Fast and Furious, meet Wide Receiver

by David Safier

Ask Darrell Issa. It's the scandal of the century. Obama's ATF goons let guns walk across the border to Mexico as part of the wrong-headed Operation Fast and Furious. Never in the history of this nation has . . . No other president would ever allow . . .

Well, never in history, except in 2006. Well, no other president except George W. Bush.

The Star's Tim Steller has written two excellent articles – one Thursday, one today — about Operation Wide Receiver, a "gun walking" program under the Bush administration similar to Fast and Furious, with a simlar purpose: to try and move its investigations up the criminal food chain by following the guns as they worked their way through Mexican criminal organizations. AP also wrote a story about Wide Receiver. CBS News has a good report as well (CBS video at the end of the post).

Operation Wide Receiver was based right here in Tucson, referred to in the CBS report as a "shopping center for smugglers." Much of the information about Wide Receiver has come from Tucson gun dealer Mike Detty, who kept a detailed journal (594 pages) of his undercover work for the operation.

The details are similar to what we've learned about Fast and Furious. Rather than stopping the buyers as they made purchases at gun shops and gun shows, the operations let the guns "walk" into Mexico. Both operations look like they were poorly executed and unsuccessful. The Obama administration has brought charges against some of the people who were being investigated during Wide Receiver, but they're the small timers. There are no indications either operation managed to get to the higher ups.

Issa, as can be expected, hates the Wide Receiver revelations, since they take away from the purity of his anti-Obama investigation. What he should do, of course, is widen his investigation to include the Bush-era operation.

A good place for Issa to start is with Paul Charlton, who, according to Steller, "represents the parents of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, slain near Rio Rico last year." Guns found at the site of Terry's murder were linked to Fast and Furious, which started the investigation of the operation. It turns out, Charlton "was U.S. attorney for Arizona when Operation Wide Receiver started in 2006."

Hmm. If Charlton was involved in Wide Receiver in some way, shouldn't he have mentioned it when he took the Brian Terry case? Steller says Charlton was asked that question and conveniently doesn't remember anything about the operation.

"We had hundreds of operations and hundreds of names," said Charlton, now in private practice and planning to file a claim against the U.S. government for letting the guns loose that may have been used to kill Terry. "I don't think I would ever have approved letting guns walk, and I don't know if that's what's happened."

He added, "If that happened on my watch, then I own it."

Maybe Issa will reach out with his investigative arm, see if he can find a paper trail linking Charlton to Wide Receiver, then ask Charlton some probing questions. Nah, not gonna happen.