Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious: the "Stench of Cover-up" may reach Obama's Oval Office.

If, if IF this damned debt crisis were not going on, consuming all the oxygen in the media, we could be delving into Barack Hussein Obama's first major scandal: a scandal that's cost the lives of an American Federal agent, and the lives of numerous Mexican civilians and agents, all because the Administration approved an 'operation' designed to snare gun dealers and therefore promote and move forward Obama's and LeftLibProgg Democrat's stalled anti-gun agenda.

This, from today's Investor Business Daily...

ATF: The White House Knew

Scandal: A former ATF special agent tells Congress a National Security Council staffer was informed about Operation Fast and Furious before guns allowed into Mexico wound up at the murder scene of a U.S. agent.

The latest evidence that both the White House and attorney general knew and approved of Project Gunrunner and its deadly offshoot, Operation Fast and Furious, came this week in the testimony of William Newell, ATF special agent in charge of the Phoenix office, before Rep. Darrell Issa's House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

That the "stench of cover-up," as Fox News analyst Brit Hume described the administration's handling of the matter, may reach even into the Oval Office itself was evidenced by Newell's testimony that he communicated with Kevin O'Reilly, a staffer on President Obama's National Security Council, about Operation Fast and Furious in September 2010.

O'Reilly was national security director for North America tasked with monitoring the activities of Mexican drug cartels. We are asked to believe he inquired about a program that was providing the cartels with guns but kept what he found out to himself.

That date, by the way, is three months before weapons permitted to "walk" into Mexico were found at the scene in Arizona were U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered. Newell said O'Reilly had inquired about the status of Project Gunrunner to brief administration officials before a trip to Mexico.

Newell sent O'Reilly the requested information with the caveat, "You didn't get this from me."

Why was a National Security Council staffer asking about an operation that no one in the upper echelons of the administration was supposed to be aware of? We find it hard to believe it was for O'Reilly's personal amusement. Why would Newell request that he not be acknowledged as the source?

Certainly the whole area of drug cartels, cross-border violence and gun trafficking are matters of national security. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made a cause celebre of blaming the easy access to U.S. weapons for Mexican violence.

Are we to believe neither the White House nor the Department of Justice knew about a program that made that access even easier?

Administration officials have taken the Sgt. Schultz "we knew nothing" approach to any inquiries, only to be tripped up by their own words and actions.

Newell's email to O'Reilly is evidence that at least one person in the White House did.

It's not yet time to really press this issue, not until we survive the debt 'crisis' that Baracky is attempting to finesse to his favor.

But after that's put to bed, boy do we have something to turn loose on this squalid Administration: Darrell Issa.

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