Congressional Republicans Ask FBI Director to Definitively Say Whether Fast and Furious Gun Killed Border Agent
In a letter to FBI director Robert Mueller today, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, tried to get a definitive answer as to whether or not any of the guns from the Fast & Furious program killed Border agent Brian Terry, and to explain why there have been inconsistent stories about Terry’s death.
You can read the letter here.
“As you know, two weapons recovered at the scene of Agent Terry’s murder have been traced to Fast and Furious,” the GOP lawmakers wrote. “Yet the FBI has released very little information about the circumstances surrounding the fatal shooting. Anonymous Justice Department sources initially told the press that the two Fast and Furious guns had been ballistically excluded as the murder weapon and that the murder weapon had not been recovered. However, we obtained a copy of the report, and in actuality, it does not exclude the Fast and Furious guns. Rather, it is inconclusive. So, apparently someone from the Justice Department attempted to deceive the press.”
Terry was killed last December, shot in the back by Mexicans suspected of being involved in criminal enterprises. Guns found at the scene have since been tied to a controversial US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives program in which individuals suspected of buying guns in order to illegally traffic them were allowed to do so, in the hope that they would lead investigators to bigger fish in Mexico. Thousands of powerful guns were allowed to “walk” to Mexico, and have since been tied to crime scenes. You can read more on the murder of Terry HERE and HERE.
In our interview with President Obama on Tuesday, he said that “people who have screwed up will be held accountable…Our overarching goal consistently has been to say we’ve got a responsibility not only to stop drugs from flowing north, we’ve also got a responsibility to make sure we are not helping to either arm or finance these drug cartels in Mexico.”
“It’s very upsetting to me to think that somebody showed such bad judgment that they would allow something like that to happen,” he said. “And we will find out who and what happened in this situation and make sure it gets corrected.”
The Senate on Tuesday voted to ban funding for any future gun-walking programs.
-Jake Tapper