Gunrunner: No victim status for Brian Terry’s family, and a DOJ assistant tried to stop Fast and Furious in 2009

  I have a couple of Fast and Furious updates today courtesy of  this article from Pajamas Media, so I thought I would cover them in one post today.

 The first update is an apparent attempt by U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke to cover his own ass because of the chance of a future trial related to the Gunrunner scandal; there is a chance that Brian Terry’s family is going to file a wrongful death complaint and this may be an attempt to protect himself and the agency by claiming there were no real “victims” from the sale of the illegal weapons.

  The family of Brian Terry filed a motion in court to be considered crime victims in the upcoming murder trial of Jamie Avila; apparently this is a routine request and the families of murder victims are regularly granted this status, but this motion was denied by Dennis Burke:

The family asked to intervene as victims in the case against Jamie Avila, the 23-year-old Phoenix man who purchased the guns allegedly used to kill Terry. Such motions are routinely approved by prosecutors, but may be opposed by defense attorneys.

However in this case, U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke argues because the family was not “directly or proximately harmed” by the illegal purchase of the murder weapon, it does not meet the definition of “crime victim” in the Avila case. Burke claims the victim of the Avila’s gun purchases, “is not any particular person, but society in general.”

  Dennis Burke appears to be saying that the sale of the weapons to Avila wasn’t what killed Brian Terry, but rather it was Avila’s actions after he purchased the weapon that killed Brian Terry, therefore there were no victims directly related to the illegal sale of the murder weapon. I have to say it is quite interesting to hear someone on the left use the guns don’t kill people, people kill people defense usually reserved for second amendment advocates and routinely ridiculed by the left. Funny how that works out now that the federal government should be considered an accessory before the fact in a murder case, isn’t it?

  It was Dennis Burke’s office which sold the weapons which turned up at the murder site of Brian Terry, so it seems to me that there is a conflict of interest in Dennis Burke’s involvement as a United States attorney in this case; it appears pretty obvious that Dennis Burke is more interested in trying to coverup the extent of the involvement his office had in the crimes which were committed than he is with providing justice to the people Brian Terry left behind. By refusing to admit that there were victims other than “society in general” he is trying to downplay the government’s role in this murder, as well as the seriousness of the situation his office and the DOJ fermented in the first place.

  Now on to the second update: William Hoover–the acting ATF Deputy Director–saw problems with Fast and Furious almost from the beginning and took steps to end the program shortly after the deadly operation began, and before something went wrong, but his concerns were ignored until it was too late:

Acting Deputy Director William Hoover called an emergency meeting and said he wanted an “exit strategy” to shut down the program. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for decades had dedicated itself to stopping illegal gun-trafficking of any kind. Now it was allowing illegal gun purchases on the Southwest border and letting weapons “walk” unchecked into Mexico.

But those at the meeting, which included a Justice Department official, did not want to stop the illegal gun sales until they had something to show for their efforts. Hoover suggested a “30-day, 60-day or 90-day” exit plan that would shut Fast and Furious down for good — just as soon as there were some indictments

  But no indictments were forthcoming  and the program was allowed to continue, and in fact no indictments came until after Brian Terry was murdered, nearly 10 months after Hoover held his emergency meeting. And it looks as if the only reason these indictments came at all was because the government realized the situation it was in after Terry’s murder and had to show some positive results to justify the program which led to Terry’s murder now that the story has gone (semi) public.

The indictments that came were little more than smokescreens designed to protect the government from the operation’s clear failures in the wake of Agent Terry’s death. The individual straw purchasers and smugglers taken into custody were all known to federal authorities prior to the start of the operation, and could have been arrested without letting thousands of guns flow into criminal hands.

  It is my belief that if Brian Terry was still alive no indictments would ever have been handed down and Fast and Furious would still be in operation because this operation was going exactly as planned; the Mexican drug lords were getting their guns from America and this meant that the border violence could be blamed on America; Americans would never learn that the federal government was actually supplying these weapons to the drug lords, and this would be the crisis that Barack Obama needed in order to ban “assault” weapons and possibly sign the UN small arms treaty.

  As the quote above states; all of the people arrested after Brian Terry’s murder were known to the federal government before Fast and Furious and these people could have been arrested any time without first providing them with weapons. This leads me and many others to come to the conclusion I came to above; this had nothing to do with tracking Mexican drug lords and everything to do with implementing gun control laws. It wasn’t until the government realized the terrible situation it had gotten itself into that it was decided to arrest these people for political cover once the whistleblowers came forward with the deadly results of this disastrous operation.