Operation Fast and Furious: ATF Scandal and DOJ Failures

Introduction: A Justice Department Scandal

Operation Fast and Furious has turned out to be one of the Justice Department's biggest scandals in recent years — not only because of the seemingly obvious problems involved in allowing known members of violent drug cartels to buy military-grade weapons and carry them across the U.S.-Mexico border unimpeded, but also because of the way in which the program, and the public fallout following its discovery, were handled by the officials who were aware of it. In particular, since the full extent of the program was first revealed, Attorney General Eric Holder provided seemingly inconsistent accounts of when and to what extent he was aware of the operation, leading members of Congress to push for a more thorough investigation. Examining the flaws in Operation Fast and Furious itself, as well as the failure of leadership within the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) and the Justice Department more broadly, reveals how such an obviously dangerous and unaccountable program was able to begin in the first place — and why it may turn out to be one of the defining issues of this Justice Department.

Background: Project Gunrunner and Southwest Border Gun Trafficking

Before discussing the fallout from Operation Fast and Furious, it is useful to provide a history of the program and the key events that led to its discovery and subsequent disavowal. Operation Fast and Furious was actually part of a larger initiative called Project Gunrunner, which had been in existence since 2005 and constituted the ATF's central "efforts in recent years to suppress illegal gun trafficking across the southwest border" (Chu & Krouse 13). Project Gunrunner was given special importance because "in the U.S. Department of Justice's National Drug Threat Assessment 2009, Mexican drug trafficking organizations were identified as the greatest organized crime and drug trafficking threat to the United States worldwide." Following Mexican President Felipe Calderón's decision to make "combating drug cartels and drug violence a top priority of his administration," cartel enforcers reportedly began buying semiautomatic versions of AK-47 and AR-15 style assault rifles and other military-style firearms — including .50 caliber sniper rifles — in the United States, where all of these weapons are legal and many can be obtained without special licensing or background checks (Chu & Krouse 1).

The availability of these military-style weapons has meant that "the cartels are achieving parity in terms of firepower with the Mexican army and law enforcement," and a look at statistics surrounding seized guns shows just how fully the United States has contributed to that firepower parity. According to a 2009 report to Congress, "although only a fraction of recovered firearms found in Mexico are submitted for tracing, approximately 87% of traced firearms were determined to have originated in the United States," with the Mexican government estimating "that 2,000 firearms are smuggled across the Southwest border daily" (Chu & Krouse 2). This process of buying guns in the United States and bringing them to Mexico has not only allowed cartels to match the Mexican military and police, but it has also been widely profitable, contributing income — on top of drug and human trafficking revenues — with "profit margins that in the past have typically ranged between 300% and 500%" (Chu & Krouse 2).

It is worth noting that this gun trafficking is a direct result of U.S. gun laws, in many of the same ways that U.S. drug laws are ultimately responsible for the continued success of the cartels — a dynamic which can be summarized in "the Southwest border paradigm: drugs and illegal migrants flow north, guns and money flow south" (Chu & Krouse 2). The dramatic increase in the number and destructive potential of weapons flowing from the United States into Mexico over the last decade, which ultimately precipitated the instigation of Operation Fast and Furious, is undeniably a consequence of the United States' lax gun laws. As Chu and Krouse observe, "the gun trafficking issue between Mexico and the United States is analogous to the 'crime gun' trafficking issue that has arisen among states within the United States," where states with strict gun laws often view states with lax gun laws "as the source of many crime guns and, hence, gun-related crimes" (2–3). This is further demonstrated by the fact that although Mexican cartels represent the most pervasive border threat, the problem is not limited to the Southwest, because "the cross-border flow of illegal firearms has also been an issue for Canada, because Canadian gun laws are also generally much stricter than U.S. gun laws" (Chu & Krouse 3).

Recognizing this factor provides important context for understanding Operation Fast and Furious: federal agencies had a difficult time stemming the illegal flow of guns across the border precisely because those guns are entirely legal within the United States. While this does not justify the decision-making process by which thousands of guns were essentially lost to the cartels, it does explain why federal agents may have believed it more beneficial to track guns rather than attempt to prohibit their purchase or sale.

Project Gunrunner had been gradually increasing in scope and financial support since 2005, so that by 2009, Congress had brought "total funding for Southwest border firearms trafficking to $61 million," including some $10 million from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Chu & Krouse 14). This money helped the ATF open new field offices and assign additional staff to the project, but even with this influx of resources the agency had seemingly not dented the cartels' ability to purchase and traffic military-grade firearms. For example, against the estimated 2,000 guns being smuggled into Mexico daily, in all of 2007 "ATF agents investigated 187 firearms trafficking cases and recommended 465 defendants for prosecution" — and this was before the agency began allowing weapons to walk (Chu & Krouse 13).

How Operation Fast and Furious Worked

The difficult task the ATF was charged with — stopping the flow of weapons from a country that intentionally and explicitly makes it easy to buy guns — likely contributed to its decision to institute Operation Fast and Furious and similar operations, such as "Operation Wide Receiver," because there was simply no way the agency could keep up with the thousands of firearms dealers it was responsible for monitoring. In most cases, weapons are obtained by "straw purchasers": individuals legally permitted to buy weapons who are actually purchasing them on behalf of someone who would otherwise be ineligible. In the case of weapons flowing into Mexico, "routine, small-scale smuggling of guns across the border often involves a series of straw purchases, during which guns are purchased from federal firearms licensees (FFLs) in border states and then sold to a middle man, who then smuggles the guns across the border," often by making "repeated trips across the border of one to three guns, referred to in border parlance as the ant (hormiga) run" (Chu & Krouse 10).

Although straw purchases are technically illegal, it remains difficult to determine whether an individual is conducting one without serious surveillance — once again due to the United States' relaxed gun laws. Although FFLs are required "to report to the Attorney General whenever they transferred more than one handgun to any nonlicensee within five consecutive business days," those records may not be kept for more than twenty days, and an individual purchasing guns at least five days apart would not even arouse suspicion in the first place (Chu & Krouse).

Understanding this background is important because, although the difficulty of stopping gun trafficking does not justify the failures of leadership and accountability seen in Operation Fast and Furious, it does at least allow one to appreciate both the scope of the problem and the ways in which law enforcement was hindered from stemming the flow of guns through more direct means. Although Project Gunrunner began gaining real traction in 2006, available evidence suggests that Operation Fast and Furious did not begin until sometime in 2009, though similar programs had existed previously (Cochran 2011). The operation focused on suspected straw purchasers but, rather than attempt to stop purchases before they happened or arrest purchasers afterward, the ATF let the guns "walk" — allowing straw purchasers to resell the weapons in hopes of tracing them to their ultimate source and setting up a larger bust. Over the course of about a year, "in total, some 1,725 weapons appear to have been involved," subsequently showing up in both the United States and Mexico (Cochran 2011).

Conclusion: Lessons and Ongoing Consequences

Operation Fast and Furious was a failure by any metric, but perhaps where it failed most profoundly was in living up to the public's expectations regarding the professionalism and competency of the United States' law enforcement and criminal justice apparatus. The failure of Operation Fast and Furious was not a convoluted policy error but rather an essential mistake: providing guns to people who, given the program's ostensible goal, should never have received them. Even the underlying tactic was not inherently beyond the pale; what was inexcusable was that once guns started to go missing, the ATF did not halt the program immediately — particularly given that similar problems had already occurred with the earlier Operation Wide Receiver. The program's failure thus stemmed from a decision to keep letting guns disappear, a decision rooted in the frustrating looseness of American gun laws combined with a genuine lack of oversight and accountability.

The ongoing investigations will undoubtedly yield a more complete accounting of what went wrong. But based on the testimonies of Attorney General Eric Holder, former ATF chief Kenneth Melson, and former Justice Department official Lanny Breuer, there appears to have been little if any meaningful inter-agency cooperation or communication. Problems and criticisms never made it up the chain of command, and high-level officials were seemingly never informed of the activities of lower-level agents and offices — even when those activities proved problematic and years of evidence had accumulated. Gun trafficking on the Southwest border remains a serious and unresolved issue, and one can only hope that the ultimately deadly experience of Operation Fast and Furious, and the political fallout that followed, will provide sufficient motivation for both a reevaluation of the country's gun laws and a reorganization of its criminal justice and law enforcement apparatus.

Works Cited

Chu, Vivian, and William Krouse. Gun Trafficking and the Southwest Border. Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2009.

Cochran, Sylvia. "Timeline of Ill-Fated Gun Smuggling 'Operation Fast and Furious.'" Yahoo News. Yahoo, 27 Oct. 2011. Web. 22 Nov. 2011.

Decker, Sue, and Phil Mattingly. "Issa Says Holder Not Telling All on 'Fast and Furious' Probe." BusinessWeek. Bloomberg, 16 Oct. 2011. Web. 22 Nov. 2011.

de la Isla, Jose. "'Fast and Furious' Gun Tracking Operation is Slow and Dithering." La Prensa San Diego: 1.

Nunez Neumann, Rita. Close Encounters in New Mexico. XLibris Corporation, 2011.

Savage, Charlie. "Documents Reveal Reactions to Disputed A.T.F. Investigations in Arizona." New York Times. New York Times Co., 31 Oct. 2011. Web. 22 Nov. 2011.