by Paul Joseph Watson | Infowars.com
October 27 2011
DHS chief tells House committee she had nothing to do with gun running scandal, when she helped launch precursor to the program in 2009
Despite telling a House Judiciary Committee yesterday that she only learned of operation Fast and Furious in December last year when the controversy went public, Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano actually helped launch the previous incarnation of the program, Project Gunrunner, at a White House press conference in March 2009.
“Napolitano, at one point likening the questioning to a cross-examination, said repeatedly she only learned of “Fast and Furious” after Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in December,” reports Fox News. “She emphasized the operation, conceived and run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, “was an ATF operation,” under the auspices of the Justice Department, not her department.”
However, as the video above documents, not only was Napolitano aware of the ATF program to put guns into the hands of Mexican drug lords, she actually helped launch the previous incarnation of it, Project Gun Runner, at a White House press conference alongside Deputy Attorney General David Ogden in March 2009.
Operation Fast and Furious, which began in the fall of 2009, was merely an offshoot of Project Gun Runner, which was the umbrella program for a series of gun running projects under the ATF that stretched back to 2006.
In the 2009 video, Napolitano clearly explains the process of using the eTrace system to track guns as they went into Mexico under Project Gunrunner. This same system would later be used for the subsequent phase of the same overarching program, Operation Fast and Furious.
Of course, the entire notion of the federal government tracking the firearms in order to target Mexican drug cartels lost credibility when it was revealed that when the guns reached the border “the agency seemed to lose track of the weapons,” which were later used to kill border patrol agent Brian Terry and other innocent people. Of the 2,000 guns knowingly released by ATF agents, 1400 were never recovered.
During yesterday’s testimony, Napolitano also dubiously claimed that she had not spoken to Attorney General Eric Holder about Fast and Furious.
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Noting that two of the guns involved in the program were found at the scene where U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was shot to death, Babeu warned that if Holder attempted to stay in power, he could bring down the entire Obama administration.