A Fortune magazine article claims the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal never happened, and that agents never allowed guns to be illegally trafficked into Mexico.
From the Fortune article: Quite simply, there’s a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. [Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform] and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.