NRA President Keene says claims that his organization simply buys votes with campaign contributions completely misunderstand the way the lobby works. The NRA, he says, is active in every state on a wide range of gun issues, and uses a broad range of tactics. “In a typical state we represent 10 percent of the persuadable Second Amendment voters” on any given gun issue, Keene says. Those voters, he says, include Democrats, independents and union members who are not only passionate about gun rights, but who rely on NRA ratings of members and endorsements of candidates at the ballot box. Keene says these gun owners are willing to pick up a phone and make a call when asked and cited one senator who he said got 5,000 phone calls opposing expanded background checks prior to the Senate vote. “It isn’t the money but the endorsements” that motivate lawmakers, Keene said. And those endorsements come from voting the NRA line.

Among the 42 Republicans who voted against stronger background checks, 40 are rated A or A+ by the NRA, meaning they virtually always vote with the NRA. Among the 41 Democrats who voted in favor of stronger background checks, 35 received ratings of D or F from the gun organization.

Gregg Lee Carter, a professor of sociology at Bryant College in Rhode Island and the editor of Guns in American Society, generally agrees with Keene’s view on the role of money, although he states the case differently. “The issue is not so much how much the NRA gives any senator or member of the House, it’s how they can make their lives miserable. And how they make their lives miserable is they e-mail ’em, they call ’em, they fax ’em, they show up at meetings. The typical person who is for gun control is very different from the [pro-gun] person calling you or being right there, being an annoyance, hassling you personally. They’re much more activist than the other side and that’s what really produces their gains.”

Yet when it comes to campaign contributions, Carter says that the amount contributed by the NRA is most often a minuscule percentage of a House or Senate candidate’s overall campaign budget. “Money is important,” he says, “but that’s not what it’s really about.”

It is difficult to say with any precision how often lawmakers are swayed by the gun lobby’s money or its endorsements. But there’s no question some fear the NRA’s ability to make their lives miserable. Suffice to say that at least two Democrats who are up for reelection in 2014 and voted with the NRA against tighter background checks — Begich of Alaska and Pryor of Arkansas — were probably unwilling to test their luck.

There are 26 senators up for reelection in 2014. Since none of these lawmakers have run since the Citizens United decision, the amounts they’ve received from both sides have been modest. In reality, the number of those who are actually vulnerable to pressure from either pro- or anti-gun money and lobbying is probably relatively small, and neither the NRA nor Bloomberg can be expected to throw large amounts of money at either Senate or House races where they have little chance of winning. What makes an incumbent fearful of pressure on gun issues is an inexact science, but a recent analysis by New York Times data guru Nate Silver suggests that a key factor to look at is the rate of gun ownership in a given state. Silver found that among the 26 senators up next year, there was a “near perfect” correlation between gun ownership in their states and how those senators voted on the background check amendment. Where gun ownership in a state was 42 percent or above, 13 of 14 senators voted “No”; where ownership was below 42 percent, 11 of 12 voted yes.

Wins and losses

But not all fear — even fear of the NRA — is rational. And it is by no means evident from the record that the average senator or congressman should fear the NRA anywhere as much as many apparently do. In 2012, the NRA invested $4.3 million in 16 senate races, but won in only 3. It endorsed 20 candidates, but only nine of them were victorious. In 15 Senate races during 2010 and 2012 in which the NRA made its largest contributions — $200,000 or more either to support a candidate it favored or to defeat one it opposed — it won only six times. The NRA also spent $13.6 million last year to elect Mitt Romney and to convince voters, as LaPierre told a conservative audience in 2011, that President Obama, once re-elected, planned to “get busy dismantling and destroying our firearms freedom — erase the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights and exorcise it from the U.S. Constitution.” Most Americans were unconvinced.

The NRA may be losing a lot of elections but, as it noted in a statement last November, “both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House will continue to have pro-gun majorities.” The NRA’s genius for convincing a substantial number of gun owners that they are at Armageddon’s doorstep at any given moment has also been terrific for the group’s bottom line. Although its critics have long challenged the NRA’s claim to four million members, Keene now says the NRA has added an additional million since President Obama pleaded for new gun laws in the wake of the Newtown murders.

Meanwhile the NRA’s most recent lobbying report shows that the organization and its legislative affiliate spent at least $800,000 lobbying the federal government during the first three months of 2013. In the previous year, the NRA spent $2.5 million on lobbying, 62 times as much money as the $40,000 spent by the leading pro-gun control advocacy organization, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Regardless of which side you’re on, it hardly seems like a fair fight. But it is a decisive fight. The NRA was victorious on every gun vote cast in the recent Senate debate and may have buried the chances for any gun control this year. It was by almost any measure an impressive performance — whatever the reason.

Manipulating Medicare in the election season

2013-01-23T12:59:48-05:00

Mitt Romney's selection of Rep. Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential nominee has vaulted Medicare to the top tier of election issues, thanks to Ryan's proposal that the entitlement program be converted to a system of "premium support" that would provide subsidies for elderly beneficiaries to buy insurance on the private market. Judging by the fiery rhetoric from both campaigns, Medicare seems certain to remain a high-profile topic for the remainder of the contest.

But Medicare is a complex topic, and the charges and counter-charges seem likely to yield more heat than light for a confused electorate. A recent story by FactCheck.org provides a helpful reality check on the finger-pointing, but there's been little of substance illuminating Medicare's increasingly precarious finances and its often-confusing spending choices.

The Center's Manipulating Medicare series has attempted to fill that void. In the next month, we'll be adding to this reservoir of reporting with new investigative pieces on billing procedures by doctors and hospitals that have added tens of billions of dollars to our Medicare tab.

In the meantime, catch up with these examinations of the Medicare system:

A sobering but illuminating examination of an entitlement run amuk
A little known American Medical Association panel has an outsized influence on what Medicare pays doctors
A look behind the scenes at reimbursement policies for mammography reveals how Medicare spending decisions are influenced by politics
Forty percent of Medicare spending on common cancer screenings appears to be unnecessary. The six-year pricetag? $1.9 billion.

A 'Fast and Furious' fight in the House

2012-06-28T08:05:58-04:00

The now-infamous Fast and Furious gun trafficking probe is returning to center stage as part of an “only in Washington” passion play — a fight over executive privilege. But the breathless showdown expected today on the floor of the House — and the accompanying rhetoric — obscures some important context about the botched investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, led by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has been investigating Fast and Furious for months. The Justice Department has given the panel 7,600 documents on the case, but Issa and his investigators want other documents they believe to be crucial. President Obama, however, has countered by asserting executive privilege over some of the material. And so the House will likely vote on a contempt of Congress recommendation against Attorney General Eric Holder. No sitting attorney general has ever faced a contempt vote.

Against that backdrop, a standard narrative has emerged about Fast and Furious, describing the operation as a seemingly ludicrous effort that allowed hundreds of firearms to “walk” to the Mexican drug cartels by way of so-called straw purchasers.

Indeed, there is much about Fast and Furious to question — but it’s simplistic to view the probe in isolation. A look behind the curtain reveals a more complex back story — a story about a rudderless, under-staffed agency responding to Justice Department pressure, while dealing with inadequate laws, paltry sentences and disinterested U.S. Attorneys.

Much of that context was detailed by the Center for Public Integrity during the early days of the Fast and Furious scandal, and it’s still both relevant and illuminating today.

We invite you to read our earlier piece.

Federal panel advises against prostate cancer screen for men

2012-05-22T12:29:09-04:00

An influential federal task force has finalized its view that men should avoid a controversial test for prostate cancer that was the subject of a Center for Public Integrity investigation last fall.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force advised men against routine prostate cancer screening using the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test because the test often leads to more harm than good. The group found that, under the best of circumstances, one man of every 1,000 given the test would avoid death as a result, while one in every 3,000 would die prematurely from complications related to prostate cancer treatment. Prostate cancer is common, particularly in older men, and often cancers discovered through screening grow so slowly that they would likely not cause harm.

The task force findings, published Monday online in The Annals of Internal Medicine, follow similar draft guidelines that were issued by the group last fall. The Preventive Services Task Force is a group of 16 primary care providers who review preventive health services and make recommendations — recommendations that are closely watched by the medical profession.

Not everyone agrees with the findings. The American Urological Association issued a statement saying it is “outraged and believes that the Task Force is doing men a great disservice by disparaging what is now the only widely available test for prostate cancer, a potentially devastating disease.”

The current debate surrounds the value of the test, but the cost of the test to government health plans has also been the subject of scrutiny. Last fall, the Center reported that 40 percent of Medicare spending on common cancer screening procedures — including the PSA test — is probably unnecessary. Cancer screening tests are widely overused, the probe found, in part because doctors disregard scientific evidence out of ignorance, fear of malpractice suits, for financial gain or in response to patient demand.

Justice Department launches probe into sexual assault at the University of Montana

2012-05-22T13:43:28-04:00

The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday announced it had opened multiple investigations into how local authorities and school officials handled a series of recent sexual assault allegations at the University of Montana. The adjudication of sexual assault cases on college campuses was the subject of a series of stories by the Center for Public Integrity.

Questions involving the handling of sexual assault cases have engulfed the university and its hometown of Missoula since late last year, when the school announced it had hired an outside investigator to look into allegations that two university students were drugged and gang-raped in December. That probe eventually grew to include other cases; the Justice Department said that at least 11 reported sexual assaults involving UM students had occurred in an 18-month period. The university faced criticism for how it handled the cases, as did the Missoula Police department and the county attorney. Several of the cases involve allegations against players for the school’s popular and successful football team, the Grizzlies. The university fired the school’s athletic director and head football coach in late March.

The Justice department said it had opened a Title IX compliance review and Title IV probe regarding the school’s response to sexual assaults. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 both bar sex discrimination, including sexual assault and sexual harassment, in educational programs. The department also announced it had begun a so-called civil pattern or practice investigation focusing on allegations that University of Montana Office of Public Safety, the Missoula Police Department and the Missoula County Attorney’s Office may have failed to adequately investigate and prosecute alleged sexual assaults against women in Missoula. The department will also coordinate with the Department of Education on a related sexual harassment complaint against members of the UM football team.

Attorney general Eric Holder called the allegations “very disturbing.” He said the department’s pattern or practice authority “enables us to ensure that law enforcement agencies are doing what is necessary to combat this despicable crime without discrimination, and we take that responsibility seriously.” City, police and university officials pledged their full cooperation.

Starting in late 2009, the Center for Public Integrity published a series of pieces looking at how sexual assault cases are handled on college campuses. The Center reported that students who have been the victim of sexual assaults face a depressing array of barriers that often either assure their silence or leave them feeling victimized a second time. The Center also found that students found “responsible” for sexual assaults in campus judicial proceedings often face little or no punishment from school judicial systems, while their victims’ lives are frequently turned upside down.

Battle over transportation bill picks up steam, again

2012-08-07T12:59:31-04:00

It’s the Washington spat that keeps on coming back — the bruising struggle over crafting a long-term bill to fund America’s transportation projects.

The last long-term measure, worth $286 billion over four years, expired in Oct. 2009. Since then, Congress has passed nine short-term extensions of the legislation, the most recent one in late March. But the March extension lasts only three months, so lawmakers will begin bickering over transportation policy again by mid-June. And given the politically charged atmosphere, it’s unlikely anything more than another short-term extension is in the offing. So it’s hard to imagine a real end to the controversy.

The myriad obstacles to crafting any rational long-term transportation policy were detailed in a Center for Public Integrity investigation back in 2009. Sad to say, not much has changed. The money for transportation bills comes from a federal gas tax that’s no longer sufficient, but who wants to talk about raising gas taxes right now? There’s controversy over highway spending versus cash for mass transit. And the bills have been a free-for-all of special interest spending with little national strategy behind them. As the previous measure approached its expiration date, some 2,000 lobbyists were competing for a slice of the pie.

On our radar screen: Oklahoma City bombing, drug use among troops

2012-04-18T12:26:24-04:00

The U.S. government declared victory after prosecuting Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols for the horrific explosion seventeen years ago this week that tore the face off the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. But nagging controversy over the completeness of its investigation into the disaster provoked two journalists to write a new book about the bombing that details the bureaucratic dysfunction during the probe.

The book, “Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed and Why It Still Matters,” by Andrew Gumbel and Roger Charles, is due out at the end of the month. It describes missed signals, ignored investigative threads, blown leads, and bureaucratic infighting so counter-productive that it almost defies imagination. Throughout the probe, the FBI and the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms failed to share crucial information and fought bitterly for credit while disparaging the other.

The two groups embraced evidence that pointed to McVeigh and Nichols, but ignored or bad-mouthed evidence that linked those men to others, including at least seven members of the radical right. Many had ties to Elohim City, a 240-acre religious compound in northeast Oklahoma that was home to a community of white supremacists. The ATF and FBI never coordinated their investigations of the group, according to the book, and prosecutors chose to keep things simple for a jury.

The April 19 explosion, which killed 168 people — including 19 infants and toddlers at a day care center in the building, has been eclipsed in notoriety by the World Trade Center’s destruction on 9/11. But some of the connect-the-dots issues and petty rivalries that bedeviled law enforcement both before and after the bombing foreshadowed vulnerabilities that would re-emerge in the wake of 9/11.

Another recently published item worth a look is the Los Angeles Times’s compelling and worrisome account on April 7 of the growing use of antidepressants, stimulants, narcotics and other drugs by uniformed service members. Those who start taking drugs while on leave — often to alleviate the residual stresses of an initial deployment — are frequently redeployed with a six-months supply of drugs and little medical oversight, “allowing them to trade with friends or grab an entire fistful of pills at the end of an anxious day.” In total, more than 110,000 active-duty Army troops are taking such medications now, the Army’s surgeon general told the Times.

ALEC scraps task force behind support for voter ID, 'Stand Your Ground' laws nationwide

2012-05-16T17:11:27-04:00

The American Legislative Exchange Council — facing heavy pressure for backing voter ID and ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws — has announced it is eliminating the task force that deals with such issues, and will focus instead on economic matters. The group’s controversial stands on voting rights and self-defense have been the subject of recent stories by the Center for Public Integrity.

ALEC spun its announcement by declaring that it was “refocusing our commitment to free-market, limited government and pro-growth principles.” The statement from ALEC national chair David Frizzell, an Indiana state representative, said the group was eliminating its Public Safety and Elections Task Force and “reinvesting these resources in the task forces that focus on the economy.”

“While we recognize there are other critical, non-economic issues that are vitally important to millions of Americans, we believe we must concentrate on initiatives that spur competitiveness and innovation and put more Americans back to work.”

The announcement said the group’s legislative board had made the decision last week.

Created in 1973, ALEC, a coalition of American corporations and mostly Republican state legislators, had long operated quietly and effectively in pushing conservative and business-friendly laws, guided by free enterprise and limited government principles. ALEC receives funding from hundreds of corporate members, including Koch Industries, Exxon Mobil, AT&T and Walmart. In addition, two thousand legislators pay $50 a year to be members.

ALEC’s broad legislative agenda had covered state budgets, education, health care and energy, among other topics. More recently, though, the group had drawn fire from liberal advocacy groups both for its support of ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws that have been in the news since the February shooting of Florida teen Trayvon Martin and for its backing of voter ID laws requiring voters to show government-issued identification at the polls. ALEC’s involvement in those issues had originated in the group’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force.

In recent weeks, pressure from the liberal groups was clearly having an effect, as brand-name firms began dropping their ALEC membership. Coca-Cola quit on April 4 and Pepsi, Kraft Foods, Intuit and McDonalds soon followed suit.

In late March, a Center for Public Integrity piece detailed ALEC’s involvement in helping the National Rifle Association push state “Stand Your Ground’ laws nationwide. Another Center story earlier this week revealed how the National Beer Wholesalers Association and the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America — both ALEC members — had supported state legislators sponsoring voter ID measures.

On anniversary of Virginia Tech shooting, law to close loophole hasn't accomplished much

2012-04-16T12:37:25-04:00

Seung-Hui Cho had a documented history of court-ordered mental health treatment, so he should have been barred from buying the guns he used to kill 32 people at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007. But five years after the shootings, a federal law designed to close the loophole Cho slipped through still hasn’t accomplished that much.

The so-called Brady Law, passed in 1993, prevented people who’d been judged mentally ill from buying firearms. Trouble is, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) established by the Brady Law hadn’t included thousands of relevant mental health records — and didn’t have any record of Cho’s treatment.

The NICS Improvement Act, signed by President George W. Bush in January 2008 — and supported by the National Rifle Association — was supposed to fix the problem by providing federal grants to help states overhaul their computer systems in order to get more mental health and other records into the NICS system. Under the 2007 law, Congress authorized $875 million over five year for this purpose, but since then only about $50 million has actually been appropriated. The results are disappointing. Published reports say two dozen states have submitted fewer than 100 mental health records to the system, and some 50 federal agencies have failed to provide records either.

A lack of access to mental health records was just one of many data gaps and loopholes that have plagued the NICS system. The litany of problems was detailed last spring by a Center for Public Integrity investigation.

Alleged White House shooter used controversial assault rifle

United States — 2011-11-22T13:24:59-05:00

The man accused of firing shots at the White House last week allegedly used a Romanian-made gun that was the subject of an iWatch News investigation earlier this year.

A source close to the investigation said the weapon used in the incident was a so-called WASR-10, a Romanian version of the Kalashnikov assault weapon that is sold in the United States by a Florida-based importer, Century International Arms. The gun was reportedly purchased in Idaho Falls, Idaho by a friend of the alleged White House assailant, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez. Ortega-Hernandez appeared in federal court in Washington, D.C. this afternoon; a public defender was appointed for him, and a hearing set for Nov. 28.

WASR-10 models have frequently been recovered at crime scenes in Mexico linked to drug trafficking. The WASR-10 has been the subject of scrutiny in part because of the route it has traveled from Romania to the United States to Mexico — a journey made legally even though for years it has actually been illegal to import high-powered, semiautomatic weapons that do not have a “sporting purpose” into the U.S.

U.S. gun laws have been interpreted by regulators in a way that affords importers a way around the ban. Foreign guns like the Romanian AKs are shipped into the United States stripped of their military features so they can be treated as sporting guns. The weapons are then modified by Century in a Vermont facility with a few U.S. made-parts, declared to be American made and shipped through wholesalers to local gun dealers with a variety of assault-style features.

The route traveled by the WASR-10 was the subject of a story published by iWatch News in February.

The piece was the result of an investigation conducted by the Center for Public Integrity, the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University School of Communication, InSight, FRONTLINE and the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism.

The perils of a highway bill

2012-08-07T13:02:59-04:00

The latest idea for jump-starting the economy? A new highway spending bill. But as iWatch News reported in 2009, such efforts have traditionally been loaded up with pork and loaded down by thousands of lobbyists.

According to POLITICO, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has directed his staff to work with the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on a new six-year bill to rebuild the nation’s highway system. Such bills are traditionally multi-year affairs worth hundreds of billions of dollars, but the nation’s been without such legislation since the previous bill — a four-year measure worth $286 billion — expired in late 2009. Since then, highway spending has inched forward in a series of stopgap measures that have infuriated highway-backers in Congress and frustrated Washington’s considerable road-building lobby.

There’s no doubt a new highway bill would create thousands of construction jobs. Trouble is, such efforts have traditionally been disorganized free-for-alls that have sometimes revealed the worst of Washington. The iWatch News investigation noted that the previous bill contained 6,371 overt earmarks and further found that at least 2,100 lobbyists were engaged in trying to influence Congress as it attempted to shape a new transportation measure.

ATF let hundreds of U.S. weapons fall into hands of suspected Mexican gunrunners

Phoenix,Arizona,United States — 2011-12-14T16:06:29-05:00

Hoping to score a major prosecution of Mexican drug lords, federal prosecutors and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives permitted hundreds of guns to be purchased and retained by suspected straw buyers with the expectation they might cross the border and even be used in crimes while the case was being built, according to documents and interviews.

The decision — part of a Phoenix-based operation code named “Fast and Furious” — was met by strong objections from some front-line agents who feared they were allowing weapons like AK-47s to “walk” into the hands of drug lords and gun runners, internal agency memos show. Indeed, scores of the weapons came back quickly traced to criminal activity.

One of those front-line agents who objected, John Dodson, 39, told the Center for Public Integrity that these guns “are going to be turning up in crimes on both sides of the border for decades.” Dodson said in an interview that “with the number of guns we let walk, we’ll never know how many people were killed, raped, robbed … there is nothing we can do to round up those guns. They are gone.”

Dodson has taken his misgivings to the Senate Judiciary Committee as a whistleblower after his concerns were dismissed by his supervisors and initially ignored by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Sen. Charles Grassley, the panel’s top Republican — who is spearheading a probe of ATF’s actions – said “it’s time to step back” and examine the policy. Two of the guns involved in the sting operation turned up at the scene of a fatal shooting of a U.S. agent.

The Justice Department said today that Attorney General Eric Holder has asked the department’s acting inspector general to evaluate the concerns about ATF’s investigative tactics.

A Change in Strategy

Dodson told the Center he and several of his colleagues wanted to intercept some of the weapons but their objections were repeatedly overruled by ATF supervisors. The supervisors instructed them to simply record the straw purchases in a database, flag them as “suspect,” and monitor the suspected gun runners until evidence piled up about their connections to Mexican drug lords.

The tactics employed in the Fast and Furious case were part of an evolving change in the strategic direction of firearms investigations, ATF officials told the Center.

Mark Chait, ATF’s assistant director in charge of field operations, told the Center he personally decided to change the strategy in September 2010 after years of futile efforts to interdict guns from small-time straw buyers with little hope of dismantling major drug trafficking organizations in Mexico. The agency’s earlier focus on straw buyers was criticized last fall in a review by the Justice Department’s inspector general of ATF’s border effort, known as Project Gunrunner.

In addition, ATF officials have so far been frustrated in efforts to persuade the White House to implement even a simple change in firearm sales reporting requirements to help detect possible gun-running at the border.

“When we look at the complexities of the organizations working around the border of Mexico, just dealing with the lowest level purchaser, the straw purchaser, doesn’t get you to the organizer, the money people and the key people in that organization to shut that down. We found that if we don’t attack the organization and shut the organization down, they will continue to move guns across the border,” Chait told the Center. “It’s kind of a somewhat common sense approach that if you don’t get to the higher-level folks that are making the calls, then guns will continue to cross the border.”

But Chait went on to say that the policy was not set in stone. “I think we have a good strategy,” he said. “I think it needs to be reviewed. We’re taking a look at it right now to see if it needs to be tweaked in any way.”

The Fast and Furious investigation was initiated in October 2009, eleven months before Chait's formal policy change.

With direct blessing of ATF headquarters in Washington and supervision by the U.S. attorney's office in Phoenix, a special ATF strike force known as Group VII was given permission to let federally licensed gun shops continue selling weapons to straw buyers already linked to a suspected Mexican gun running operation.

Officials told the Center that ATF allowed about 1,765 firearms over the 15 months of the operation to pass from gun dealers to the suspected straw buyers that were the accomplices of the gun running ring. Another 233 weapons had been bought by the suspects prior to the ATF operation starting, bringing the total number of guns in the case to 1,998.

Of those, 797 of the guns were eventually recovered as a result of criminal activity on both sides of the border — including 195 from inside Mexico — after they were used in crimes, collected during arrests, or interdicted through other law enforcement operations, the officials told the Center.

Understanding the Risks

The risks that some of the guns might end up in crimes was fully understood, memos show.

A case summary sent to ATF headquarters took note of “firearms being recovered in the Republic of Mexico or on/near the US/Mexico border.”

“ATF is attempting to not only secure a straw purchase/dealing in firearms without a license case against various individuals but more specifically to make the bigger connection to the Mexican Cartel/Drug Trafficking Organization (DTO) obtaining these firearms for the best possible case and the most severe charges when it is time to Indict this case,” the memo read.

Dodson said his supervisors seemed pleased when one of the guns the agency had let “walk” showed up in a crime in Mexico. They were “elated every time a gun was recovered in Mexico” because they “saw it as proving the nexus that we were dealing with a real drug trafficking group."

But the investigation dragged on for 15 months, in part, documents show, because the Justice Department was slow to approve a wiretap and bring prosecutions. Memos reveal that ATF supervisors were frustrated by the delays, but let straw buyers and suspected gun runners continue to move scores, even hundreds of guns a month, internal agency memos show.

An April 2, 2010 memo from the strike force leader to the Justice Department disclosed that ATF watched as targeted suspects purchased 359 guns in the United States in March 2010 alone.

The case summary sent to ATF headquarters in summer 2010 gave a much higher number.

“To date over 1,500 firearms have been purchased since October 2009 for over one million ($1,000,000.00) cash in over-the-counter transactions at various Phoenix area” gun dealers, the memo said.

Some of the field agents became increasingly incensed.

"Nothing happened. We're monitoring the same buyers buying the same guns from the same dealers at the same rate and we're not stopping any of it," Dodson recalled.

Notations in the case files reviewed by the Center show ATF received several “trace” reports of guns they had let pass to straw buyers showing up in criminal cases in Mexico or on the U.S. side of the border.

In November 2009, for example, four 7.62 caliber weapons were recovered in Naco, Mexico only two weeks after one of the suspects had purchased them. Also, in July 2010 a Romanian AK-47 variant was recovered in Navojoa, Mexico, the records say.

Dodson, who told the Center he expects to be fired for speaking out, said four of the seven agents on the strike force had strong reservations about what they were being instructed to do. The three others, he said, backed the approach. Dodson’s biggest fear was that some of the guns would eventually be used against law enforcement.

That fear was soon realized.

A Death Raises Questions

In May 2010, a Customs and Border Protection agent confronted an armed band of gangsters along the U.S. side of the border. The suspects fled but some of the guns they left behind were traced back to weapons purchased by one of the suspects targeted in Fast and Furious, Dodson said.

U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry was fatally shot north of the Arizona-Mexico border in December while trying to arrest bandits who target illegal immigrants. Two weapons recovered at the scene were traced to the ATF's Fast and Furious operation, according to Sen Charles Grassley.Then in December, two weapons recovered at the scene of a murdered Customs and Border Protection agent, Brian Terry, were traced to the ATF operation, according to Sen.Grassley.

“This may be a well-intended policy, but when you have agents on the ground for months questioning what’s going on, and a Border Patrol agent is killed, it’s time to take a step back and check to see if the policy has gone awry,” Grassley told the Center.

The ATF said in a statement today that neither gun recovered at the scene appears to be the weapon that killed Terry, and they may simply have been left behind by the criminals. “At this time, we're not aware of any forensic evidence that would link these guns to the homicide,” the agency said.

Grassley said his committee has interviewed numerous ATF agents, including Dodson, who have come forward to raise concerns about the Fast and Furious operation and the potential danger of ATF's approach.

“The ATF clearly had plenty of information on the bad guys. The problem wasn't the fact that the guns weren't being reported, it was that the ATF didn't act on the information they had," the senator said.

“We heard from more than a dozen people who brought forward allegations of wrongdoing at the ATF. What Agent Dobson has done by risking his career in an effort to expose the truth is patriotic. He is guilty of only one thing: committing truth,” Grassley added.

Dodson said he feels responsible for Terry's death by being part of the ATF operation. He said he saw no other option but to go public — even if meant being fired — because he and his fellow agents' concerns were ignored by supervisors.

Dodson said after his supervisors rejected the agents’ concerns, he filed a whistleblower complaint both by Web and phone to the Justice inspector general but was never contacted. He then approached Grassley, keeping his current supervisor on a joint terrorism task force apprised of his whistleblowing activities. Eventually, the inspector general contacted Dodson after Grassley intervened.

ATF supervisors told agents who disagreed with the strategy that "if you are going to make an omelet you’ve got to scramble some eggs,” Dodson said. “That was the attitude. I took it to mean that whatever crimes these guns were going to be involved in, those were the eggs, those were acceptable.”

Dodson said that another time a supervisor told him, “’It’s kind of a moot argument. They’re going to get those guns somewhere.’ But my feeling is we shouldn’t be making it easier for them.”

Internal agency memos show ATF supervisors dismissed the objections of agents in the Group VII strike force, insisting the prize of getting permission to run a wiretap and eventually rolling up a major gun or drug gang in Mexico merited the risks. There were even comments interpreted by the agents as veiled threats that they could lose their jobs if they didn't fall in line.

“This is a time we all need to pull together, not drift apart,” Group VII supervisor David J.Voth wrote to his strike force team in March 2010, acknowledging “there may be a schism developing amongst the group.”

“If you don’t think this is fun you’re in the wrong line of work — period! This is the pinnacle of domestic U.S. law enforcement techniques. After this the tool box is empty,” Voth wrote.

“Maybe the Maricopa County Jail is hiring detention officers and you can get paid $30,000 (instead of $100,000) to serve lunch to inmates all day.”

Plagued By Delay

The operation, however, turned out to be anything but fast and furious.

By spring 2010, Voth appealed to the Justice Department for some “urgency” as the number of weapons ATF let through was growing.

In an April 2, 2010, email to one of his supervisors and an assistant U.S. attorney in Phoenix, Voth wrote there was “no pressure but perhaps an increased sense of urgency.” The strike force supervisor noted that March 2010 was deadliest month in five years in Mexico and also yielded some of the largest movement of weapons from Fast and Furious.

“Our subjects purchased 359 firearms during the month of March alone, to include numerous Barrett .50 caliber rifles,” Voth wrote. “I believe we are righteous in our plan to dismantle this entire organization and to rush in to arrest any one person without taking into account the entire scope of the conspiracy would be ill advised to the overall good of the mission.

“I acknowledge that we are all in agreement that to do so properly requires patience and planning. In the event, however, that there is anything we can do to facilitate a timely response or turnaround by others, we should communicate our sense of urgency with regard to this matter.”

Nine months later, Fast and Furious finally bore some fruit.

On Jan. 25, 2011 — 15 months after the operation was launched and one month after the agent's death along the border — the primary suspect named in the strike force case file, Jaime Avila, was indicted along with 19 alleged cohorts in Arizona. The 53-count indictment included 35 counts of making a false statement in connection with the acquisition of firearms. Avila has pleaded not guilty.

“The massive size of this operation sadly exemplifies the magnitude of the problems,” said U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke at the time. “Mexican Drug Lords go shopping for war weapons in Arizona.”

When asked for comment on the office's role in the ATF operation, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Phoenix noted today that federal prosecutors along the Mexican border have been pressing for tougher penalties against straw buyers who traffic arms to Mexico.

William Newell, special agent in charge of the ATF’s Phoenix office, announces the indictments that emerged from the Fast and Furious investigation on Jan. 25 in Phoenix. ATF officials say Newell is slated to become the agency's new attaché to the Mexican government. Credit: Matt York/Associated PressDodson said some of the cooperating gun dealers who sold weapons to the suspects at ATF's behest initially had concerns and wanted to end their sales. One even asked whether the dealers might have a legal liability, but was assured by federal prosecutors they would be protected, he said.

The case logs show ATF supervisors and U.S. attorney's office lawyers met with some of the gun dealers to discuss their “role” in the case, in one instance as far back as December 2009.

Concerns about ATF's approach even extended outside the ATF office in Phoenix.

Grassley's office said it has gathered evidence and testimony that Darren Gil, the ATF's then-attache to the Mexican government in Mexico City, also objected to the Fast and Furious strategy. He worried it might be viewed by the administration of Mexican president Felipe Calderon as a misguided approach that only armed drug lords for more violence.

The attache, Grassley said, raised his objections to ATF headquarters but was told supervisors there already knew about the operation. Gil was eventually removed from his job, and retired. His planned replacement is the special agent-in-charge in Phoenix during the operation, William Newell, ATF officials said.

Gil declined to be interviewed.

Behind the Debate

Law enforcement experts said the ATF’s strategy clearly had risks.

Phil Jordan, a former Drug Enforcement Administration administrator who once ran the inter-agency El Paso Intelligence Center, said: “I can’t comprehend how one of our agencies could allow weapons to flow if we knew that they could end up in the hands of the cartels, and then be utilized to kill people.”

A respected former ATF executive, Jim Cavanaugh, conceded that allowing guns to reach the streets may have been a mistake. “But the alternative argument could be, ‘Well I could have got one or two guys. But that would have allowed a ring of 30 to 40 to 50 gun traffickers to operate for two or three more years, and they could have pumped thousands of guns into Mexico,’ ” he said.

What other factors might have influenced ATF to let guns "walk" rather than confiscating them immediately and arresting the straw buyers?

Part of the answer may lie in the sort of frustration experienced by ATF in an earlier Phoenix case against firearms dealer George Iknadosian, who owned a store called X Caliber Guns.

Dozens of Romanian WASR 10 weapons bought by suspected straw buyers at X Caliber were eventually recovered at Mexican crime scenes, but authorities could not make a successful case against Iknadosian in 2009, alleging that he was part of a conspiracy trafficking firearms to Mexico. Federal prosecutors declined to take the case because federal courts were increasingly ruling that purchasers had to be barred from buying weapons in order for a dealer to be prosecuted. State prosecutors stepped in and charged Iknadosian with fraud, conspiracy and money laundering, but a state judge dismissed the case, using similar logic as the federal courts.

After a deadly shootout with suspected members of the Beltran-Leyva cartel on May 26th, 2008, that left eight policemen dead, authorities seized a variety of guns, including seven AK-47s, as well as 36 magazines, and 500 rounds of ammunition, according to ATF investigative reports. Credit: ATFATF officials were also facing a Justice Department inspector general's review of Operation Gun Runner — a review which ultimately criticized the agency in November 2010 for not aiming higher in its border gun probes.

“ATF’s focus remains largely on inspections of gun dealers and investigations of straw purchasers, rather than on higher-level traffickers, smugglers, and the ultimate recipients of the trafficked guns,” the report said.

“Because there is no federal firearms trafficking statute, ATF must use a wide variety of other statutes to combat firearms trafficking. However, cases brought under these statutes are difficult to prove and do not carry stringent penalties — particularly for straw purchasers of guns,” the report noted.

“As a result, we found that [U.S. Attorney’s offices] are less likely to accept and prosecute Project Gunrunner cases. And when these cases are prosecuted and convictions obtained, Federal Sentencing Guidelines categorize straw-purchasing-related offenses as lesser crimes.”

The contretemps occurs just as Mexican President Felipe Calderon met today at the White House with President Barack Obama.

The presidential get-together was already expected to be tense, as friction has arisen over leaked American diplomatic exchanges that criticized the Mexican government. The cables, some of them classified secret, were disclosed by the Wikileaks website.

In an interview last week with El Universal, one of Mexico's leading newspapers, Calderon said that U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual's "ignorance has translated into a distortion of what is happening in Mexico" that has caused "an impact and an irritation in our own team."

As he has several times, Calderon complained to El Universal that the American government has done little to curb the nation's demand for drugs or stop the flow of weapons across the border.

"The institutional cooperation ends up being notoriously insufficient," Calderon said.

Jordan, the former senior DEA official, said the ATF’s policy in Fast and Furious “supports President Calderon’s complaint that the U.S. is not doing nearly all it can to stop the flow of weapons into Mexico.”

Publicly, ATF and Justice have tried to downplay any notion it would let guns knowingly flow to straw buyers to Mexican drug lords.

Newell, the special agent in charge in Phoenix, was asked at a news conference after the Avila indictment whether his agency would ever let guns knowingly cross the border. Newell answered, "Hell, no." But, he said, suspects under surveillance sometimes elude agents, which could result in guns winding up in Mexico.

Grassley got a similar answer.

In a Feb. 4 letter to the senator, the Justice Department said ATF never “knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser who then transported them into Mexico.” ATF, the letter added, makes “every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation into Mexico.”

Grassley told the Center he now believes those representations are contradicted by the documents his staff has gathered and the testimony of agents like Dodson. “The Justice Department and the ATF put up a wall to mislead the American people and were less than forthcoming,” he said.

Dodson also believes his agency has been less than forthright, and said that was part of the reason he went public.

“I’m boots on the ground and I’ve seen it done (let guns go through) and I had done it and I was instructed to do it almost every day I was down there. It happened,” he said.

“What we were doing in my opinion was wrong. It’s not what we do and for my agency to openly and publicly come in and deny we are doing it, I can’t even fathom it.”

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' Ricardo Sandoval Palos also contributed to this story.