“This Fast and Furious debacle started under the Bush administration,” Jackson Lee declared. “And it is been evidenced by various reports that it started under the ATL office in Arizona unbeknownst to leadership in Washington DC, at least leadership that came in under the Obama administration in this instance, Eric Holder.”
Attempts by Democrats to pin the Fast and Furious operation on Bush, however, don’t stand. National Review’s Andrew McCarthy explains:
Wide Receiver actually involved not gun-walking but controlled delivery. Unlike gun-walking, which seems (for good reason) to have been unheard of until Fast & Furious, controlled delivery is a very common law enforcement tactic.
…
To the contrary, Fast & Furious involved uncontrolled deliveries — of thousands of weapons. It was an utterly heedless program in which the feds allowed these guns to be sold to straw purchasers — often leaning on reluctant gun dealers to make the sales. The straw purchasers were not followed by close physical surveillance; they were freely permitted to bulk transfer the guns to, among others, Mexican drug gangs and other violent criminals — with no agents on hand to swoop in, make arrests, and grab the firearms. The inevitable result of this was that the guns have been used (and will continue to be used) in many crimes, including the murder of Brian Terry, a U.S. border patrol agent.
