Fortune: Much of what you think you know about 'Fast and Furious' may not be the case at all

Darrell Issa (Western Journalism Center) A day before the House of Representatives votes on a contempt resolution against Attorney General Eric Holder over the release of documents in the "Fast and Furious" operation, Katherine Eban at Fortune has called into question some of the most basic beliefs about what happened in this gun sales operation. Whether you've followed the case closely or never paid attention until now, it's worth a read.

"Fast and Furious" grew out of frustration at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Agents had a devil of a time getting prosecutions against straw purchasers who bought large numbers of guns they then passed along to others. The program was initiated in Arizona, which is a freaking free-for-all for gun buyers. Any 18-year-old without a criminal record can buy as many firearms in Arizona as he wants and the same afternoon transfer them to whomever. That whomever may very well be the person who put up the money for the purchase. After the transfer, the guns can wind up anywhere, but thousands of guns go to Mexico. Many of those wind up in the hands of gangsters in the drug cartels whose war among themselves and on the Mexican people have taken an estimated 50,000 lives in six years.

Straw-purchase cases are difficult to prosecute anywhere, but Eban writes that it was made more difficult by the reluctance of Arizona-based U.S. prosecutors to take on any case that wasn't ironclad. And their definition of that was extreme:

After examining one suspect's garbage, agents learned he was on food stamps yet had plunked down more than $300,000 for 476 firearms in six months. [Dave Voth, supervisor of Fast and Furious] asked if the ATF could arrest him for fraudulently accepting public assistance when he was spending such huge sums. Prosecutor [Emory] Hurley said no. In another instance, a young jobless suspect paid more than $10,000 for a .50-caliber tripod-mounted sniper rifle. According to Voth, Hurley told the agents they lacked proof that he hadn't bought the gun for himself. [...]

Even if a suspect bought 10 guns that were recovered days later at a Mexican crime scene, this didn't mean the initial purchase had been illegal. To these prosecutors, the pattern proved little. Instead, agents needed to link specific evidence of intent to commit a crime to each gun they wanted to seize.

And if getting single-defendant prosecutions in cases like that was hard, obtaining prosecutions of multiple defendants, including bigwigs, in straw-purchasing and trafficking schemes was nigh on impossible. Southwest border units, including Group VII in Phoenix, became ATF's solution for putting together big cases and making them stick. Fast and Furious was an attempt to get the ironclad evidence needed. The idea was to manually dig through the sales reports of holders of Federal Firearms Licenses, select some likely straw purchasers, track the weapons they bought and then bring strong cases against them and their recruiters.

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