Posted by
Steve on Wednesday, August 17, 2011 9:04:29 AM
Operation Fast and Furious is still under investigation. Four important people under investigation in Arizona for the ATF were recently promoted to Washington. Now, as a former federal employee I know that the policy is to promote people out of trouble. In other words, if someone gets in trouble, you promote them or transfer them to get them out of the trouble spot. The one proviso on that rule is that you wait until any legal investigation is over until you make the transfer. What I am talking about is someone gets a divorce or something and that cause’s problems in a small town. You promote the person away from the problem to solve the greater problem of public relations.
This series of promotions for these four individuals smacks of a cover-up. In cover-ups, one thing you do is give the person who knows important information a promotion to get him to shut up about whatever he/she knows. These promotions appear to be this kind of promotion. Moves cost the government thousands of dollars to complete. On the Mike Broomhead show yesterday he estimated that each move cost about $186,000 plus the cost of the per diem for a month for the family. That is easily another $30,000 per individual, probably more. The positions these individuals were moved to appear to be the type of positions where you put people you want on “ice”. They are artificial make-work positions that have never been there previously.
The four individuals that were moved were high ranking individuals in Arizona. They would have had knowledge of who authorized the program or at least from what department authorization came from. Now that they have been paid off, this information will be much more difficult to obtain. I say they were paid off because each one of them was in danger of being personally prosecuted for crimes. That means they could have spent time in jail for what they did with Operation Fast and Furious, unless they came clean on what they knew of higher level people involved. Now that will be difficult, if not impossible to obtain. The hook is not there any longer. These people are still in danger of prosecution, but the hook that would have obtained more information has been removed.
This appears to be part of a cover-up to protect high level employees of the Obama administration or even Obama himself from the fallout from Operation Fast and Furious. The path that would have led to the individuals responsible just became more difficult to follow. These individuals who were moved were undoubtedly told that their move was dependent on their remaining silent on any higher level involvement in Operation Fast and Furious. At least, that is how I would handle the moves if I was in the Obama administration. I would make them agree to be silent on high level involvement before moving them away from the problem. That way I could protect anyone in Washington who authorized the program.
We may still get to the bottom of the case. But these four people are now going to obstruct the investigation instead of being a help to the investigation. That is a shame, because people have died as a result of Operation Fast and Furious. Because of these deaths, the individuals responsible need to be brought to justice. They can still be identified and prosecuted because there have to be other sources of information. But it is always easier to get cooperation from key individuals instead of roadblocks. We need to cut off the head of this terrible program to show the criminals in the Obama administration that they will be discovered if they commit crimes. We cannot allow cover-ups to protect guilty people from prosecution.