Congressional investigators probing Operation Fast and Furious are not the only ones who are frustrated: President Barack Obama’s administration appears to be withholding information from high-ranking Mexican law enforcement officials, too.
Mexican Attorney General Marisela Morales said United States law enforcement and Obama administration officials still haven’t given her full details on what happened during Operation Fast and Furious. (RELATED: Issa: Only way Holder didn’t know about Fast and Furious is ‘if he didn’t want to know’)
Morales told the Los Angeles Times that she learned about Fast and Furious from news reports, and to this day U.S. officials from the Obama administration have yet to brief her or apologize for the botched program.
“At no time did we know or were we made aware that there might have been arms trafficking permitted,” Morales said, according to the LA Times. “In no way would we have allowed it, because it is an attack on the safety of Mexicans.”
In Operation Fast and Furious, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives facilitated the sale of weapons to Mexican drug cartels via straw purchasers. Straw purchasers are people who could legally buy guns in the United States, but were doing so with the known intention of trafficking them to Mexico to sell them to drug cartels.
The brother of another high-ranking Mexican law enforcement official, Chihuahua prosecutor Patricia Gonzalez, was kidnapped and killed with weapons linked to Fast and Furious. “The basic ineptitude of these officials [who ordered the Fast and Furious operation] caused the death of my brother and surely thousands more victims,” Gonzalez said.
House oversight committee spokeswoman Becca Watkins told The Daily Caller that Congressional investigators are working on figuring out more of the details regarding what happened in Mexico. She adds that the committee hopes to help mend any damage the Justice Department’s actions did to United States-Mexico relations.
“The committee has shown via sworn testimony that the our government left Mexico in the dark on this reckless program,” Watkins said in an email. “It’s unclear the extent of damage this administration has done to our relationship with Mexico but we will hold the Justice Department accountable and in doing so, help the Mexican government understand where mistakes were made.
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