Justice Withdraws Inaccurate 'Fast And Furious' Letter It Sent To Congress

Under fire for losing track of weapons that turned up at crime scenes along the Southwest border, the Justice Department has taken the extraordinary step of formally withdrawing an inaccurate letter about the episode that it sent to Congress earlier this year.

And Martha Stewart just sent a letter formally withdrawing her testimony on insider dealing charges...

The February 2011 letter said that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives makes "every effort" to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally before they cross into Mexico. It added that the allegation that the ATF had "sanctioned or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons" to suspicious people was false.

It's really difficult to believe that the collection of high powered lawyers in the Justice Department would imagine that anyone would believe they sent a letter to Congress with statements of fact that hadn't been well verified.  But now they're claiming they had no actual basis for saying that:

The basis for the inaccurate statements in the letter appears to have originated among people in the U.S. Attorney's office in Arizona and among ATF officials earlier this year, according to the new letter to Congress. Notes taken by a Justice Department legislative affairs person who helped prepare a response to Congress include statements that found their way into the faulty Feb. 4 letter, including: "ATF doesn't let guns walk" and "we always try to interdict weapons purchased illegally."... Jason Weinstein, a senior aide in the Justice Department's criminal division, played a key role in drafting the February 2011 letter. Weinstein, who had served as a highly regarded prosecutor in Baltimore and New York for a decade before taking a political appointment at the Justice Department, already had come under scrutiny from Republican lawmakers. They say he had approved the use of wiretaps in the Obama administration's Fast and Furious operation and he should have dug deeper.

As others have pointed out before, it's either monumental incompetence at the Justice Department to allow actual lies into their testimony, or incredible arrogance at the thought that no one would check their false assertions.  Either way, heads should roll at ATF and Justice, all the way up the chain of command to Eric Holder.