[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 192 (Wednesday, December 14, 2011)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8570-S8573]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
FAST AND FURIOUS
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, the reason I came to the Senate floor is
to give my colleagues an update on the Fast and Furious investigation
that I have been conducting since last January 31.
For almost 11 months now, I have been investigating Fast and Furious,
an operation of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, ATF. On
December 2, the Justice Department finally came clean about who helped
draft its February 4 letter to Congress. That was a letter I wrote that
they responded to since I opened the investigation on January 31. It
only took them a few days to get a letter to me that had a tremendous
number of falsehoods in it.
That letter falsely denied ATF whistleblower allegations that ATF
walked guns. The revelation in the December 2 documents of this year
were the last straw for me. They admitted the February 4 letter had
falsehoods in it. I called for Assistant Attorney General Breuer to
step down, and I don't do that lightly.
Earlier documents had already shown Mr. Breuer displayed a stunning
lack of judgment in failing to respond adequately when told guns had
walked in Operation Wide Receiver in the years 2006-07. The December 2
document showed that Mr. Breuer was far more informed during the
drafting of the February 4 letter than he admitted before the Judiciary
Committee just 1 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 2 documents also established 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. So
any of my colleagues, any of the 99 other Senators who are writing
letters to the Justice Department, understand they have a flawed
process if it involved whistleblowers responding to us. I will show
[[Page S8571]]
that to you. In the cover letter that accompanied the documents, the
Justice Department wrote that, in drafting their February 4 response,
which had these falsehoods in it:
Department personnel . . . relied on information provided
by supervisors from the components in the best position to
know the relevant facts.
They were listening to supervisors because they only listen to
supervisors. That is the problem with not answering the letters in a
truthful way, to me, 5 days later after I handed them to the Attorney
General. I will show that in just a minute.
Clearly, the Justice Department did not rely on those in the best
position to know the facts, since the letter was withdrawn on December
2 due to its inaccuracies.
I don't know how they can withdraw a letter that is in the public
domain, but they just somehow withdraw the letter.
The whistleblowers were in the best position to know the facts.
Frontline personnel--not supervisors--were in the best position to know
the facts, not these senior bureaucrats or political appointees. Yet
the Department failed to provide a credible process for whistleblowers,
people who know what is happening on a day-to-day basis, 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 is a
career killer because the ATF and the Justice Department culture
protects those who retaliate against whistleblowers. Yet whistleblowers
in this case spoke out anyway.
In other words, these whistleblowers were speaking out, taking a
chance on their professional future in Federal Government because they
knew something wasn't right about the walking of guns. So they risked
their career to make sure the truth was known.
The only crime committed by whistleblowers, generally, is the crime
of committing truth. But when the Office of Legislative Affairs sought
information to respond to my inquiries, it didn't ask these brave
whistleblowers what happened. Instead, it simply relied on self-serving
denials of senior officials at ATF headquarters or the criminal
division here in DC or the U.S. attorneys in Arizona.
In other words, the Department took the word of the very officials
the whistleblowers alleged had mismanaged the situation in the very
first place, without getting both sides of the story.
The U.S. attorney has since admitted in testimony to congressional
investigators he was too strident when he first heard these
accusations. He claimed he didn't know all the facts.
We can't rely on the chain of command when we 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, and abuse.
Sometimes those supervisors attempt to cover tracks and paper over the
problem. That is why we have to get the story straight from the horse's
mouth. We 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
very first place before whistleblowers even come forward.
These problems are particularly prevalent in the Federal Government
that is so very large it is virtually impossible for anyone to ever be
held accountable for anything. So it is crucial 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 whistleblowers 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 and why it doesn't function as efficiently as it
can. Because if more whistleblowers were listened to and wrongs were
brought to the surface and transparency ruled, there would be more
accountability.
The focus should be on whether the accusations are true so the
problems can be corrected. Too often, however, the focus is on finding
out what information the whistleblower disclosed so 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 we get
straight answers in the first place. That is one reason we have pushed
in our investigation to be able to interview frontline 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 and impedes Congress's constitutional responsibilities to see
that the laws are faithfully executed. In other words, we don't just
pass laws and say that is the end of it. We have to pass laws to make
sure we are a check on the executive branch of government and that
means to do the constitutional job of oversight. That means ask
questions. That means we are entitled to answers--unless somebody is
trying to cover up something. When they are trying to cover up
something in the bureaucracy, I always tell them: If you get
stonewalled, eventually the truth is going to come out. The more truth
that comes out, the more egg you are going to have on your face. Mr.
Breuer is one of those who has tremendous egg on his face.
Justice cites the so-called line personnel policy for refusing to
provide officials for voluntary interviews. The policy is based purely
on nothing but the Department's own preferences. This isn't any law or
statute or even case law. The Department has frequently set aside the
policy and made exceptions.
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 tell me or argue to Congress that
Congress should not be allowed access to line attorneys when they give
that same kind of access to the press? Those are the kinds of line
personnel and individuals who have the actual answers. I kind of
surmise that the reason the Justice Department will let a U.S. attorney
or some FBI agents be interviewed on television is that some public
affairs officer has looked at it and said: This is a good story. This
is going to make us look good. But when Congress wants to interview
line people, no, and we have a constitutional responsibility to do
that.
I would like to suggest that the Justice Department let the public
affairs people make a decision of who can talk to Congress because it
might make them look a little better if they will let them talk to
Congress or are they afraid we might find out something? It is
irritating as heck.
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. The memo I have here I am not
going to read, but I want to hold it up.
The memo is from an ATF line agent who substantiated the claims of
the first ATF whistleblowers.
I ask unanimous consent a copy be printed in the Record immediately
after my remarks.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(See exhibit 1.)
Mr. GRASSLEY. 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 such as this is
why I was skeptical days later when the Department sent its February 4
letter to me, denying the allegations. In other words, I had proof they
were lying to us.
The agent wrote in the memo about being ordered by a Fast and Furious
[[Page S8572]]
case agent to hold back in their surveillance, so that they did not
``burn the operation.''
While watching straw purchasers hand off weapons to traffickers--
violating the laws of this country but encouraged to do it by their own
Justice Department--the case agent ``told all the agents to leave the
immediate area.''
While a crime was being committed the agent said to the agents to
leave the area immediately. 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.
A crime is committed, U.S. agents there let them move on.
After the phone call to my staff, the ATF agent's supervisor
requested that he write this memo documenting what he had told my
investigators. This passed up the chain all the way to the ATF
leadership. We know that because there are e-mails attaching the memo
sent to senior headquarter officials. However, the Justice Department
has refused to provide copies of those e-mails 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 hold of it they tried to keep it under wraps by refusing
to give me 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 is embarrassing to the Department
because it shows that the truth was easily knowable before the false
denial was sent to Congress on February 4. If they had asked for
firsthand documentation such as this memo when they first got my letter
in January, we would not be where we are today.
The second point these documents establish is that main Justice had
problems of its own. It was not all the fault of the ATF or the U.S.
attorney. Mr. Breuer's deputy, Deputy 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 line originated in a phone conversation, 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.
April 2010 is 8 months before I got involved in this investigation. His
e-mail to Mr. Breuer about Wide Receiver said:
As you'll recall from Jim's briefing, ATF let a bunch of
guns walk in efforts 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 is ironic that is how Mr. Weinstein described Wide Receiver. He
was one of the officials who authorized wiretaps in Fast and Furious.
Therefore, he was in a position to know that exact same description
applied to Fast and Furious. Yet he allowed the myth to be perpetrated
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 happens to be the criminal
division, and OLA, which is the Office of Legislative Affairs--``CRM
and OLA 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 2 this year, the Justice Department's latest spin was
that its statement that ``ATF makes every effort to interdict weapons''
was ``aspirational.'' Nevertheless, that did not stop them from
withdrawing the letter for inaccuracies. Perhaps the ``aspirational''
language should be saved for mission statements. Responses to specific
and serious allegations ought to, in a commonsense way, stick to the
facts, right? This was an oversight letter. I was not asking for some
``feel good'' fuzzy message about what ATF aspired to. I was asking for
simple facts.
A U.S. Border Patrol agent had died, and at the scene of his death
were two guns from Fast and Furious. So his death was connected to the
ATF operation. Whistleblowers were reaching outside of the chain of
command because supervisors would not listen. Instead of treating these
allegations with the kind of seriousness they deserved, the Justice
Department resorted to damage control.
I do not know what else my investigation is going to uncover, but we
are going to pursue it until we get to the end of it because my goal is
to find out who at the highest level of government, in Justice or the
White House, approved this, and get them fired; make sure that the
Terry family gets all of the information about the death of their son--
to this point they have had hardly anything--and, No. 3, to make sure a
stupid program like walking guns, Fast and Furious, et cetera, never
happens again.
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 not from the Justice Department but
from outside of the Justice Department. The Justice Department has not
provided it to us, even though it is clearly responsive to a House
Oversight Government Reform Committee 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 the other responsive documents.
This investigation will continue. People must be held accountable.
The Justice Department must stop stonewalling today.
Exhibit 1
U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives,
Washington, DC, February 3, 2011.
Memorandum To: Special Agent in Charge, Dallas Field Division
Thru: Resident Agent in Charge, Lubbock Field Office
From: Gary M. Styers, Special Agent, Lubbock Field Office
Subject: Contact with Congressional Investigators
On February 2, 2011, at approximately 1500 hours, ATF
Special Agent Gary Styers was contacted telephonically by
Robert Donovan and Brian Downey, representing United States
Senator Chuck Grassley and the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Downey and Donovan after identifying themselves asked Special
Agent Styers if he would be willing to answer some questions
regarding the time Special Agent Styers spent on a detail to
the Phoenix Field Division, Phoenix Group VII Office. Special
Agent Styers said he would be willing to answer questions to
the best of his knowledge.
Special Agent Styers was asked if he was familiar with the
large firearms trafficking case in Phoenix Group VII and
Special Agent Styers said he was. Downey and Donovan asked if
Special Agent Styers knew the name of the case and he
responded that it was ``Fast and Furious.'' Downey and
Donovan then asked if Special Agent Styers knew who the case
agent was and Special Agent Styers said it was Special Agent
Hope McAllister. Special Agent Styers was also asked who the
supervisor of the group was and Special Agent Styers said it
was Group Supervisor David Voth. Downey and Donovan also
asked who helped Special Agent McAllister, Special Agent
Styers said that Special Agent McAllister had a Co-Case Agent
from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as an
agent from Group VII. Downey and Donovan asked who was the
Agent from ICE and Special Agent Styers told them it was Lane
France.
Downey and Donovan asked Special Agent Styers if he knew
what the agents were assigned to do on the investigation.
Special Agent Styers explained that a group of agents were
assigned to the case and that since the case was in the stage
of an active
[[Page S8573]]
wiretap, some agents were working within the group and
Special Agent Styers was then asked about his general
impression of the Fast and Furious case. Special Agent Styers
stated that the case had systematically divided and isolated
agents from the group. The case agent had solicited the
advice of numerous experienced agents, including Special
Agent Styers, regarding how to conduct and end the wiretap
operations and case overall. Special Agent Styers gave the
case agent his honest opinion and advice since Special Agent
Styers had worked two wiretap investigations in his career.
Special Agent Styers felt that his advice and opinions, as
well as other agents' advice and opinions were widely
disregarded. Along with other agents within the group,
Special Agent Styers explained that he was no longer asked to
assist with Fast and Furious and concentrated on his assigned
cases and provided necessary assistance to fellow agents
within the detail and group.
Downey and Donovan asked Special Agent Styers what he felt
was incorrect about the way the Fast and Furious case was
conducted. Special Agent Styers explained that first and
foremost, it is unheard of to have an active wiretap
investigation without full time dedicated surveillance units
on the ground. Special Agent Styers relayed that no agents in
the group were assigned to surveillance on the Fast and
Furious case. Special Agent Styers said that other agencies
or task force officers may have been used to conduct
surveillance and respond to calls of FFLs, but it seemed that
either the case agent or Group Supervisor would poll the
office for agents who were available to respond at short
notice.
Secondly, Special Agent Styers said that it appeared odd to
have a majority of ATF Agents working on a wiretap
investigation, who had never worked such a case. Especially,
when numerous, permanent Group VII agents and detailers had
previous wiretap experience.
Special Agent Styers was provided with contact information
for Downey and Donovan and the conversation was ended.
Special Agent Styers contacted the Lubbock Resident Agent in
Charge, Jim Luera at 1545 hours after the conversation with
Downey and Donovan ended, to inform him of the contact.
Special Agent Styers was later asked to document the
conversation herein and attempted to do so to the fullest
extent possible.
Respectfully,
Gary M. Styers.
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I do not see another Member on the
floor. Unless some staff person among the Republicans or Democrats
tells me somebody is coming, I wish to take another 5 minutes, if I
could.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, more like 7 or 8 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
____________________