***Click here for the Styers memo Grassley references below.***
For almost 11 months now I have been investigating Fast and Furious, an operation of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
On December 2nd, the Justice Department finally came clean about who helped draft its February 4 letter to Congress. That letter falsely denied ATF whistleblower allegations that ATF walked guns. The revelations in the December 2nd documents were the last straw for me. I called for Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer to step down. I don’t do that lightly.
Earlier documents had already shown that Mr. Breuer displayed a stunning lack of judgment in failing to respond adequately when told guns were walked in Operation Wide Receiver, a 2006-2007 case. The December 2nd documents showed the Mr. Breuer was far more informed during the drafting of the February 4 letter than he admitted before the Judiciary Committee just one month earlier.
These two issues led me to call for the resignation of Mr. Breuer, the highest-ranking official in the Justice Department who knew about gunwalking in Operation Wide Receiver.
The December 2nd documents also establish a number of other key points.
The first is that the Justice Department has a flawed process for responding to letters from Congress that involve whistleblowers. In the cover letter that accompanied the documents, the Justice Department wrote that in drafting their February 4 response:
“Department personnel…relied on information provided by supervisors from the components in the best position to know the relevant facts…”
Clearly, the Justice Department did not rely on those in the best position to know the facts, since the letter was “withdrawn” on December 2nd due to its inaccuracies.
The whistleblowers were in the best position to know the facts.
Frontline personnel were in the best position to know the facts, not senior bureaucrats and political appointees. Yet, the Department failed to provide credible process for whistleblowers and other frontline personnel to provide information without fear of retaliation.
Employees simply do not believe they are free to report misconduct because they see what happens to those who speak out. They know it’s a career killer because the ATF and the Justice Department culture protect those who retaliate against whistleblowers. Yet, the whistleblowers in this case spoke out anyway. They risked their careers to make sure the truth was known.
But, when the Office of Legislative Affairs sought information to respond to my inquires, it didn’t ask those brave whistleblowers what happened. Instead, it simply relied on the self-serving denials of the senior officials at ATF headquarters, the Criminal Division here in D.C., and the U.S. Attorney’s in Arizona.
In other words, the department took the word of the very officials the whistleblowers alleged had mismanaged the situation in the first place—without getting both sides of the story.
The U.S. attorney has since admitted in testimony to Congressional investigators that he was too strident when he first heard these accusations. He claimed he didn’t know all of the facts.
You can’t rely on the chain of command when you have a whistleblower. By definition, whistleblowers emerge because the chain of command is broken. Whistleblowers come to Congress because they are unsuccessful in getting their supervisors to address fraud, waste, or abuse. Sometimes those supervisors attempt to cover the tracks, or paper over the problem. That’s why you have to get the story straight from the horse’s mouth.
You can’t let the facts be filtered through multiple layers of bureaucracy. After all, the bureaucracy is filled with the same supervisors who should have done something about the problem in the first place, before a whistleblower came forward.
These problems are particularly prevalent in a federal government that is so large, it is virtually impossible for anyone to ever be held accountable for anything. So, it is crucial that those investigating whistleblower allegations go straight to those on the ground level with firsthand knowledge of the facts. Their goal should be to understand the underlying facts of the whistleblower allegations—not to intimidate them into silence. Instead, inquiries all too often focus on the whistleblowers themselves, and what skeletons they have in their closet.
That approach is exactly what is wrong with the federal government.
The focus should be on whether the accusations are true so that any problems can be corrected. Too often, however, the focus is on finding out what information the whistleblower disclosed so that the agency can circle the wagons and build a defense.
That needs to change. If the department is going to regain its credibility, it needs to provide straight answers, not talking points and spin. The only way to provide straight answers is to make sure you get straight answers in the first place. That’s one reason we have pushed in our investigation to be able to interview front line personnel. The Justice Department objected in a letter Tuesday night. In that letter, the Justice Department also objected to us talking to first- or second-level supervisors. This is exactly the sort of approach that prevents key information from getting to senior officials and to Congress. Justice cites the so-called “line personnel” policy for refusing to provide officials for voluntary interviews. However, the policy is based purely on nothing but the department’s own preferences.
It is not found in any statute. It is not grounded in any case law.
The Department has frequently set aside the policy or made exceptions in the past. For example, line attorneys gave transcribed interviews under oath to Congress in the 1992 Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility investigation. As recently as October, Assistant U.S. Attorney Rachel Lieber, the line attorney responsible for the anthrax investigations participated in an interview with PBS’s Frontline.
How can the Justice Department argue Congress should not be allowed access to line attorneys when they give that kind of access to the press?
Those kinds of line personnel are the individuals who have the actual answers. In this case, had the Justice Department gone to the horse’s mouth before sending an inaccurate letter to me on February 4, they would have been able to get the story straight.
This memo (Styers Memo) is from an ATF line agent who substantiated the claims of the first ATF whistleblower. I ask unanimous consent that a copy be placed in the record immediately after my remarks.
It is dated February 3, 2011—the day before the Justice Department sent their letter to me.
The memo was passed up his chain in response to investigators on my staff talking to him about Operation Fast and Furious. He accurately described the problems with Fast and Furious. What he said was consistent with the claims I had already heard from other whistleblowers. Information like this is why I was skeptical days later when the Department sent its February 4 letter to me denying the allegations.
The agent wrote in the memo about being ordered by the Fast and Furious case agent to hold back in their surveillance so they didn’t “burn the operation.” While watching straw purchasers hand off weapons to traffickers, the case agent “told all the agents to leave the immediate area.” The memo explicitly says: “The transaction between the suspects took place and the vehicle that took possession of the firearms eventually left the area without agents following it.”
After the phone call with my staff, the ATF agent’s supervisors requested that he write this memo documenting what he had told my investigators. It was passed up the chain all the way to ATF leadership. We know that because there are emails attaching the memo sent to senior headquarters officials. However, the Justice Department has refused to provide copies of those emails and will only allow them to be reviewed at Justice Department headquarters.
The department has also refused to provide a copy of this memo. My staff had to obtain it from confidential sources. One of the questions yet to be answered is who in the Justice Department saw the memo and when. Either way, once the Justice Department got ahold of it, they tried to keep it under wraps by refusing to give us a copy. They made my staff go to the Justice Department to view it, even though the entire memo simply recounts information that was already provided to my staff.
It’s just embarrassing to the department because it shows that the truth was easily knowable before that false denial was sent to Congress. If they’d asked for firsthand documentation like this memo when they first got my letter in January, we wouldn’t be where we are today.
A second point these documents establish is that Main Justice had problems of its own.
It wasn’t all the fault of ATF and the U.S. attorney: Mr. Breuer’s deputy, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jason Weinstein, participated in drafting a false statement.
The Justice Department’s February 4 letter read:
“ATF makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation to Mexico.”
Documents show that that line originated in a phone conversation on February 1, 2011 between Justice Department Legislative Affairs; Assistant Director Billy Hoover, from ATF; and Jason Weinstein, from Main Justice’s Criminal Division. Like Assistant Attorney General Breuer, Mr. Weinstein knew that ATF had let hundreds of weapons walk in Operation Wide Receiver, which was an earlier, smaller-scale case than Fast and Furious.
In fact, in April 2010, he brought that fact to the attention of Mr. Breuer, his boss.
His email to Mr. Breuer about Wide Receiver said:
“As you’ll recall from Jim’s briefing, ATF let a bunch of guns walk in effort to get upstream conspirators but only got straws, and didn’t recover many guns. Some were recovered in [Mexico] after being used in crimes.”
It’s ironic that that’s how Mr. Weinstein described Wide Receiver. He was one of the officials who authorized wiretaps in Fast and Furious. Therefore, he was in the position to know that exact same description applied to Fast and Furious. Yet he allowed the myth to be perpetuated that ATF would never do such a thing.
Mr. Weinstein saw the Justice Department’s very first draft of the letter to Congress. In fact, as one of his Justice Department colleagues in the Deputy Attorney General’s office said: “CRM [which is the Criminal Division] and OLA [which is the Office of Legislative Affairs] … basically drafted it…”
Mr. Weinstein knew the letter contained a blatantly false line. Yet he did nothing to correct it, and that line thus remained in every successive draft of the letter.
On December 2nd, the Justice Department’s latest spin was that its statement that “ATF makes every effort to interdict weapons” was “aspirational.” Nevertheless, that didn’t stop them from withdrawing the letter for inaccuracies. Perhaps the aspirational language should be saved for mission statements. Responses to specific and serious allegations should stick to the facts.
This was an oversight letter.
I was not asking for a feel-good, fuzzy message about what the ATF aspires to. I was asking for the facts. A U.S. Border Patrol agent had died. His death was connected to an ATF operation. Whistleblowers were reaching outside of the chain of command because supervisors wouldn’t listen. Instead of treating these allegations with the kind of seriousness they deserved, the Justice Department resorted to damage control.
Now I don’t know what else my investigation is going to uncover.
Just this week, the investigation revealed that shortly after the February 4 letter, Lanny Breuer asked Mr. Weinstein to write up an analytical memo of Fast and Furious.
This suggests that Mr. Breuer and his deputy, Mr. Weinstein, were down in the weeds on Operation Fast and Furious a lot earlier than previously admitted.
Mr. Weinstein was in an excellent position to write such a memo, since Mr. Breuer has acknowledged that Mr. Weinstein was one of the individuals who approved wiretaps in the summer of 2010 as part of Operation Fast and Furious.
However, we had to learn of this memo from sources other than the Justice Department. The Justice Department has not provided it to us, even though it is clearly responsive to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s October 25 subpoena. This type of maneuvering is what got the Justice Department in trouble to begin with. The Justice Department should produce this document immediately, along with all other responsive documents.
This investigation will continue.
People must be held accountable.
The Justice Department must stop stonewalling today.