Category: Government

DOJ is selectively complying with FOIA requests. Well, if they are even telling Republican Senators to take a walk, it’s hardly surprising they are stonewalling ordinary Joes.

In response to the giant middle finger from ATF, Grassley present the evidence his office is in possession of. The evidence indicates that ATF has been telling border dealers to proceed with suspected straw sales, and report information on the guns and buyers to ATF. This represented approximately 769 firearms, only 103 of which are now accounted for.

“In addition to these specific weapons, the indictment of Avila and other references approximately 769 firearms. Of those, the indictment refers to the recovery of only about 103 weapons. So, where are the other approximately 666 weapons references in the indictment? Why did the ATF not seize them?”

There is documented evidence that the gun that was used in the murder of CBP Agent Terry is one of the guns ATF lost track of. Grassley also smacked down Holder for stonewalling him:

The Justice Department’s reply asked that Committee staff stop speaking to law enforcement personnel about these matter. However, if not for the bravery and patriotism of law enforcement personnel who were willing to put their careers on the line, this Committee would have been forced to rely on nothing more than rumors in the blogosphere and a Justice Department denial to resolve these allegations. We need more than that. To be an effective check on Executive Branch power, we need cold, hard facts. We sill seek them from whatever source is necessary.

Unfortunately, the Justice Department’s letter suggested that my attempts to seek information about these matters might be politically motivated. I understand the Department needs to “protect … law enforcement personnel … from inappropriate political influence.” However, there is a difference between inappropriate political influence and appropriate holding officials accountable to the American people.

He goes on to note that the family of Agent Terry deserve answers, and encourages Holder to “come clean.” I’ve said before, when our opponents argue there’s not enough funding for ATF, because the evil NRA has seen to it that they are kept underfunded, that the reason ATF is on a short leash is because they have incompetent enforcers of our federal gun laws. I have no doubt there are many fine employees and dedicated workers in the organization. Indeed, the whistleblowers here would be among those, but the agency has suffered under poor leadership for years. That’s not our doing. It’s cultural, and it’s been that way since the moonshine business dried up for them in the 1970s.

Hat Tip to David Codrea’s examiner.com site for the Grassley Document.

John Richardson has a lot of details. Basically the DOJ gave Grassley a big middle finger in response to inquiries. Not surprising, unfortunately.

Maybe we need an amendment to the FAA bill to deal with stuff like this.

From the LA Times. Dave Hardy notes: “The spin is now — this happened because we didn’t have enough resources to do more. In other words, ‘give us more money and we won’t ____ up again.'” Funny how with federal agencies, it always seems to come back to that.

Monopolies & the government regulators who serve them are always able to come up with such creative ways to fleece taxpayers.

Under a little-noticed decision by Maryland regulators, Pepco for years has been authorized to raise rates temporarily to recover money it loses when electricity use drops. The system was meant to encourage energy conservation.

But as an unintended consequence, customers could help make the company whole for outage-related losses next month by paying Pepco more than they would have otherwise. The higher rates would apply to all Maryland customers, including those who shivered in the dark for days.

“They are paying for delivery of electricity they did not receive,” said Eric Friedman, director of the Montgomery County Office of Consumer Protection.

I would say that it’s the law on unintended consequences at work, but we can see that there’s nothing unintended about it.

But in Maryland, the billing adjustment is colliding with a string of outages at Pepco in the past year. Some critics have said that the billing system has removed any incentive for Pepco to reduce outages or to rush to restore service once the lights go out. Either way, Pepco is guaranteed the same rate of return. …

A Washington Post investigation published in December found that Pepco’s day-to-day reliability began declining five years ago and that Pepco ranks at or near the bottom in national surveys of reliability. The average Pepco customer experienced 70 percent more outages than customers of other utilities in major metropolitan areas.

Hat tip to @DonIrvine.

I can’t think of any reason why, in a pinch, I might need to call my local ATF field office. At least not urgently enough that I need an iPhone app. Even as an FFL holder, there’s a form to report a lost or stolen gun, and even as an FFL holder, my first call to report a missing or stolen gun is going to be to local police.

Maybe this kind of waste of taxpayer money is why their budget is getting cut.

I’ve been reluctant to speak about the accusations going around the blogosphere about the extent that ATF was facilitating trafficking to Mexico. Not that I would put something like this past ATF, but serious accusations require evidence, and until today I hadn’t seen any. Having been in a position of having sensitive information shared with me, it never seemed a good idea to broadcast the fact publicly, rather than directing the information quietly to folks who have the power to do something with it. Otherwise you risk tipping off whoever’s ox is going to get gored, and hand them an opportunity to destroy evidence and discredit your source.

But now we have real evidence that whoever Codrea and Vanderboegh have been speaking with is the real deal, and is actively working with the office of Senator Chuck Grassley, as shown in this letter here, and also here, and as detailed on David Codrea’s examiner site. Grassley’s office notes that there has been “detailed documentation” which “lends credibility to the claims and partially corroborates them.” We will see where Grassley’s office goes with this.

The whistle blower in this case deserves quite a bit of praise. Federal whistle blower protections are applicable on paper, but are nearly non-existent in practice. Working with Grassley’s office is probably a career ending move for the agent in question, and on top of that he will need to retain a lawyer during this whole process. It’s not clear who’s come forward with this information at this point, but my hat’s off to them.