Remembering "Deporter in Chief" Obama's Most Lethal Border Blunder

Before Attacking Trump, Barry Should Repent for "Fast and Furious"

According to governmental data, reported ABC encouragingly in August 2016, “The Obama administration has deported more people than any other president’s administration in history. In fact, they have deported more than the sum of all the presidents of the 20th century.” You might not have sensed this history listening to Barack Obama lecture President Trump about how, thanks to Trump’s deportation strategy, “many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.”

In truth, Obama’s deportation strategy mirrored the one in play right now: “ICE has continued to increase its focus on identifying, arresting, and removing convicted criminals in prisons and jails, and also at-large arrests in the interior.”

This strategy may have inspired his critics on the radical left to dub Obama “deporter in chief,” but the media ate it up. On May 31, 2016, CNN ran a must-see feature titled, “A Day with ICE in the Sanctuary City of Chicago.” On this ride-along, the reporter marveled at the work of ICE officers working “under the cloak of darkness” to arrest illegals at their Chicago homes. The fact that the agents accidentally arrested the target’s brother did not dim CNN’s enthusiasm.

With the media’s help, Obama was able to work under a metaphorical “cloak of darkness” for the eight years of his presidency. He never needed that cloak more than with his almost inexplicable border program named for no good reason after the movie franchise, Fast and Furious.

During a meeting with President Calderon of Mexico in April 2009, Obama promised to get to work on “the issue of gun tracing.” Six months later, in October 2009, the DOJ made good on Obama’s promise to Calderon with a nine-page memo called the “Department of Justice Strategy for Combating the Mexican Cartels.” The memo instructed ATF offices near the Mexican border to broaden their scope in order to “identify, investigate and eliminate” the cartels.

As some field officers noticed, ATF, then under the DOJ, had begun to exhibit the symptoms of regulatory mission creep. With Obama’s political operatives fully in place, that creep turned into a sprint. From Attorney General Eric Holder on down, all the major political players responsible for Operation Fast and Furious were outspoken champions of gun control.

As the operation worked, ATF agents leaned on licensed gun dealers in Arizona to ignore traditional restraints and sell weapons to buyers they knew to be straw purchasers for the cartels. ATF proposed to track these sales and then, at some point, find their way to the higher ups in the Mexican cartels and bust them. The problem was that for the first year at least ATF did no busting, and as many as two thousand guns flowed across the border into the hands of the cartels. Carlos Canino, acting ATF attache in Mexico, would accurately call the operation a “perfect storm of idiocy.”

The operation had no rational purpose other than to discredit the buying and selling of guns. This strategy had propaganda value, however, only if those doing the dying were anonymous Mexicans and the distributors unknown Americans.

In the early morning hours of December 15, 2010, more than a year after the program was launched, the one thing wary ATF agents feared would happen, did happen. Drug dealers used one of the Fast and Furious guns to kill an America border patrol agent, Brian Terry.

If nothing else, the DOJ had more success in suppressing the news than they did in arresting cartel members. The media would not catch on to Fast and Furious for months. The media might not have caught on at all had they not been prompted by some knowledgeable bloggers and whistleblowers. The efforts of the one major media reporter who who did get involved, CBS’s Sharyl Attkisson, cost Attkisson her career.

A few of these ATF whistleblowers found their way to Republican Senator Charles Grassley, the ranking minority member of the Committee on the Judiciary. In late January 2011, Grassley asked the Justice Department if it were true that ATF had allowed guns to “walk” into Mexico.

On February 4, 2011, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich responded forcefully, “At the outset, the allegation described in your January 27 letter--that ATF ‘sanctioned’ or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser who then transported them into Mexico--is false.”

A little more than a month later, Obama conceded to Mexican journalist Jorge Ramos that “a serious mistake may have been made.” In this Univision interview, however, the dissembling Obama denied that either he or Holder had anything to do with Fast and Furious. “And you were not even informed about it?” asked an incredulous Ramos. “Absolutely not,” said Obama, “this is a pretty big government, the United States government. I have got a lot of moving parts.”

In June 2012, just as a House committee was about to cite Holder for contempt of Congress for withholding subpoenaed documents, Obama asserted executive privilege. The House was not impressed. A week later, its members voted to cite Holder for contempt anyhow, the first cabinet member ever cited.

In September 2012, in the midst of a tightly contested re-election race, Barack Obama responded to Jorge Ramos’s question about the operation. By Ramos’s count, the weapons sold under DOJ’s supervision had killed as many as 300 Mexican citizens. At this Univision forum, Obama unblushingly lied to Ramos, “The Fast and Furious program was a field-initiated program begun under the previous administration.” Our media yawned.

Between the operational absurdity of Fast and Furious and the ritualistic obstruction of its overseers, this folly should have been disgrace enough to deny Obama reelection. In 2012, though, the major media set an extraordinarily high bar for presidential scandal. As Attkisson observed, “Anything short of a signed confession from the president himself is deemed a phony Republican scandal, and those who dare to ask questions are crazies, partisans, or conspiracy theorists.”

Media eagerness to protect Obama’s candidacy was never more obvious than in the second presidential debate, the town hall-style tag team event infamously hosted by CNN’s Candy Crowley. At one point, Mitt Romney asked Obama about Fast and Furious. “I’d like to understand,” said Romney, “who it was that did this, what the idea was behind it, why it led to the violence — thousands of guns going to Mexican drug lords.”

Obama responded with one word just as he had on a previous question about Benghazi. “Candy!”

On cue, Crowley jumped in the ring to bail out her partner once more. True, her Benghazi intervention was even more disgraceful, but there was never an apology, never a recantation. In the years since, CNN has repeatedly shown its value as the chief propaganda arm of the globalist left. The major difference between it and the old Soviet Pravda was that the Pravda audience knew they were being lied to.

My newest book, Empire of Lies, is available in ebook and print versions at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. If you sign up to be a paid subscriber, you will receive a free signed copy when you email me, jackcashill@yahoo.com, with your name, address and any preferred inscription.

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