Homeland Security from The Center for Public Integrity

Current gun debate may not help beleaguered ATF

2013-04-16T11:54:42-04:00

Editor's note, April 16: This week's tragic events in Boston have once again put the troubled Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on the front lines of a major terrorism investigation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is leading the probe into the bombing at the Boston Marathon, but ATF is intimately involved because its agents are the government's top experts on explosives. As the Center reported in February, though, ATF remains an agency effectively handcuffed from performing its missions:

The massacre of 20 schoolchildren and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., has placed gun violence squarely at the front of the national agenda. Long-skeptical legislators have expressed a new openness to at least consider laws that might keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. Polls show increased support for some new restraints on guns. And just a month after the massacre, President Obama signed nearly two dozen executive actions and proposed a package of legislative initiatives that together represent the most comprehensive effort in decades to reduce what he called “the broader epidemic of gun violence in this country.”

Conspicuously absent from the president’s agenda, however, is much of anything that might address the stunning and widespread weaknesses that have for years crippled the federal agency responsible for enforcing the nation’s gun laws — the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Yes, the president announced his nomination of a full-time director for the long-leaderless agency —widely known as ATF — and some of the new proposals do tacitly acknowledge a number of the agency’s long-standing challenges. But the initiatives are modest, and Congress may not go along with any of them. So for now, the bureau remains systematically hobbled by purposeful restrictions, flimsy laws, impotent leadership and paltry budgets. And it’s not at all clear there’s anything on the horizon that would change that situation.

“If you want an agency to be small and ineffective at what it does, the ATF is really the model,” says Robert J. Spitzer, author of The Politics of Gun Control. Spitzer, a political science professor at the State University of New York College at Cortland, says the ATF’s critics, in particular the National Rifle Association (NRA), have been “extremely successful at demonizing, belittling and hemming in the ATF as a government regulatory agency.” The result, he says, is an agency with insufficient staff and resources, whose agents are “hamstrung” by laws and rules that make it difficult or impossible to fulfill their mission.

ATF declined to make any senior officials available for an interview. But Special Agent George Semonick, a spokesman for the agency noted that ATF “does not make the laws and regulations...ATF will hold to what the laws and regulations allow us to do."

A history of controversy

The ATF traces its roots to 1791, when Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton tasked his agents to collect a tax on domestic spirits. Since then it has never seemed able to shake its connection to booze. It has had only one prominent director, Eliott Ness, made famous in the TV series "The Untouchables," who ran the agency during Prohibition.

The ATF gained jurisdiction over guns in 1952, but it was not until passage of the Gun Control Act in 1968 that it became the Division of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Even so, many observers have long argued that one of ATF’s challenges is that it is tasked with carrying out a jury-rigged amalgam of functions —collecting taxes, regulating a disparate group of industries and investigating gun crimes.

It is, perhaps, no coincidence that the agency became a lightning rod for controversy in the late 1970s, around the time the National Rifle Association was taken over by a contingent set on transforming what had historically been an organization of hunters, marksmen and conservationists into a single-issue political operation with an uncompromising view of the Second Amendment. For the new NRA leadership, ATF was an irresistible target, and the lobbying group has been shooting it full of holes ever since —with some healthy assistance from ATF’s own missteps.

In 1981, when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the NRA produced a film called It Can Happen Here in which ATF agents were attacked as “Nazi Gestapos” and “jackbooted fascists.” Criticism of the ATF grew so heated that Reagan, a strong gun-rights advocate, recommended dismantling the agency.

That idea was resurrected in 1993 by Vice President Al Gore’s National Performance Review, which suggested moving ATF regulatory operations into the IRS and its enforcement arm into the FBI. The same year, the ATF was fiercely attacked for its mishandling of a raid on the heavily armed compound of the Branch Davidian cult near Waco, Texas, in which four ATF agents were killed and 20 were wounded. Weeks later, after the FBI inserted tear gas into the compound, it burned to the ground, resulting in the deaths of some 80 men, women and children.

Waco became a cause célèbre for anti-government, gun-rights activists. In a 1995 fundraising letter, Wayne LaPierre, now the NRA’s executive vice president, castigated ATF agents as “jack-booted government thugs.” Six days later, another ATF-hater, Timothy McVeigh, blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Okla., killing 168 people — including 19 children under the age of 6. McVeigh reportedly targeted the building because it contained a regional ATF office. And former President George H.W. Bush turned in his lifetime NRA membership, calling LaPierre’s letter “a vicious slander on good people.”

Most recently, between 2011 and 2012, the ATF was the subject of virtually nonstop investigations by House and Senate committees and the Justice Department’s inspector general for conducting a botched gun-tracing operation along the Southwest border. Operation Fast and Furious allowed some 2,000 guns to cross into Mexico. ATF agents watched “straw purchasers,” lawful purchasers who stand in for the real buyers, walk off with hundreds of high-powered weapons, many of which later turned up at crime scenes in Mexico, two at a site where a U.S. border agent was killed.

Leadership

ATF’s management came in for harsh criticism following the Fast and Furious operation, but it was far from the first time that the agency’s leadership had been questioned. Following the Waco debacle, an exhaustive Treasury department review was sharply critical of ATF’s performance. The report said the initial probe into the Davidians “was an appropriate response to a dangerous situation” — the compound contained 48 illegal machine guns —and the preponderance of the evidence indicates the Davidians fired first. But the review also asserted that the operation’s on-site leaders lacked the expertise for such a large-scale operation and made fatal errors in judgment in the absence of effective supervision from headquarters. ATF director Stephen Higgins resigned.

Months before the Fast and Furious revelations, a Nov. 2010 review of ATF gun trafficking efforts at the border by the Justice IG cast a different, but also unflattering light on agency managers — portraying them as timid, and uninspired. The report quotes ATF agents who said they “felt … discouraged from conducting … complex conspiracy cases,” and cites one special agent in charge who said he “preferred his agents to initiate cases that could be completed within one month rather than cases that involve surveillance, wiretaps and other investigative methods typical of complex conspiracy cases.”

Operation Fast and Furious, which took months, did involve wiretaps and attempted to get at higher-ups in the Mexican cartels, may have been in part a reaction to that earlier Justice IG probe — but by any account, it was not a success, and did not reflect well on ATF management. The fallout from Fast and Furious led to the resignation of Kenneth Melson, the ATF’s acting director at the time of the operation, and a top Justice Department official. Two ATF officials in the Phoenix, Ariz., office, where the operation was headquartered, were transferred to Washington. A scathing Justice Department inspector general’s report singled out 17 officials for possible administrative or disciplinary action.

Although critics charged that the congressional inquiry into Fast and Furious was highly politicized, the Justice IG’s indictment of the ATF’s leadership was incontrovertible. “Our investigation identified serious failures by the leadership of ATF,” the September 2012 IG report stated, pointing to “a series of misguided strategies, tactics, errors in judgment, and management failures that permeated ATF Headquarters and the Phoenix Field Division.” The IG found that the operation “received little to no supervision by ATF Headquarters” and that the “failures within ATF ... were systematic and not due to the acts of only a few individuals.”

But these indictments aside, the weakness of ATF’s leadership is, in part, a matter of design. President Obama’s recent nomination of Acting Director B. Todd Jones to permanently head the agency merely highlighted the fact that Congress has forced the ATF to operate without a full-time leader since 2006; that’s when lawmakers changed the position from an appointment to one requiring Senate confirmation.

Jones is its fifth acting director in the past six years. Senators even refused to approve President George W. Bush’s nominee, Michael J. Sullivan, a former Republican state legislator and U.S. attorney. His confirmation was blocked by three Republican senators who accused him of being hostile to gun dealers and expressed concerns about ATF’s “overly aggressive” enforcement of gun laws. The Senate also did not act on Obama’s first nominee, Andrew Traver, the chief of ATF’s Chicago office. The NRA said Traver was “deeply aligned with gun-control advocates and anti-gun activities.” Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the Justice Department never produced documents needed to move forward on Traver’s nomination. Grassley has now also expressed concerns about Jones, as has a former FBI official in Minnesota, where Jones has also been serving as U.S. Attorney. Other law enforcement officials in the Twin Cities area have supported Jones.

Higgins, who served as ATF director between 1982 and 1993, says that trying to get anyone confirmed as ATF director is “almost an impossibility” because of the influence of special interests. He says that the lack of a full-time director is damaging both to employee morale and agency operations. “It sends all the wrong messages to the people inside the agency. It says the administration doesn’t think it’s important who’s director, and it says the director’s job is about politics.... And if changes need to be made in the agency, there’s no one to make those changes.”

Resources

The ATF employs about 5,000 men and women, approximately the same number of staff it had a decade ago; about half are special agents assigned to conduct criminal investigations. That’s a force about the size of the Harris County, Texas, Sheriff’s Department, and the same number of agents that ATF had in 1972 when it separated from the Internal Revenue Service and became its own bureau. In a letter to Vice President Joe Biden’s Gun Violence Commission, 108 academic researchers complained that the ATF’s funding was “stagnating” while the budgets of law enforcement agencies such as the FBI had seen “dramatic expansions.” Since 1972, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s staff has more than doubled, while the FBI’s is up by two-thirds. The ATF’s current budget of $1.15 billion is little changed from the $900 million it received 10 years ago.

Higgins and others intimately familiar with the agency’s history say the root of the problem is that ATF has no political constituency, no one invested in seeing it succeed and willing to stand up against those determined to see it fail. The success of ATF’s critics in reining in its authority is nowhere more evident than in the bureau’s appropriation statute, a two-page document that devotes 11 lines to describing the agency’s budget and the remaining 79 lines to proscriptions on its powers. Many of these “riders,” as they’re known, go to the agency’s most basic investigative functions (see chart). Two of the riders ban consolidation and computerization of records. One limits access and use of crime gun trace data, while another is designed to undermine the credibility of whatever trace data are released. One rider overturns ATF efforts to ban the import of large-capacity shotguns, which the agency found had no “sporting purpose.” Another overturned an ATF regulation to limit the import of dangerous weapons under a law originally designed to protect collectors of “curios and relics.”

Perhaps the most iconic of these riders is one that literally bars the oft-suggested transfer of ATF functions to any other agency such as the FBI or Secret Service, which have stronger reputations and more public support. “These riders are designed to keep the functions of ATF within that agency so they can be targeted for criticism,” says Adam Winkler, author of Gun Fight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. “It’s helpful to have a clear villain.”

No databases and no registration

Of course the NRA has a starkly different view of what the ATF and gun control advocates view as unreasonable restraints. Chris Cox, the executive director of the NRA’s lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA), did not respond to an interview request. But last February, in the NRA magazine First Freedom, Cox wrote, the “NRA-ILA puts a great deal of effort into protecting gun owners by urging the Congress to pass ‘riders’... that help accomplish our agenda....” An NRA press release from November 2011 heralded the riders in the ATF appropriation as “Twelve Big Wins for Gun Owners.”

According to Cox, the most important of the ATF riders “is a prohibition on creating or maintaining a database of gun owners or guns,” which the NRA and other gun-rights advocates say could be used by a tyrannical government to confiscate firearms. The rider, which dates back to 1978, was a response to President Carter’s attempt to create a national registry of handguns. A related rider, dating to 1997, bars the government from creating an electronic database of the names of gun purchasers contained in 597 million gun sale records from 700,000 out-of-business dealers. (Those dealers are required by law to turn their records over to the ATF.) In addition, a 1986 law, the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act (FOPA), explicitly forbids the government from creating a database of gun owners.

Higgins was stoic about the long-standing ban on databases. “Everyone in the agency understood that things that made sense in the modern era — such as automation — just weren’t going to happen.” But Higgins also said that working through mountains of paper and microfiche records is a huge waste of agents’ time and taxpayer money. As a practical matter, the lack of a computerized records system for gun sales means that a crime gun trace that might otherwise be accomplished in a matter of seconds can take up to two weeks.

Today, gun sale records are kept at 60,000 separate locations by the nation’s 60,000 federal firearms licensees (FFLs). With a centralized database, an ATF agent in possession of a gun found at a crime scene could simply plug the gun’s serial number into a computer and identify the name of the dealer who sold the weapon, along with the name of the first purchaser. Without a database, agents must often embark on a Rube Goldberg-style odyssey, contacting the gun’s manufacturer or a gun’s importer who will direct the agent either to a middleman who sold the weapon to a dealer or to the dealer himself, who can identify the first buyer. Dealers are required to keep records of each firearm transaction. Frequently, however, the records are on paper, and dealers can’t locate particular ones quickly. At the same time, there is no law requiring consolidation of wholesale weapon transfers — those sales by the manufacturer or middleman — which means ATF inspectors have no way of knowing whether a dealer’s ledgers accurately represent all of the guns he has bought or if he is illegally selling guns off the books.

One gun database that works

Joseph Vince, a former ATF special agent and now a partner at Crime Gun Solutions, a consulting firm, says solving gun crimes is all about gathering information and having the tools to make sense out of it. He says U.S. gun laws often make that work far more difficult. “People talk about 9/11 and not connecting the dots; but when we talk about gun laws, we’re taking the dots off the paper.” Vince says concerns that a centralized database of guns and gun owners will lead to gun confiscation have been disproved by 80 years of history with the National Firearms Act, a 1934 law that requires citizens who own machine guns, short-barrel shotguns and certain other highly dangerous weapons to register them with the federal government. Owners of NFA firearms, as they are known, are fingerprinted, photographed and subjected to an FBI background check, and the serial numbers of their guns are kept in a federal database, whose contents, Vince says, have never been divulged outside of a legitimate law enforcement inquiry. Most important, these weapons are rarely used to commit crimes. The NFA has effectively removed these guns from the criminal marketplace.

Vince notes that NFA weapon owners are also required to obtain a clearance from a local law enforcement authority, because these officials are more likely to know whether a prospective machine-gun owner is a responsible citizen. “If you’ve got anger issues, if you’re getting involved in weekly brawls at bars or beating your wife, you shouldn’t have a firearm,” says Vince. “It’s just common sense.” Vince and some gun control advocates argue that assault weapons and other modern, high-powered guns should be brought under the registration requirements of the NFA. The assault weapons ban recently proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. includes no registration language.

Background checks miss many buyers

The centerpiece of the president’s just-released gun agenda is a proposal to require, in his words, “universal background checks for anyone trying to buy a gun.” Under the 1993 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, licensed dealers are required to run a background check through the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) before selling a firearm. Between 1998 and 2012 the FBI conducted more than 160 million background checks and turned away nearly a million prohibited buyers, including convicted felons, domestic abusers, illegal aliens, drug abusers and so-called mental defectives.

The problem with the current law is that it covers only guns sold by FFLs; there are currently no background checks for sales by "private sellers," that is, individuals and unlicensed dealers, many of whom sell at gun shows, flea markets, or on the Internet. President Obama and gun control groups have suggested that as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases are made through unlicensed sellers, and New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly estimated about 6 million such sales last year.

Selling guns without a license was made a lot easier when Congress passed the 1986 Firearms Owners’ Protection Act, which narrowed the definition of “those who engage in the business of” selling firearms and were required to buy a license. “You could tell if someone was engaged in the business of selling firearms by looking at a simple sequence of sales,” says William J. Vizzard, a former ATF agent and now a professor of criminal justice at California State University, Sacramento. But the new law exempted “collectors,” people engaged in “occasional sales” and those selling guns from a “personal collection” regardless of its size, all of which greatly expanded the universe of unlicensed sellers. After FOPA, Vizzard says, “we’d arrest a guy with hundreds of guns, all with price tags on them, and he’d say they were part of his collection, and the tags were to let his family know what they were worth in case he died.” Vizzard says the law should define a dealer based on the number of guns he sells.

Richard Feldman, a former NRA lobbyist and president of a gun-rights group called the Independent Firearm Owners Association, insists that the gun show loophole could be closed at little cost by requiring show operators — rather than individual dealers — to conduct NICS checks on all gun sales. Alternatively, unlicensed dealers might be required to run their checks through licensed dealers, for a small fee. That would eliminate the incentive criminals have to buy from unlicensed gun show dealers.

The current system of background checks is also hampered by ongoing problems with data collection. Missing from the NICS system are millions of state and federal records that would disqualify prospective buyers — including mental health and drug abuse records, and case histories of accused felons. A report by the Government Accountability Office found that 17 states have provided fewer than 10 mental health records to the database. As a result, thousands of prohibited buyers slip through the cracks every year. In 2010, about 3,000 such cases were identified. The president’s gun violence plan calls for additional funding to help states compile mental health and other records and get them into the system.

No cross-checks: The 24-hour rule

The absence of background checks for potentially millions of gun sales each year means that an ATF agent trying to trace a gun picked up at the scene of a homicide may find no paper trail. If he’s lucky, a dealer will identify the first buyer. But 85 percent of traced crime guns had changed hands at least once before being recovered by law enforcement, and none of those secondary buyers were run through the NICS system.

The investigative challenges are further complicated by a series of riders authored by then-Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., in 2003 in collaboration with the NRA. One of the “Tiahrt amendments,” as they’re known, requires the FBI to destroy information contained in Brady or NICS checks within 24 hours. When a felon purchases a gun, he commits a new felony. But the FBI now has only 24 hours to figure that out. In effect, the FBI is required to destroy evidence of a crime. “Obviously, bringing the record retention down to 24 hours would preclude any significant investigation,” says Julius Wachtel, a retired ATF agent with 20 years of service. “One might as well not even bother.”

According to the NRA, the rider “protects the privacy of law-abiding gun buyers.”

ATF handgun traces demonstrate that 20 percent of handguns collected from crime scenes were initially part of large-scale purchases of multiple firearms. That’s why the Brady law included a provision requiring that dealers who sell more than one handgun to any single individual within a five-day period file a special report with the ATF and the local police. ATF agents say these multiple sales reports are one of the most valuable tools for identifying gun traffickers. But traffickers can easily evade this reporting requirement and assemble their arsenals without being detected by purchasing a single handgun from multiple dealers over a period of several days, weeks or months. A straw buyer can pass 100 Brady checks. And because the NICS database cannot retain that information for more than 24 hours, it’s impossible to detect that he or she has made multiple purchases.

Although the Brady law did not require multiple sales reports for long guns, including the military-style assault rifles favored by Mexican drug cartels, President Obama has tried to crack down on traffickers in those weapons. In 2011 the Justice Department issued a rule requiring gun dealers in four Southwest border states to file multiple sale reports for rifles of larger than .22-caliber. The NRA and the Newtown, Connecticut-based National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) immediately went to court to stop its enforcement. Cox, the NRA lobbyist, said the rule “will only divert scarce law enforcement resources from legitimate criminal investigations and squander them on policing law-abiding retailers.” But Peter Forcelli, an ATF supervisory special agent, called the long-gun rule a “huge tool” that “gives us a head start to investigate potentially unlawful sales.” During the first eight months of the program, ATF initiated 120 investigations based on multiple long-gun sale reports and recommended prosecution of more than 100 defendants in 25 separate cases. Two federal district courts turned down the NRA/NSSF challenge, which is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.

No dealer inventories

Yet another Tiahrt amendment bars the ATF from forcing gun dealers to conduct annual inventories of their firearms, which the NRA’s Cox describes as a “laborious and time-consuming process” and “generally unnecessary.” In fact, unlike automobile dealers who have a pretty good idea when a car is missing from the lot, gun dealers seem to lose track of firearms all the time. In 2010, ATF inspections of less than 10 percent of firearms licensees identified more than 31,000 missing weapons. Unlike gun dealers, explosives dealers, also regulated by ATF, are required to keep annual inventories.

Yet lost and stolen firearms account for a huge percentage of the guns that turn up at crime scenes. Between 2005 and 2010, the Justice Department reported 1.4 million guns stolen. More than 80 percent were never recovered. Although licensed dealers are required to report stolen weapons, there is no similar requirement for individuals, although numerous cities and towns — 30 in Pennsylvania alone — have enacted laws that require such reporting within 24 to 48 hours. The International Association of Chiefs of Police supports these laws, arguing that quick reporting of stolen guns makes it far easier to track down thieves, traffickers and straw purchasers. The NRA opposes lost and stolen reporting laws. An NRA challenge to a Pittsburgh law was turned down in 2010.

For ATF investigators, a large number of lost or stolen firearms from a particular dealer can be a red flag that the dealer may be selling to criminals. An ATF study in 2000 found that more than 57 percent of crime gun traces in 1998 came from just 1.2 percent of gun dealers. The Washington, D.C.-area snipers, who murdered 10 people in the course of a three week shooting spree in 2002, obtained their assault rifle from a Tacoma, Washington, dealer with a long history of “missing” firearms.

Limits on dealer inspections and penalties

Corrupt dealers will often claim that a firearm that turned up at a crime scene was lost or stolen. Absent annual inventories, ATF must rely on on-site inspections to ascertain whether a dealer has accounted for every firearm he has bought or sold. That was made more difficult by the 1986 Firearm Owners’ Protection Act, which limits ATF to a single dealer inspection per year, regardless of that dealer’s track record. ATF officially claims to have 776 "inspectors" to examine 60,000 FFLs. But as spokeswoman Ginger Colbrun explained, only about 600 officers actually conduct inspections while the remainder are administrators. In addition, those 600 officers are responsible not only for inspecting active gun dealers but explosives dealers and prospective dealers. In 2011, less than half of the inspections conducted by those 600 officers were of active retail and wholesale gun sellers. "We do the best job that we can and visit as many dealers as possible," Colbrun said, "but with the resources we have we're not going to get to every dealer every year."

In January, the agency made a presentation at the "SHOT" firearms exhibition in Las Vegas which singled out dealer inspections as a major priority and "risk assessment tool," and specifically noted that some FFLs are not inspected "for more than 5 years." An ATF official said they are currently trying to visit each dealer at least once every five years.

The NRA has complained for years that dealer inspections are a nuisance and has accused ATF of harassing honest gun dealers and revoking licenses “for insignificant technical violations.” But Andrew Molchan, the director of the 4,000 dealer National Association of Federally Licensed Gun Dealers, maintains that dealer relations with ATF have been “better in recent years.” “We don’t have the kind of ridiculous problems there used to be a lot of,” he says. That doesn’t mean dealers are happy when ATF agents pay a visit. Last year, Indiana gun dealer Charles Ludington received a four-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to selling guns to a convicted felon. Ludington came under suspicion during a routine ATF audit in which he was unable to account for 997 firearms. Investigators also found 93 guns that had not been logged in as inventory, another signature of illegal sales.

Even with inspections, closing down corrupt dealers for record violations is extremely difficult. That’s due in part to another Firearm Owners’ Protection Act provision which reduced the penalties for record keeping violations. “Even when you find blatant violations of records laws, you can no longer charge a felony,” says former ATF agent Vizzard. “And most U.S. attorneys are much too busy to be charging misdemeanors.” In 2010, the ATF inspected more than 10,500 dealers and found reporting violations had been committed by half of them. Yet only 71 dealers had their licenses revoked or were denied a renewal. Revocations can take years because of due process requirements, and dealers can remain open while they challenge revocations in the courts (see sidebar).

Restrictions on use of gun trace data

The Tiahrt amendments also barred the use of ATF trace data in administrative proceedings such as those to revoke a dealer’s license. John Feinblatt, chief policy adviser to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, said trace data is extremely useful in establishing “whether a dealer has broken the law,” and that barring its use in revocation hearings is “like having a law that says you can’t introduce DNA evidence in a rape case.” Under Tiahrt most trace data is also off limits to journalists and scholars. “You’re trying to detect a pattern,” says former ATF agent Vince. “And the idea is, let’s keep the truth and the facts from really coming out so the public can’t see what’s really going on.” In a recent report, Mayors Against Illegal Guns charged the gun lobby with “blindfolding law enforcement” by limiting access to trace data.

Several Tiahrt restrictions have been removed from the law in recent years. These include a provision that prevented state and local police from analyzing gun trafficking patterns and another that prevented law enforcement agencies from sharing ATF trace data. During his 16 years in the House, Tiahrt received $77,350 from the NRA, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. He chose to run for Senate in 2010, but was defeated in a primary.

Statutes and punishments

Legal experts and former ATF officials have long argued that the legal tools available to the agency are weak —for instance, there is no comprehensive federal firearms trafficking statute. As a result, “ATF must use a wide variety of other statutes to combat firearms trafficking,” said the Nov. 2010 Justice IG report. “However, cases brought under these statutes are difficult to prove and do not carry stringent penalties —particularly for straw purchasers of guns.”

The president’s plan to reduce gun violence recognizes that “there is no explicit law against straw purchasing, so straw purchasers and others who traffic guns can often only be prosecuted for paperwork violations.” The president has called on Congress to pass new gun trafficking laws with serious penalties —a bipartisan quartet of House members proposed such legislation last week —but the prospects for passage are far from clear, given the politics.

And so ATF agents are left with those paperwork violations. And since those don’t draw heavy sentences, the IG reported, U.S. attorneys “are less likely to accept and prosecute” these cases. A Justice Department review of straw buyer sentences between 2004 and 2009 found that they averaged only 12 months. Following complaints from several U.S. attorneys in 2011, the U.S. Sentencing Commission approved guidelines that allow judges to increase sentences for straw purchases by up to five years.

US attorneys also told the IG there were insufficient investigative and prosecutorial resources for gun trafficking cases, while ATF agents reported that they didn’t refer cases “that they assume would be rejected” by prosecutors.

ATF’s future

A White House statement on the president’s gun violence proposals says there “is no excuse for leaving the key agency enforcing gun laws in America without a leader.” Despite the burgeoning controversy over his nomination, perhaps Jones, a former Marine, will get the chance to convince the Senate that he is the right man for the job. But even with a full-time director, it is not at all clear that the ATF is up to the task of enforcing America’s gun laws — or that the agency has the tools to do so.

The NRA view is that more than enough laws are already on the books. In his post-Newtown speech, Executive VP LaPierre insisted that fully 20,000 gun laws “have failed” to protect us. And he claimed that “government has failed in enforcing...our laws against violent criminals with guns.”

Even with all its limitations, the ATF is not exactly a paper tiger. ATF investigations helped win more than 68,000 convictions between 2005 and 2010, sending more than 55,000 criminals to prison for an average of 15 years each.

Still, retired ATF agent Wachtel says federal gun laws are “toothless” and that “corrupt licensees and traffickers have little fear of discovery or meaningful punishment.” Wachtel calls U.S. gun laws “an illusion” designed to reassure the public that “we can really keep guns from falling into the wrong hands if we just check people’s records,” while at the same time “telling the industry we’re going to help you sell as many guns as you possibly can.”

In a report issued shortly before the president announced his gun plan, the Center for American Progress, a liberal advocacy group, called the ATF a “beleaguered agency that is unable to adequately fulfill its mission” and said it is “simply incapable of functioning properly as a standalone agency in its current state.” The Center called on the White House to make the ATF a unit of the FBI. “What we want,” said Winnie Stachelberg, executive vice president for external affairs and a co-author of the report, “is to see ATF moved ... to an agency that can work in the way it needs to, to reduce gun violence.”

But despite the post-Newtown atmosphere, dramatic change at ATF seems highly unlikely. When Presidents Reagan and Clinton threatened to send ATF’s functions to the FBI and Secret Service, both ATF defenders and the NRA moved decisively to prevent that from happening. President Obama has so far opted not to re-fight that battle. And it's not clear that Congress is seriously interested in giving ATF the resources and power it needs to identify and arrest gun criminals. Absent major new developments, that leaves ATF in the same handicapped state it’s been in for years. And that seems to be just the way a lot of people like it.

ATF's struggle to close down firearms dealers

2013-02-08T15:54:23-05:00

The federal agents who visited Scott Taylor’s rural Pennsylvania gun shop in early January 2010 — to conduct the store’s first inspection in more than three decades — found thousands of violations of firearm sales laws.

Taylor couldn’t properly account for more than 3,000 guns he had bought or sold during the previous three years, according to agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. These and other violations led ATF to revoke his license to sell guns in November 2011. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Far from it.

Taylor blamed the infractions on his poor health and a computer crash that wiped out his business records. The gun shop, located in the basement of his Biglerville, Pa., home, remains open 14 months later while Taylor appeals the ATF action in federal court. Taylor had no comment. His lawyer, Scott L. Braum, said the violations have been corrected and “no rational person would expect them to reoccur in the future.”

A controversial process

The ATF case against Taylor’s Trading Post — one of a dozen reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity — offers a rare look inside the federal government’s contentious and, some critics say, weak-kneed, procedure for policing gun dealers nationwide.

Some dealers don’t see an ATF inspector for eight years or more. By law, ATF can inspect dealers once a year only and may revoke a license only when it believes the dealer “willfully” violated gun control laws. Some revoked dealers have handed their business off to a relative, or stayed open while their cases lumbered through the courts. Others have converted their inventory to a “personal” collection, which they can then sell without doing background checks of prospective buyers.

As the Obama administration presses for stricter gun controls in response to the killings of 20 schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn., last December, ATF’s oversight of the gun industry — particularly its secretive dealer inspection and revocation process — faces criticism from all quarters.

The process often drags on for years after ATF inspectors discover what they consider serious violations of firearms sales laws. Dealers notified of ATF’s intent to revoke their license are entitled to an informal hearing to contest the action. Senior ATF officials review the recommendations of the hearing officer before making a final agency decision. Dealers can appeal that decision in federal courts, and ATF often doesn’t oppose allowing the dealer to remain open pending the outcome of the court appeal.

Gun control advocates argue that the program has been crippled by inadequate funding and congressional meddling and that as a result ATF can’t assure the public that gun dealers are doing their best to keep weapons out of the wrong hands. They argue that the laws favor dealers over public safety and that ATF has too few inspectors to do its job properly.

One group favoring tighter gun controls meeting at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore in January recommended that ATF be “required to provide adequate resources” for more inspections and “develop a range of sanctions for gun dealers who violate gun sales or other laws.”

Becca Knox, director of research for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, added in an email that federal law “handcuffs” ATF by “barring it from conducting more than one spot inspection a year for gun dealers, or from requiring store inventories.”

ATF criticized

By contrast, some gun-rights groups, including the National Rifle Association, have blasted ATF oversight as arbitrary and unfair — and are lobbying to make it harder for ATF to drive dealers out of business.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry’s trade association, also questions whether dealers accused of misdeeds are afforded due process in ATF revocation hearings. But the trade group stresses that it tries to work with ATF to keep dealers on the right side of the law.

“We want retailers to stay in business and assist law enforcement,” said Lawrence Keane, the foundation’s senior vice president and general counsel. He said “the vast majority of licensees take that responsibility seriously.”

ATF spokesman Mike Campbell in Washington defended the inspection process, saying, “I think ATF is doing the best job they possibly can with the resources and priorities that we have set to reduce violent crime.”

Federal law obligates licensed dealers to record all transactions so that guns connected to a crime can be traced. This means that dealers must faithfully log all “acquisitions and dispositions” by manufacturer, model, serial number, caliber and the date they bought and sold the gun and to whom.

Gun dealers, from local pawnshops to big-box retailers such as Walmart, also must submit buyers’ names for background checks to confirm they aren’t felons or other prohibited buyers, like those who have been declared mentally ill by a judge. Records must be kept on file for 20 years and be available for inspection, even if ATF agents seldom drop by to check.

An uneven record

ATF’s track record in making sure dealers follow the law is difficult to assess, because its inspection and disciplinary actions occur almost entirely behind closed doors. ATF had licensed some 65,000 firearms dealers as of fiscal 2011, when it conducted 13,159 “compliance” inspections. ATF doesn’t release detailed inspection findings for each dealer, but says about half were “in full compliance.” The most common violations are failures to record gun transactions properly. The ATF revoked 71 dealers’ licenses in 2011, but what these dealers did to warrant that penalty isn’t disclosed either. The allegations usually surface only after a dealer decides to fight the revocation in federal court, where pleadings are public record.

The dozen revocation cases reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity were all filed in, or decided by, federal courts since January 2010. Most of the dealers who sued to keep operating had been cited repeatedly for violations that could impact public safety.

One Wichita, Kan., dealer admitted selling a gun to a man who answered “yes” when the dealer asked him if he’d ever been convicted of a crime of domestic violence, among other violations. A Tennessee pawnshop had sold guns to 16 people despite “reason to believe” (from their answers to a questionnaire) that they were prohibited from buying them. A Wisconsin pawnbroker with a history of infractions allegedly sold two rifles to a “straw buyer.” A straw buyer is a person with a clean record who makes a purchase on behalf of someone who is legally prohibited from doing so.

Federal judges sided with the ATF in all three of these cases. But each case took three years or more from the discovery of the violations until the court ruled. All three dealers were repeat offenders who had been warned after previous inspections that further violations could cost them their licenses. For instance, ATF cited the Wisconsin dealer in 2004 for seven instances of selling a firearm to persons who “had indicated they were prohibited from purchasing firearms,” according to court records. In March 2007, ATF inspectors returned and found two similar cases as well as the rifle sales to straw buyers. The results of the 2007 inspection prompted the revocation order.

For the most part, dealers who take the ATF to court don’t dispute that the violations occurred. Rather, they argue that most infractions were paperwork errors or oversights, not “willful” violations that warrant revocation of a license. Three dealers cited ill health to partly explain why they fell behind in their paperwork and should be given a second chance. One Maine dealer cited by ATF for repeatedly failing to keep and locate sales records cited multiple infirmities, including ADHD, which he said made it “extremely difficult to focus and stay on task.” He lost his license.

Back in Biglerville

Taylor, the Pennsylvania dealer, said he was struggling at age 60 with diabetes and simply “overwhelmed” trying to keep up. He couldn’t produce a registry to fully account for 3,732 guns in his inventory when ATF agents inspected his shop Jan. 4, 2010 — his first inspection in more than 30 years, court records show.

After working for months to unsnarl his paperwork, agents concluded that 168 firearms were “missing.” Taylor couldn’t locate sales and acquisitions records for 2007, 2008 and 2009, either, a period when he sold or disposed of 2,856 firearms, according to court records.

In his defense, Taylor said he began entering sales data into a computer in 2004, only to see it crash and wipe out his records. At an ATF hearing in Harrisburg in August 2011, Taylor was apologetic and promised to turn things around. But he met with little sympathy from the agency.

“He didn’t stop selling guns. He continued to sell guns. In fact, he sold thousands of guns and he bought thousands of guns, but he stopped keeping records of the acquisition and disposition of those firearms despite knowing that the law required him to keep those records,” ATF attorney Kevin White argued, according to a hearing transcript.

Taylor sued in January 2012 to keep his license. He lost the first round in late December, when a federal magistrate recommended a judgment for ATF. The magistrate noted that more than 100 firearms acquired by Taylor had “disappeared without a trace,” which, he said, “presents significant potential concerns for public safety.” But Taylor’s lawyer said he is challenging the magistrate’s decision.

Taylor said he remains open and his website advertises “a full line of gunning and shooting accessories and gunsmithing to the general public.”

ATF has long faced criticism that its inspection program isn’t tough enough. In July 2004, the Justice Department inspector general reported that most dealers were being inspected “infrequently or not at all.” The report said that without regular inspections ATF “cannot effectively monitor” whether dealers are following the law. The report recommended that inspections be done at least once every three years, but the agency has not been able to meet that goal. Spokesman Campbell said ATF hopes to visit dealers once every five years.

In fiscal 2011, ATF had 776 investigators in its inspection branch.

Though ATF revoked just 71 dealers that year, about 12 percent of the more than 10,000 inspected dealers were issued “warning letters,” which indicates serious violations whose recurrence could prompt revocation.

The sloppy record keeping by some dealers may well have helped put guns on the streets. In 2007, when ATF agents reviewed about one of 10 dealers, they found 30,000 guns missing. During fiscal 2011 inspections, ATF identified nearly 177,500 “unaccounted for” firearms, which could not be located either in inventory or in sales records. The agency worked with dealers and eventually was able to account for all but 18,500 of the firearms, which the agency called a “significant threat” to public safety.

ATF critics see other major gaps in the oversight program, such as loopholes allowing some dealers to stay in business even after their licenses are revoked and they lose their court appeals.

An investigative report in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in December 2010 identified more than 50 stores in 20 states in which a revoked dealer was able to turn operations over to a relative or friend, for example.

In addition, dealers who exhaust all appeals can as a last resort convert their stock to a personal collection, which they can sell privately. U.S. Rep. David N. Cicilline, D-R.I., has filed a bill to end this “fire sale loophole.”

“Closing the fire sale loophole is a commonsense first step Congress should undertake in order to prevent guns from getting in the hands of criminals and the seriously mentally ill,” Cicilline said in a statement.” It’s not at all clear, though, how much support the bill has in Congress.

‘Wildly one-sided’

Some in the gun industry remain deeply suspicious of ATF and strongly oppose granting it more power. They argue that petty violations can result in dealers’ undeservedly facing a revocation hearing and that ATF needs to follow proper legal procedures to protect dealers’ rights.

Christopher M. Chiafullo, a New York attorney whose firm defends gun dealers at revocation hearings, calls the process “wildly one-sided” and argues that it “makes a mockery of the legal system.” He said dealers cited for violations aren’t given a chance to settle or accept probation, only revocation. Their only recourse, he said, is to file suit in federal court to overturn a decision by ATF, but these cases are often unsuccessful.

The Justice Department in February of 2012 published draft regulations that it hoped would clarify the inspection program by guaranteeing dealers the right to submit “facts, arguments, offers of settlement, or proposals of adjustment for review and consideration.”

The Justice Department is expected to act on the regulation, which the NRA has soundly criticized, in June.

Christopher A. Conte, the NRA’s legislative counsel, in a May 3, 2012, letter to ATF said that the current system for revoking the licenses of dealers is “directly contrary to what Congress intended for these hearings.”

He argued that dealers are entitled to “formal proceedings where the agency has the burden of proof, where the evidence offered must be reliable, probative, and substantial, and where the applicant may present evidence and conduct cross-examination of the agency’s witnesses.”

In the past, the NRA has unsuccessfully supported congressional bills that would rewrite the licensing law so that ATF could levy fines and other penalties short of revocation. The NRA argues that changes in the law are necessary to prevent what it says are “all-too-common situations” in which ATF has revoked a dealer’s license for “insignificant technical violations.”

House votes to hold attorney general in contempt

Arizona,United States — 2012-06-28T17:36:01-04:00

WASHINGTON — The House on Thursday held Attorney General Eric Holder in criminal contempt of Congress for failing to provide documents related to a failed gun-tracking operation. It is the first time a sitting Cabinet member has been held in contempt.

The vote was 255-67, with more than 100 Democrats boycotting. They said the contempt resolution was a political stunt.

African-American lawmakers led the walkout as members filed up the aisle and out of the chamber to protest the action against Holder, who is the nation's first black attorney general. Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California joined the boycott, saying Republicans had gone "over the edge" in their partisanship.

Seventeen Democrats voted with Republicans in favor of the contempt vote, while two Republicans — Reps. Scott Rigell of Virginia and Steven LaTourette of Ohio — joined other Democrats in voting No.

The National Rifle Association pressed hard for the contempt resolution, leaning on members of both parties who want to stay in the NRA's good graces. Attorney General Eric Holder said afterward the vote was merely a politically motivated act in an election year

Republicans cited Holder's refusal to hand over — without any preconditions — documents that could explain why the Obama administration initially denied that a risky "gun-walking" investigative tactic was used in Operation Fast and Furious, which allowed hundreds of guns to be smuggled from Arizona to Mexico.

The vote on a criminal contempt resolution sent the matter to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who is under Holder. A separate vote on civil contempt will allow the House to go to court in an effort to force Holder to turn over the documents.

In past cases, courts have been reluctant to settle disputes between the executive and legislative branches of government.

During the debate before the vote, Republicans said they were seeking answers for the Michigan family of Brian Terry, a Border Patrol agent killed in December 2010 in a shootout with Mexican bandits. Two guns from Fast and Furious were found at the scene.

Democrats insisted that they, too, wanted the Terry family to have all the facts, but argued that only a more thorough, bipartisan investigation would accomplish that.

The NRA urged House members to vote for contempt, contending the administration wanted to use Operation Fast and Furious to win gun control measures. Democrats who normally support the NRA but who vote against the contempt citations would lose any 100 percent ratings from the group.

That could affect whether they get endorsements from the powerful organization, particularly if Republican opponents surface who are strong NRA backers. But a former NRA board member and the longest-serving House member, Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, argued gun control was not at issue. He failed in attempt to head off the contempt votes.

The Congressional Black Caucus, explaining its boycott, said in a letter to the House that "Contempt power should be used sparingly, carefully and only in the most egregious situations" and the GOP leadership had "articulated no legislative purpose for pursuing this course of action."

The dispute is both legal and political. Republicans asserted their right to obtain documents needed for an investigation of Operation Fast and Furious — focusing on 10 months in 2011 after the Obama administration initially denied guns were allowed to "walk" from Arizona to Mexico. By year's end, the administration acknowledged the assertion was wrong.

President Barack Obama asserted a broad form of executive privilege, a legal position designed to keep executive branch documents from being disclosed. The assertion ensures that documents will not be turned over any time soon, unless a deal is reached between the administration and congressional Republicans.

In the debate, Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., said the contempt motions were "Fast and foolish, fast and fake."

Rep. Rich Nugent, R-Fla., took the opposite view, arguing, "A man died serving his country, and we have a right to know what the federal government's hand was in that."

For the past year and a half, some Republicans have promoted the idea that Holder and other top-level officials at the Justice Department knew federal agents in Operation Fast and Furious had engaged in gun-walking.

Two of Holder's emails and one from Deputy Attorney General James Cole in early 2011 appear to show that they hadn't known about gun-walking but were determined to find out whether the allegations were true.

"We need answers on this," Holder wrote. "Not defensive BS. Real answers."

The Justice Department showed the selected emails on Tuesday to Republican and Democratic staffers of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, in an effort to ward off the criminal contempt vote against the attorney general.

The full contents of the emails were described to The Associated Press by two people who have seen them. Both people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about them publicly.

In Operation Fast and Furious, agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives abandoned the agency's usual practice of intercepting all weapons they believed to be illicitly purchased. Instead, the goal of "gun-walking" was to track such weapons to high-level arms traffickers who had eluded prosecution and to dismantle their networks.

Gun-walking long has been barred by Justice Department policy, but federal agents in Arizona experimented with it in at least two investigations during the George W. Bush administration before Operation Fast and Furious. The agents in Arizona lost track of several hundred weapons in that operation.

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.

Attorney General Holder, Issa square off over Fast and Furious documents

2012-02-02T10:48:25-05:00

Attorney General Eric Holder and a House chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, have squared off over the Justice Department's flawed gun-smuggling probe.

Issa, R-Calif., is demanding the department turn over documents about how it handled congressional inquiries after problems with Operation Fast and Furious came to light.

At the start of Thursday's hearing, Issa said the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will do what is necessary to force the Justice Department to produce the information.

The attorney general says he will consider Issa's demand.

Issa has threatened a contempt of Congress ruling against Holder for failing to turn over the congressionally subpoenaed documents. The lawmaker alleges the Justice Department is engaging in a cover-up.

The Justice Department on Wednesday rejected an assertion by a House committee chairman that top Justice officials are covering up events surrounding a flawed gun-smuggling probe, Operation Fast and Furious.

Rep. Issa made the accusation in a letter threatening to seek a contempt of Congress ruling against Attorney General Eric Holder for failing to turn over congressionally subpoenaed documents that were created after problems with Fast and Furious came to light.

In Fast and Furious, agents lost track of about 1,400 weapons they were tracking after they were sold to low-level straw purchasers believed to be supplying Mexican drug gangs and other criminals. Another 700 firearms connected to suspects in the investigation have been recovered, some from crime scenes in Mexico and the U.S., including a murder scene in Nogales, Ariz., where border agent Brian Terry was slain.

Issa's allegation was fueled by documents turned over Friday night by the Justice Department that contained new information about the events of early February, 2011.

Two days before Justice told Congress that federal agents made every effort to intercept illegally purchased weapons, the department's criminal division chief, Lanny Breuer, was suggesting letting some illicit "straw" weapons buyers in the U.S. transport their guns across the Mexican border where Mexican law enforcement could arrest them.

According to emails turned over to the committee, Breuer made the suggestion to Mexican officials because it "may send a strong message to arms traffickers" because Mexican laws contain far stiffer penalties against straw gun buyers than U.S. laws do.

Responding Wednesday to Issa, Deputy Attorney General James Cole said it is neither fair nor accurate to equate Breuer's suggestion to the risky "gun-walking" that the Phoenix division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed to take place in several gun-smuggling investigations that dated back to 2006 when Republican George W. Bush was president.

"In light of Assistant Attorney General Breuer's commitment to stemming the flow of guns from the United States into Mexico and his strong ties and collaborative relationships with his counterparts in Mexico, it is inconceivable that his intention was to have guns released into Mexico," Cole wrote.

By Associated Press writer Pete Yost.

Fast and Furious hearing: Holder defends Assistant Attorney General Breuer

2011-11-17T08:30:17-05:00

Attorney General Eric Holder faced sharp questions from congressional Republicans Tuesday about a controversial gun-trafficking case that was the subject of an iWatch News investigation this spring. But Holder firmly rebuffed requests to oust a Justice Department official involved in overseeing the case.

The venue for these pointed exchanges was a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about “Operation Fast and Furious,” an ill-conceived anti-gun-trafficking probe conducted by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). The gun investigation allowed thousands of weapons to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

As the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News reported in March, federal prosecutors and the ATF permitted some 2,000 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. The bureau had previously been criticized for focusing on lowly straw buyers rather than high-level traffickers.

ATF officials were hoping to follow the guns in hopes of making cases against higher-level traffickers. The decision was met by strong objections from some front-line agents who feared they were allowing military-style weapons to “walk” into the hands of drug lords and gun runners, internal agency memos show.

Some of the sharpest disagreements at the hearing involved Lanny Breuer, the head of the Department of Justice criminal division, whose comments about the case have proved controversial. Holder pointedly declined requests from Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, the panel’s ranking Republican, that Breuer be asked to resign.

The attorney general also politely refused to disclose documents that could reveal when Breuer first learned about the unorthodox gun-tracking tactics used by the ATF in both Fast and Furious and “Wide Receiver,” a recently revealed predecessor program that began during the Bush administration.

Assistant Attorney General Breuer told a Senate judiciary subcommittee last week that he found out in 2010 that federal agents had allowed guns to flow illegally onto U.S. streets and into Mexico between 2006 and 2007. This tactic, known as “gun walking,’’ was also a key part of Fast and Furious, the Obama administration gun-trafficking program that is under investigation by Republican lawmakers and the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Breuer’s admission contradicted a Feb. 4 letter to congressional investigators. “The letter could have been better crafted,” Holder said. “I regret that,” he added, but did not offer any further information.

“Why would you risk contempt of Congress to prevent us from finding out who reviewed the drafts of that letter and whether they knew that they contained false statements?” the Iowa Republican asked.

“We will certainly try to work with you and try to provide you with all the relevant information we can,” said Holder.

Grassley had privately expressed his concerns to Holder about internal Justice talking points regarding the ATF whistleblower that were leaked to the press. Holder bristled when the senator asked him to name and shame the DOJ officials responsible for attempting to smear the former ATF agent.

“As you said, we had a ‘private conversation,’” he said. “In a different time in Washington, I’m not sure that what you just said would have been shared with everyone here.” Holder said leaks from the agency are being reviewed and he is “not in a position to comment on ongoing investigations.”

Democrats and Holder used the hearing to press the case for stronger laws to prevent gun trafficking. “Fast and Furious was a flawed response to, not the cause of, the flow of illegal guns,” the attorney general said in his prepared remarks. He urged “congressional leaders to work with us to provide ATF with the resources and statutory tools it needs to be effective.”

iWatch News reported in April that authorities feel they are handcuffed in their efforts by a lack of resources and an absence of statutes to outlaw gun trafficking.

Lone wolves and home-grown terrorists: Experts warn of a growing threat from unusual sources

United States — 2012-08-22T08:03:42-04:00

As the United States commemorated the 10^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, terrorism experts stepped up warnings that authorities must look beyond the usual sources of terror, to the lone wolves stirring with anger and seeking out big-impact weapons.

Isolated and underestimated, lone wolves might go unnoticed even as they try to get chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons – collectively known as CBRN – that can spread terror and spark psychological chaos.

Anders Breivik is the latest of the lone wolves and a point of concern among terrorism experts. His devastating attack in Norway in July spurred researchers to mine his 1,500-page treatise in search of evidence that unconventional, free-agent terrorists may now have greater potential to inflict damage and ignite panic.

Breivik’s manifesto was more than just the ramblings of a lone nut.

“Dismissing Breivik’s “[weapons of mass destruction] idea” as unrealistic is dangerous and overlooks important nuances that give his warnings about greater weapons added validity. Moreover, his writings might spur other extremists, according to a little-noticed report from the Washington, D.C.-based Federation of American Scientists.

Acknowledging the threat

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, in an interview on ABC News last week, said one of the biggest challenges she had seen as DHS secretary, “is movement toward the home-grown violent extremist. The person who, for whatever reason, decides to attack his fellow citizens,

She warned citizens to be vigilant of “the lone actor that we may not know about, who may already be in the United States and so it requires us to be vigilant and the public be vigilant.”

Adding to that official urgency is a sense among terrorism experts that the path to destructive weapons is easier.

“It is not that difficult to acquire radiological materials. There are different ways people would disseminate them. The most likely way is to mixing them into conventional explosive devices to cause further damage,” said Dr. Jeffrey M. Bale, of the Graduate School of International Policy and Management at the Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS).

Bale, who directs the Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program, said attacks with unconventional weapons are not likely to cause massive causalities. Instead they’re supposed to deliver disproportionate psychological impact.

“An attack with chemical agents that kill only twenty people will probably have as much or more psychological impact as a conventional explosive which kills two hundred people because the lay public does not know much about their capabilities and qualities,” he said.

Charles Blair, director of the Terrorism Analysis Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said that, for example, the public often confuses a radiological device, a so-called “dirty bomb,” with a nuclear explosive. Extremist groups and individuals are significantly less able to acquire the latter.

“Of all CBRN attacks, a low-level radiological is the most likely,” Blair said., “These are weapons of mass disruption which cause great panic, psychological impact and economic impasse …

“The threat that comes from the within is the scariest. The insider threat is a topic that nobody still wants to talk about,” added Blair, cautioning that he believes there has yet to be a candid, public discussion in the national security community about domestic terrorist threats.

In a January 2011 story on iWatchnews.org, House Speaker John Boehner pushed the Department of Homeland Security to back away from a report that noted a rise in right-wing violence which could motivate "lone wolves."

And the White House, to avoid offending the Muslim community, has opted for the general term “violent extremism” to describe the threat of Islamic radicalization.

“The administration is understandably apprehensive about identifying Islamist extremism as the primary extremist threat to the United States for fear that the broader Muslim community will take offense,” said terrorism expert Jonathan Kennedy.

New sources of terror

The dimensions of internal threats have diversified in the recent times.

Peter Boogaard, the deputy press secretary at the Office of Public Affairs of the US Department of Homeland Security, said that a decade after 9/11, America is “stronger and more resilient … ” but that threats persist:

Homegrown Islamist terrorism remains a threat.

And in the past few years, al Qaida and its affiliates have become more effective at recruiting and radicalizing would-be terrorists.

So far the United States’ growing counterterrorism capacity has led to arrests and a thwarting of planned attacks, like the failed car-bomb incident in New York this summer.

But Jeffery Bale of the Monterey Institute warned that “Terrorists have to succeed only once but we have to succeed 100% of the time. There will be future terrorist attacks inside the United States. But the question is how successful and frequent these attacks will be.”

New tools for terror

The Internet has become a powerful recruiting, fundraising and planning tool for terrorists -- and a monitoring and investigative measure for law enforcement and governments.

“I think many people would be surprised to learn about the range and diversity of terrorist and extremist groups operating in the United States,” Kenney said. Terrorism experts propose “major focus of efforts” to track down unusual suspects.

"Perpetrators of terrorist violence increasingly rely on the internet for recruitment and planning purposes. As the internet and related technologies evolve, the instrumental power of the internet – for fundraising, recruitment, financial transactions, and so on – expands and diversifies,” Kennedy added.

Two areas of concern for terrorism experts are the lack of public awareness and what they say is “mediocre” research on the subject.

“In the United States, public awareness of terrorism is mostly limited to Islamist terrorism,” said Kennedy, who consults with government agencies on terrorism. “I don’t think the average person in the United States would know that Colombia is a country with one of the highest rates of terrorism in the world.”

Charles Blair of FAS recalled that months before 9/11, a television show called the Lone Gunman featured a plane crashing into New York’s World Trade Center. Similarly, the teens behind the Columbine Massacre in 1999 had included in their planning a plane crashing into the twin towers.

“People tend to ignore terrorism warnings. They frantically scream saying they were not expecting an attack when it has already struck,” Blair said.