Multiple sources, including sources from ATF, DOJ and Congressional offices have said there is a white paper circulating within the Department of Justice, outlining the essential elimination of ATF. According to sources, the paper outlines the firing of at least 450 ATF agents in an effort to conduct damage control as Operation Fast and Furious gets uglier and as election day 2012 gets closer. ATF agents wouldn’t be reassigned to other positions, just simply let go. Current duties of ATF, including the enforcement of explosives and gun laws, would be transferred to other agencies, possibly the FBI and the DEA. >>>
After a town hall meeting about Operation Fast and Furious in Tucson, Ariz. on Monday, ATF Whistleblower Vince Cefalu, who has been key in exposing details about Operation Fast and Furious, confirmed the elimination of ATF has been circulating as a serious idea for sometime now and that a white paper outlining the plan does exist. >>>
“Allowing loads of weapons that we knew to be destined for criminals, this was the plan. It was so mandated,†ATF Whistleblower John Dodson said in testimony on Capitol Hill on June 15, 2011.
In fact, not only were the ATF agents forced to carry out the operation, they were told to go against what they had been taught in training.
I don't see it happening either. If the agents are cut, then they will be free to tell their story.
...And if this is their idea of a brilliant damage control strategy, they have not thought through what's going to happen when 450 ATF agents get dumped on the street and have nothing at stake in protecting anyone in DOJ anymore, and probably an attitude about their former employer to boot.
Oh there's no saying whether they've thought it through or not, particularly if their management logic resembles the same logic they apply to economic theory:
The joke goes that anything named “Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms†ought to be a convenience store instead of an arm of the federal government, but what’s going on in Washington these days with the embattled agency is no laughing matter.
Hardly a week passes now without some revelation about the Obama administration’s complicity in what may yet turn out to be one of the worst and most lethal scandals in American history: Operation Fast and Furious.
In a classic Friday document dump -- a sure sign of an administration with something to hide -- the feds released to congressional investigators a month’s worth of e-mail correspondence in the summer of 2010 between Bill Newell, then head ATF agent in Phoenix, and his friend Kevin O’Reilly, a former White House national-security staffer for North American affairs.
What do you know? Among the e-mails was a photograph of a powerful Barrett .50-caliber rifle that had been illegally purchased in Tucson and recovered in Sonora, Mexico, raising the possibility of a second “gunwalking†program, this one called “Wide Receiver.â€
Like Fast and Furious, the ATF-supervised scheme that saw thousands of weapons “walk†across the Mexican border for reasons no one in the Justice Department has yet satisfactorily explained, Wide Receiver was apparently a joint operation that also included the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the IRS and the US Attorney’s office.