Judicial Watch announced on Thursday that it's suing the City of Phoenix, Arizona to obtain police records related to a gang-style attack in July 2013 that might have been perpetrated with guns from the Obama Administration's deadly Operation Fast and Furious:
According to press reports, on July 29, 2013, police investigating an apartment shooting in Phoenix ??? that left two people wounded ??? found an assault rifle in the front passenger area of a vehicle that had crashed into a fence surrounding the apartment complex. Police reported that the front windows and door of the apartment had multiple bullet strikes, and empty rifle bullet casings were found in on the grounds in front of the apartment. Also reported was a handgun at the scene of the crime.
Three weeks later, on August 21, 2013, five suspects tied to the July 29 shooting were arrested in a large-scale Phoenix drug raid. According to the Phoenix CBS affiliate, KPHO-TV, ???Detectives from the Phoenix Police Department and Homeland Security Investigations served federal search warrants at 3525 W. Quail Track Dr. and 10142 W. Monterosa St.??? where the five suspects were apprehended.
The presence of DHS investigators has raised questions because Phoenix was the location of the ATF???s deadly Fast and Furious gunrunning operation. Operation Fast and Furious was a Justice Department/Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) program in which the Obama administration allowed guns to go to Mexican drug cartels in the hopes that the guns would end up at crime scenes, thereby advancing gun-control policies. Fast and Furious weapons have been implicated in the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and hundreds of other innocents in Mexico. Guns from the Fast and Furious scandal are expected to be used in criminal activity on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border for years to come.
Fast and Furious was long ago pronounced "old news" by Obama's media bodyguards, but it's still very much alive, and brimming with the sort of unanswered questions journalists would be breathlessly asking of a Republican Administration. One of the whistleblowers in the case, retired ATF agent Jay Dobyns, recently defeated the Administration in court, with the judge describing government persecution of Dobyns for daring to write a book about his experiences as something out of a Kafka novel. Another agent who spilled the beans on Fast and Furious, Vince Cefalu, sued the ATF for inappropriately terminating him (in the parking lot of a Denny's restaurant, no less) and won a settlement last week. Remember when the media considered whistleblowers to be epic heroes, especially when they prevailed over retaliation attempts?
Most importantly, the stonewall erected by outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama is cracking at last, as a federal court denied a Justice Department motion to delay in late September, and ordered the release of a comprehensive list of Fast and Furious documents shielded by Obama's executive orders, no later than October 22. We will, at last, know what President Obama thought was so important to keep the American people from seeing, even if we cannot yet review the documents themselves. And just in time for the midterm elections, too!
AG Holder announced his resignation two days after that court order was issued, which Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton thinks was not coincidental. "We have little doubt that Fast and Furious guns are behind the crazed gun assault last summer in Phoenix,??? Fitton said of the Arizona shooting incident. ???Eric Holder admitted that his agency???s Fast and Furious guns would continue to be used for crimes for years to come. That is his real legacy as Attorney General, and we are confident that our lawsuit in Phoenix will expose yet another cover-up of Fast and Furious tragedies by the Obama administration."
