we have the Inspector General's office behaving in a very bad way:
CBS News has obtained secretly recorded conversations that raise questions as to whether some evidence is being withheld in the murder of a Border Patrol agent.
The tapes were recorded approximately mid-March 2011 by the primary gun dealer cooperating with ATF in its "Fast and Furious" operation: Andre Howard, owner of Lone Wolf Trading Company in Glendale, Arizona. He's talking with the lead case ATF case agent Hope MacAllister.
The tapes have been turned over to Congressional investigators and the Inspector General.
How is the IG acting badly?
Then, the sources say for some reason the Inspector General passed the tapes along to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Arizona: a subject in the investigation. It's unclear why the Inspector General, who is supposed to investigate independently, would turn over evidence to an entity that is itself under investigation.
They updated this with the following:
A spokesman from the Office of the Inspector General today said, "The OIG officially provided the United States Attorney's Office with a copy of the recordings in question so that the USAO could consider them in connection with the government's disclosure obligations in the pending criminal prosecutions of the gun traffickers. Prior to receiving the tapes, the OIG made clear that we would have to provide a copy of the recordings to the United States Attorney's Office because they would need to review them to satisfy any legal disclosure obligations."
Can you say "Cover our ass because we didn't think anybody would find out about this"?
I knew you could.
Could be I'm being a little overly distrustful here, but my first thought is "Here's this recording, and the committee has it; you'd better make sure they don't catch you holding back anything on this. " 'Legal disclosure obligations' my ass: they've been ordered by Congress to 'give us EVERYTHING on this matter', and if they don't they're in violation. This sounds to me like the OIG playing games to try to help ATF figure out what they CAN try to hide. And the OIG needs to have its ass kicked for this.
And let's not forget the third gun that the EffingBI didn't want mentioned in Terry's murder.
Update: I'm going to throw this into a new post, too:
In a letter released on Wednesday to Acting Justice Department Inspector General Cynthia Schnedar, they expressed deep concern over her decision to turn over to U.S. prosecutors in Arizona audio recordings obtained during her investigation.
Representative Darrell Issa, head of the House Oversight Committee, and Charles Grassley, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Schnedar apparently did not consider the significant harm caused by giving the recordings to those under investigation.
(or possibly that WAS the consideration, maybe?)
They criticized the move as potentially obstructing the congressional probe into the operation because potential witnesses may have colluded about what to tell investigators…
The letter described how an ATF supervisor, in discussing the congressional inquiry, allegedly said, “We are all on the same sheet of music. And if we stay on the same sheet of music, we will be all right.”
That does sound like acting to control testimony, doesn't it?
No comments:
Post a Comment