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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I am excellent. How are you?
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, I'm good because we're going to have an explosive conversation.
N. Rodgers: I was going to go there. Then I was like, no, I'm not going to go there, but I do want to say something. Listeners, we are starting a new series, which I don't know how long it will take us to get through this series because, frankly, there are 100 billion agencies. It could be that we're just starting a new podcast, and this is how it's going to go from now on. I don't think that will be the case, but we are delving into some of the more interesting agencies. We're not going to do the big ones that people know about or that people are super highly familiar with. This one's not obscure. This one actually is fairly well known, but I think people don't know the history of this agency. But we're also going to bring up some other agencies that you may go, really? That's an agency? Don't be surprised if in this series, you find out things you didn't know about the federal government. We'll all just do this together, me, you, and Elon Musk.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, listeners, in a previous season, Nia and I did an entire series on cabinet-level departments.
N. Rodgers: Which was fun.
J. Aughenbaugh: It was. If you don't have very much knowledge of the history of some of our departments, we definitely encourage you to go back to those episodes and give them a listen.
N. Rodgers: They all come out of need.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, but these are agencies that are of interest to Nia and I for various reasons. The first one out of the shoot, as they say, is Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, but most refer to this agency as ATF
N. Rodgers: It's because that's what fits on their jackets. They don't have ATFE.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or they don't have BATFE, the bureau of.
N. Rodgers: That's true. BATFE.
J. Aughenbaugh: BATFE. This is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. It's a domestic law enforcement agency that is currently situated in the Department of Justice.
N. Rodgers: But that has not always been the case.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's the reason why I use that adverb, listeners, because one of the themes of this particular episode is that this is an agency that has been tossed back and forth.
N. Rodgers: Like an explosive. You hold it. No, you hold it. Think of it as a little baby grenade agency.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because it's gone from Treasury to Justice, to the IRS, to the Treasury, back to Justice.
N. Rodgers: It has a long and storied history. The thing about the ATF is I thought the ATF was a relatively modern agency. The ATF, folks, was formed in 1886. The 19th century, we were already having something like this. Now, we should state for the record, for almost all of the agencies that we'll be talking about throughout this series, almost none of them have started as the thing that they have become because they start as one thing and then they morph a little bit because that's how the federal government works. It's just hardly ever that you start off with a thing, and it stays the thing that it's going to be the whole time. But I have to say that I didn't realize that the ATF has as many employees as it has. It's a relatively big agency to be what it is. It has, according to Aughie's notes, 5,285 employees as of you hearing this in early March. But who knows how many employees it will have? When we tell you things like employee size and budget size, we are talking about numbers prior to DOGE and the current Trump administration.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because the figures I was able to find and be able to fact check, these are figures from during the Biden administration.
N. Rodgers: We don't know how many employees. It could have two employees now.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia is correct. A little over 5,800 employees with a budget of almost $1.5 billion.
N. Rodgers: That's some actual money. That's starting to be money with the federal government. A billion.
J. Aughenbaugh: A couple hundred thousand is pocket change.
N. Rodgers: Nothing. That's a rounding error.
J. Aughenbaugh: Those are the loose coins.
N. Rodgers: In the couch. When you're vacuuming, you're like, look, in the corner, a penny.
J. Aughenbaugh: Hey, there's a dollar bill. But nevertheless, Nia, I'm going to ask this question, and listeners, I'm asking this question simply because I want Nia's reaction. On what authority in the US Constitution was ATF created?
N. Rodgers: Was it the Commerce Clause?
J. Aughenbaugh: It was the Commerce Clause.
N. Rodgers: The Commerce Clause is the reason for all things. Why does the moon circle the Earth? The Commerce Clause. Why are there molecules in the air? Commerce Clause. The sun rises and sets on the Commerce Clause. By the way, we are going to call it the ATF because that's its common nomenclature, even though it's technically the ATFE. We're going to call it the ATF. That actually is not super surprising considering that one of the things that you would be doing is transporting alcohol, tobacco, and firearms across state lines. I can see why the Commerce Clause would be involved.
J. Aughenbaugh: When it was created in 1886, it was a part, a unit of the Department of the Treasury. It was formed as the "revenue laboratory" within the Treasury Department's Bureau of Internal Revenue. Basically, what Congress intended was for the revenue laboratory to trace those who made money on the sale of alcohol. What you're talking about here are the people who were producing illegal alcohol, which in me and Nia's part of the United States were bootleggers and moonshiners.
N. Rodgers: That's right. The people who chased them down were revenuers.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: That's why you get the revenue laboratory. Revenuers were the people who chased you down and tried to find your still, tried to find your stash.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because they wanted to cut of the taxes.
N. Rodgers: It's always about the money. You can always follow the money. The answer to every single question in the federal government comes down to, at some point, funding. But this is before prohibition. They were trying to deal with what we pejoratively call the black market. Goods that are sold outside the normal streams of selling goods because those are taxed. If you had at that point been importing rum from the Bahamas or Jamaica, then you would have paid import taxes, and the government would have gotten its cut. This is people who are trying to get around that, and then the revenuers who are trying to get the taxes.
J. Aughenbaugh: Where the revenue laboratory becomes really important is, Nia, what you just mentioned. When the Constitution was amended to prohibit the sale of alcohol, then the revenuers became the Bureau of Prohibition in 1920, and it was an independent agency in the Treasury Department during prohibition because it was part of the federal government's effort to enforce the Volstead Act.
N. Rodgers: That's the 18th Amendment?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: It's 18 and 21.
J. Aughenbaugh: For listeners, if you don't know, just because the Constitution says the government has the authority to do something, for instance, the 18th Amendment prohibited the sale of alcohol and spirits, Congress typically has to pass a law to enforce that provision within the Constitution. That's the Volstead Act. What happens when you get the repeal of prohibition? Well, the unit then was transferred from Justice.
N. Rodgers: It's in the Treasury. It gets transferred to Justice, there's now law that they are trying to enforce which is prohibition.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's not just taxes.
N. Rodgers: At that point, it's also destroying the alcohol itself.
J. Aughenbaugh: It was part of Treasury because in part, Treasury was trying to collect tax. Well, with the Volstead Act, you're trying to stop the actual sale.
N. Rodgers: It moves to justice for that reason.
J. Aughenbaugh: It moves to justice for that reason.
N. Rodgers: Whenever you see people hacking up, well, not all people, because sometimes women did it just for whatever. But when you see guys with axes going at the barrels and pictures, that tends to be these guys. Well, they are ATF, the revenuers who are coming along and destroying the alcohol.
J. Aughenbaugh: But after prohibition.
N. Rodgers: Which is 1932, '33 somewhere along in there?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, because the Volstead Act was repealed in the first year of the Roosevelt administration, December of '33.
N. Rodgers: Then we move back to the Treasury, because it's no longer illegal. Now, it's about money again.
J. Aughenbaugh: Many of the federal government agents that were enforcing the Volstead Act, including Eliot Ness and his Untouchable went to work for the Alcohol Tax Unit of the Bureau of Internal Revenue in the Treasury Department.
N. Rodgers: Because now we've moved away from revenuing and back to taxes.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: No. Revenuing is taxes. We've moved from illegal to taxes.
J. Aughenbaugh: Prohibition of sale to the collection of tax. That's all fine and Dandy but the Bureau of Internal Revenue gets renamed in the early 1950s as the Internal Revenue Service, which we still have today, the infamous IRS.
N. Rodgers: IRS.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. The alcohol tax unit was given the additional responsibility of enforcing federal tobacco tax laws. Now we have alcohol and tobacco. But this is still part of Treasury. That's fine throughout most of the 1950s and '60s. But then in 1968, Congress passed the Gun Control Act, which we have previously discussed on this podcast in the previous episode. The agency's name changed yet again. Now we have another taxed item. We have now alcohol, tobacco, and firearms, but still part of the IRS.
N. Rodgers: Part Treasury. That's when you get ATF. It could have been ATG. It could have been alcohol, tobacco, and guns, but they chose firearms. Which I think rolls off the tongue a little bit better.
J. Aughenbaugh: But Congress has not done tinkering.
N. Rodgers: Of course not. Because Congress lives to tinker. Well, these days, they don't they. Now they don't do much of anything. Back then, they were still trying to do stuff.
J. Aughenbaugh: They were passing all kinds of laws. In 1970, Congress enacted the Explosives Control Act. Nia, what gets added to ATF?
N. Rodgers: The E. The Explosives. It's now the alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives.
J. Aughenbaugh: Explosives.
N. Rodgers: There's an Oxford comma in there.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. ATF gets moved from the IRS back to Treasury. Which I'm not entirely sure why Treasury all of a sudden was going to be regulating explosives. But nevertheless.
N. Rodgers: See, IRS is independent from Treasury. It moves back under Treasury?
J. Aughenbaugh: Two years later, it becomes a standalone bureau within the Treasury department. Oh, my God, this is so confusing.
N. Rodgers: Your timeline here, you need a very long piece of paper.
J. Aughenbaugh: You need a scorecard. It's like I'm at a baseball game. The manager decided to go ahead and replace most of the infield with a whole bunch of subs, and we spend two innings trying to figure out who's playing shortstop, who's at first base. Oh, and we have a brand new pitcher. Really, dude?
N. Rodgers: Well, can you imagine being employee of this thing every two years? You're like, Who do we work for? What are we doing?
J. Aughenbaugh: When we still were using business cards, you imagine how much the government print office was just like, Wait, you want a new set of business cards? Are you guys kidding?
N. Rodgers: I'm not sure that the ATF leaves a business card, Aughie. I'm just going to say that has not been my experience of them, at least in things that I've seen them do.
J. Aughenbaugh: When they show up to serve a warrant.
N. Rodgers: They're generally not like, da-da-da, here's my business card. They have that big thing with the flat thing on the end that they smack your door down, and they're yelling, Put your hands up. We will get, by the way, to the problematic aspects of the ATF. We are going to get to that.
J. Aughenbaugh: But think about the symbols on their business cards. You'd have a bottle of booze, you have a tobacco leaf, a firearm.
N. Rodgers: An explosion.
J. Aughenbaugh: An explosion. No, those would be cool business cards.
N. Rodgers: They would be cool business cards. They'd be very, who's that guy that makes all the exploding movies? Oh, his name Michael.
J. Aughenbaugh: Michael Bay?
N. Rodgers: Yes. They would be very Bay cards.
J. Aughenbaugh: Bay-ish cards. I think we just came up with a new name there, by the way. During this period of time, during the 1970s, the ATF was collecting billions of dollars of alcohol and tobacco taxes. They even initiated a whole bunch of regulations of federal wine labeling.
N. Rodgers: California wines was starting to have a reputation at that point and needed to be protected, so you had to declare the origins.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then you had other states who wanted to get into the winemaking business.
N. Rodgers: But they also wanted to be careful to not compete in terms of, it's like if anybody's wondering, there is official Parmesan cheese from an official part of Italy which stamped and marked and all this other stuff. Then there's, like, fake Parmesan cheese. It's not fake, but it's not from that area and it doesn't get to carry those markings because those markings change the value of that cheese.
J. Aughenbaugh: But the history changes yet again after what seminal event in US history, Nia?
N. Rodgers: 911.
J. Aughenbaugh: 911.
N. Rodgers: Which is we find changes a lot of things. 911 reorganizes the government in a lot of ways.
J. Aughenbaugh: After the 911 attacks, Bush 43, President Bush, our 43rd president signed into law the Homeland Security Act of 2002. Now, in addition to creating the Department of Homeland Security, ATF once again gets shifted from treasury back to the Department of Justice.
N. Rodgers: Less worried about the money, more worried about security and enforcement.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is where we get the current name, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. What is it? BATFE, ATF, AFTE. But everybody still refers to it as ATF. In addition to collecting federal tax revenue, they now have the important function of enforcing all laws, to regulate all of these potentially harmful
N. Rodgers: Explosive events.
J. Aughenbaugh: Commercial activities.
N. Rodgers: They also have the investigative responsibility.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, they do.
N. Rodgers: When something explodes, for instance, the Murray building. When Timothy McVeigh blew that up, the people who did the investigation of the explosives part of it was the ATF.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, I don't know if you picked up on this in my prep notes, but I was completely unaware that the ATF has a Fire Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, where they do full scale mockups of criminal arson.
N. Rodgers: The only reason and I did see that in the notes, and I did know about that because I saw a documentary on it. You're right. They can build a house inside this building. They can build a mock up of a house, and then they set it on fire to see if it burns in the proper way. They can say, this is how this started. It started in this room, it started in this way and it is. It's to track arson and to be able to say, we know a person set this fire. We know this was how it was done. It is pretty impressive. The government has these odd, well, not just the government because in Tennessee, University of Tennessee has the body farm which does a similar thing for coroners where they do things to human bodies to see how they decompose so that they can then say, this is how this person died or this is where they were when they died, that thing. It's really cool the way the government and entities like universities build things like that so that we can understand the world and how things in the world work. Being able to understand arson is huge because for a long time, we didn't understand how people set fires and how that thing. There've always been arsonists probably I don't know, since fire. But it's always been hard to prove that and now they have better ways of proving it.
J. Aughenbaugh: The science of fire.
N. Rodgers: People go there and study, don't they? Don't they hold classes and stuff for arson investigation.
J. Aughenbaugh: That laboratory has created a compendium, if you will, of how fires are created.
N. Rodgers: I assume video, that would be interesting to see it, wouldn't it?
J. Aughenbaugh: If you're speaking of the ATF, listeners, many Americans are familiar with this agency because of various controversies. We're going to spend a few minutes talking about these controversies. The first to that I was able to find in my research was a series of congressional committee hearings in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
N. Rodgers: Started that early.
J. Aughenbaugh: Started that early. In fact, I got my hands on a senate subcommittee report that was quite critical of ATF enforcement tactics. In particular, the senate subcommittee revealed evidence that the ATF focused its firearms enforcement efforts on individuals who basically lacked criminal intent and knowledge. In other words, ATF seemingly was arresting a whole bunch of people who made mistakes on background check forms, etc. They weren't intending to buy firearms.
N. Rodgers: Illegally.
J. Aughenbaugh: To commit crime. They were people who wanted to buy a firearm, and like many of us screwed up.
N. Rodgers: The form.
J. Aughenbaugh: The form, which at that time, and even to this day, is a prosecutable offense.
N. Rodgers: Ask Contra Biden. If lying on that form. Now, he lied on his form. But there was also just, I didn't know that's what this part of the form meant. I didn't know I was supposed to fill it out in this particular way. But can I just say that to me, that's not the biggest. My biggest mental image when anybody says, why is the ATF controversial is Ruby Ridge.
J. Aughenbaugh: That was the next example I was going to give.
N. Rodgers: Because messing with people over a form, eventually, judges can throw that out, and it can be dealt with. But Ruby Ridge was truly a tragedy like, that was just bad juju all around.
J. Aughenbaugh: For our listeners who are unfamiliar with this infamous event and Ruby Ridge, the standoff began in June of 1990. The actual events that led to the standoff occurred, months before. It centered on the fact that this guy, Randy Weaver, sold two unregistered short barrel shotguns to an ATF informant, Kenneth Fadeley.
N. Rodgers: He did that in June of 1990. He sells these guns.
J. Aughenbaugh: No, the standoff actually began in June of 1990. The events leading up to it occurred before.
N. Rodgers: No, I thought he missed his court date in '91.
J. Aughenbaugh: Standoff beginning.
N. Rodgers: I think he sold that in 1990, and he booked it up by selling him guns that were too long.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. Well, the ATF claimed the guns were too long, but the shotguns were later found to be shorter than allowed by federal law, which required registration as a short barreled shotgun.
N. Rodgers: And a payment.
J. Aughenbaugh: Of a $200 tax.
N. Rodgers: Of a $200 tax, which Randy Weaver did not want to pay and Kenneth Fadeley did not want to because these are dudes out in the woods. They don't want to pay a $200 tax. That's a lot of money, relatively speaking, and neither one of them have a lot of money.
J. Aughenbaugh: ATF brings firearm charges against Weaver, but they agree to drop the charges. Classic plea bargain. We agree to drop the charges if you, Weaver, agree to become what?
N. Rodgers: An informant.
J. Aughenbaugh: An informant. He refuses. The ATF passed false information about Weaver to other agencies, and they profiled Weaver as having explosive booby traps, tunnels, and bunkers in his home, that he was growing marijuana and that there were numerous felony convictions that he incurred, and he was a bank robber.
N. Rodgers: Basically, they lied. They lied about him to other agencies to bring pressure on him.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: To try to get him to do what they wanted him to do.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. He misses a hearing.
N. Rodgers: Wait. He's acquitted of the gun charges.
J. Aughenbaugh: Charge, yes.
N. Rodgers: He loses to ATF. This is an important factor in this. Sorry, ATF loses to him.
J. Aughenbaugh: He's acquitted.
N. Rodgers: He's acquitted, but then he misses a court date because somebody tells him the wrong date.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, probationary officer told him the wrong date.
N. Rodgers: He doesn't show up to the court date. They use this as a reason to send out the marshals to get him.
J. Aughenbaugh: The United States Marshals Service. Yep.
N. Rodgers: There is some question about whether that was deliberate or not. The probation officer said it was not deliberate, but Randy Weaver had been a pain in the butt to the ATS, to the US Marshals, to the local law enforcement for a while, because he was that guy.
J. Aughenbaugh: The Marshals Service shows up in August of 1992. Now we're two years into this mess, and they encounter Weaver, a friend, a bunch of family members, and resulting shootout killed a marshal, Will Degan, Weaver's son and Weaver's pet dog. Now, the games on.
N. Rodgers: Because at this point, it's a standoff.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's a standoff.
N. Rodgers: Now it's a standoff because people have died.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Everybody's emotions are involved.
J. Aughenbaugh: A beloved family pet is killed.
N. Rodgers: His son is killed.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: He's not going to stand for that, and the cops aren't going to stand for it because one of theirs has been killed, a US Marshal has been killed.
J. Aughenbaugh: At this point, and this is now during the Clinton administration, The Justice Department sends out the FBI's hostage rescue team, and they surround the cabin.
N. Rodgers: This is when it gets even more off.
J. Aughenbaugh: We're at fault, yes. A hostage rescue team sniper fires at Weaver, misses and kills Weaver's wife. That's the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.
N. Rodgers: He surrendered, and he surrendered his family, but she was holding their baby. She was holding an infant child when she was shot. Forgive me, but that was pretty unforgivable. That was pretty awful on the ATF's part. For this guy, over two guns that were in $200. That is what went down here, and Randy Weaver's wife and son were shot because of that, and the US Marshal lost his life. None of this had to happen.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, listeners, remember, at trial, Weaver was acquitted, and the ATF was declared to engaged in entrapment.
N. Rodgers: That's what happened here. They were embarrassed, and they were mad, Then a year later.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good Lord.
N. Rodgers: A year later, you get something, listeners, which I will tell you now is the Waco siege. Starting with the Waco siege, so what you have are the Branch Davidians. The Branch Davidians are following David Koresh, and David Koresh is a small, we're just going to call it what it was a cult where he told them that he was the second coming of Christ, and they believed him, and they were all living on this compound in Waco, Texas. They were nutty, let's be honest. They were odd as a group, and there were some issues, but what drew the attention of the federal agencies was the amount of guns that they were purchasing and stacking up because as many Doomsday cults do, they were preparing for an end time siege. They were preparing for the end of the world and having to defend themselves. They were buying an awful lot of guns, which drew the attention of the ATF and other folks.
J. Aughenbaugh: In February of 1993, the ATF accompanied by the press, because the ATF was hoping to shall we say, resurrect their damaged reputation after Ruby Ridge, they show up to the Branch Davidian compound to execute a federal search warrant for all the aforementioned firearms that Nia just described. Unfortunately, the branch Davidians were alerted to the upcoming warrant execution.
J. Aughenbaugh: But ATF leaders pressed on even though the element of surprise was long gone.
N. Rodgers: Even though they had said ahead of time that if they lost the element of surprise they would not do it.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: But adrenaline got the better of them.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. There was a resulting exchange of gunfire that killed six Branch Davidians and four ATF agents. Once again, the FBI was called in their hostage rescue team. A 51-day standoff ensued that eventually ended on April 19th, 1993, after the complex caught fire.
N. Rodgers: There's some question about whether it was deliberately set on fire or not. A side note to this, my good people, is that one of the people who was watching this 51-day siege was one Timothy McVeigh, who two years later, blew up the Arthur M Murrah building.
J. Aughenbaugh: In Oklahoma City.
N. Rodgers: In Oklahoma City. This cascade of events, Randy Weaver and then Waco and then Oklahoma City can all be traced back to the ATF being, for lack of a better word, I'm just going to go here, Aughie, and you can correct me, jerks.
J. Aughenbaugh: They were employing questionable assertive tactics.
N. Rodgers: That's a better way to put it. I'm going to shorthand it to jerks, but you're right. The part of what they did was they got emotionally involved in it. Once you get emotionally involved and there are guns involved, somebody's going to get hurt.
J. Aughenbaugh: For a number of the agencies we're going to be reviewing in this series, listeners, there are critics of these agencies, they use the adjective rogue. The ATF, starting in the late '70s, but in particular in the early 1990s was being criticized as a rogue federal agency. Where Congress was not providing very much oversight. You had back-to-back presidential administrations that didn't seem to want to rein in the ATF. The Justice Department leadership, including Bill Clinton's Attorney General, Janet Reno, took some serious criticism. In fact, Reno eventually resigned and took ownership for what happened, particularly after the Branch Davidians.
N. Rodgers: The only positive I can think out of all of that was when she said to Congress, "The buck stops with me." It's my responsibility, and then she resigned, which was the right thing to do, because it did stop with her. If I sound strident, listeners, and if I sound like I don't like the ATF, it's because I think both of these situations were so poorly handled. That they opened the door not only to Timothy McVeigh but to Aryan Brotherhood, to a lot of other things, a lot of other American terrorist organizations that point to these kinds of events and say, this is government overreach. This is the government attempting to kill us one by one. Do you know how many people died at Waco? Seventy-six people. Twenty of whom were children. What on Earth? How could it possibly have ended this way? Yet it did.
J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners, if you think that Ruby Ridge and Waco were the only two incidents, we got one more, folks.
N. Rodgers: Much more modern.
J. Aughenbaugh: Much more recent, but this one is also very troubling. The ATF and other law enforcement agencies for years have employed a tactic that's referred to as gun walking, or letting the guns walk. Basically, the idea is, you put guns out on the street to see how the illegal operation or illegal sale of guns actually materializes. You're trying to figure out, okay, how the black market actually works.
N. Rodgers: Then, listener, so let's just say that I am a notorious gun dealer of illegal guns. Aughie comes in, and he's like, I need an illegal gun. I'm like, all right, I'll sell you an illegal gun. I sell him an illegal gun. An illegal could be a variety of reasons. It's stolen. It's not up to spec. All these different things that make a gun illegal. I sell that illegal gun to Aughie. Aughie goes home, gathers up his 800 kilos of weed that he's about to sell to whoever. When he gets arrested, the cops can then say, and he was in possession of an illegal gun. Because they can track that gun and they can use it to bring more charges against Aughie. That's one of the theories behind this. But what if Aughie goes home and he just sells that gun to somebody else? Then they sell it to somebody else. Now we've lost track of where the heck that gun went. I think there's some real sketchy questions with letting guns walk.
J. Aughenbaugh: In particular, this was a tactic used in the Arizona field office of ATF.
N. Rodgers: About cartels. Trying to catch the cartels.
J. Aughenbaugh: They ran a series of sting operations between 2006 and 2011, and they were trying to go ahead and track the guns to the Mexican drug cartel leaders, which would give them yet another reason to arrest them. If you couldn't arrest them for what you believe was illegal drug sales, you would at least be able to get them on possession of illegal guns.
N. Rodgers: Aughie goes home and he manages to sell his 800 kilos of weed without me being able to catch him, but if I catch him at the border on the way back and he's got that gun in his car, I can at least get him for that. What was the name of this program?
J. Aughenbaugh: The operation was given the title Fast and Furious because the agents discovered that a number of individuals, most prominently Jacob Chambers, belonged to a car club so they went ahead and named it Fast and Furious after the movie.
N. Rodgers: The movie?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, the movie franchise.
N. Rodgers: Sometimes I wonder if government agents aren't just 19 year old college dudes like playing games in their underwear, in their apartments, and skipping school. Anyway.
J. Aughenbaugh: Each of the weapons that were provided to Chambers and his car club were equipped with a GPS unit. However, what they found out was the GPS battery life was only a few days and the weapons tracker signal was routinely lost, and especially in car trunks.
N. Rodgers: Aughie buys this gun, he throws it in the trunk of his car. He waits ten days before he murders somebody with it, and there's no way to track that gun.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Sorry. Not that I'm accusing you of murder, but you know that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Basically what happened was, the ATF monitored the sale of about 2000 firearms. But within a couple of years, they were only able to recover 710 of them, which meant that, again, I'm not a math major.
N. Rodgers: Thirteen hundred guns.
J. Aughenbaugh: Thirteen hundred guns were just floating around.
N. Rodgers: That the ATF had put into the system.
J. Aughenbaugh: The system, yes.
N. Rodgers: These are in addition to the illegal guns that already find their way into the system. These are ones that they put into the system to try to track back and have a reason to arrest people.
J. Aughenbaugh: What the ATF eventually had to acknowledge in testimony in front of the United States Congress was that ATF guns, as part of their Fast and Furious operation, were found at crime scenes on both sides of the Mexican, United States border and, in fact, one of the United States border patrol agent was killed with one of these guns. What was it, the total? A hundred and fifty Mexican civilians were maimed or killed. It harmed diplomatic relations between Mexico and the United States because Mexico was like, what are you doing arming our cartels? They already have.
N. Rodgers: Exactly. My gosh. Mexico's going, wait, you didn't think we had enough of a problem that you wanted to add 2,000 guns into the mix? My goodness
J. Aughenbaugh: It went the whole way up to the upper levels of the Obama administration because in June 12, 2012, so this is right before the 2012 re-election, Attorney General Eric Holder refused to testify in front of Congress, and he became the first sitting member of the United States cabinet that was held in contempt of the United States Congress because he refused to turn over any internal memos in regards to how the Obama administration responded and who approved it.
N. Rodgers: Let's not hold Barack Obama innocent in this. He invoked executive privilege to prevent those memos from coming to light. This was a mess from start to finish.
J. Aughenbaugh: It all started with an ATF field office that eventually led to the office of president. You had dead bodies on both sides of the border. You had federal government agents being killed. You had Mexican civilians that were being killed because of ATF guns, simply because they wanted to track how guns moved in the black market. Yeah.
N. Rodgers: After enough stonewalling, it got dropped.
J. Aughenbaugh: It got dropped..
N. Rodgers: If you wait long enough, things go away.
J. Aughenbaugh: But in terms of the organization, I'm not going to do this with all the agencies, but the ATF is the classic top down organization. Nia, it has a director, a chief of staff, a chief counsel, a deputy director. They have office of field operations. Of course, they got an HR department. They got a management department. They got an office of enforcement. They got an office of professional responsibility, which is the ATF's version of internal affairs. These are the ones.
N. Rodgers: People who investigates themselves. I bet that doesn't work out, but anyway. I'm a little crabby about this, about the ATF.
J. Aughenbaugh: They got an office of public and government affairs. These are in liaison with other law enforcement. Office of science and technology which is where the big explosive lab in Beltsville, Maryland reports. The office of strategic intelligence, and then it has 26 field divisions scattered across the United States, typically in major cities.
N. Rodgers: Well, which is where most of that work would take place so that makes sense.
J. Aughenbaugh: Now, you want to talk about a few of the criticisms before we wrap up our work?
N. Rodgers: I should be a little more fair in my criticism.
N. Rodgers: I think that the ATF focuses highly on individuals and doesn't focus on the flow of guns in the United States.
J. Aughenbaugh: If there is a shared criticism, Nia, to your point between conservatives and liberals, is that the ATF does not focus on large-scale organizations involved in illegal gun sales.
N. Rodgers: They focus a lot on individuals and their individual gun purchases and choices and not on people who are selling hundreds of guns at a time.
J. Aughenbaugh: Now, where conservatives and liberals diverge is that for liberals, ATF should be focusing on stopping all gun violence and removing the flow of guns, whereas conservatives are like, why are you targeting individual legal gun owners? But both liberals and conservatives, if they have a common critique of the ATF is, why are you not going after those organizations that make readily available illegal guns? Now, as I pointed out, and I found this even in articles that are generally positive about the ATF, another criticism of the ATF is that it is a "rogue agency that has not had enough oversight by either the Congress or multiple presidents of both political parties."
N. Rodgers: The thing about the ATF is, if a president comes down on the ATF, people will say, it's crime prevention and he's trying to stop crime prevention, and he's trying to blah, blah, blah. If he doesn't come down on them, then they're a rogue agency that gets to do whatever they want. Presidents cannot win with the ATF.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because if you're a Democratic president and you come down hard on the ATF.
N. Rodgers: You'll be soft on crime.
J. Aughenbaugh: You're soft on crime. If you're a Republican president and you come down hard on the ATF, then you get criticized how, Nia?
N. Rodgers: By gun owners, who're like, Second Amendment rights there, buddy.
J. Aughenbaugh: Either way.
N. Rodgers: You don't win.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, this points to the larger problem in the United States in regards to our relationship with guns. We are so unwilling to address the fundamental tension that we have in this country right now between gun ownership and gun violence.
N. Rodgers: I completely agree. You notice that the ATF, the only part that we talk about are the firearms. We don't argue about the alcohol. We don't argue about the tobacco. We certainly don't argue about the explosives. Yes, please remove explosives from the world. We're all fine with that. But, man, when it gets to the firearms part, it goes off the rails fast.
J. Aughenbaugh: Fast. If you think about alcohol and tobacco, according to our public health friends, alcohol and tobacco are deadlier than guns.
N. Rodgers: Alcohol definitely kills more people in terms of if you combine alcohol and vehicles.
J. Aughenbaugh: With vehicles.
N. Rodgers: They come with warning labels. They ought to put warning labels on guns. This gun may be deadly in the wrong hands.
J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners, you may be thinking that we're being somewhat jokey about this. No, we're being somewhat serious about this, because all four of the items that ATF is supposed to regulate kill people. Alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and explosives, no matter what their purpose is, no matter how they are used are deadly.
N. Rodgers: I'm not sure that if you have an organization that's supposed to regulate four of the most deadly things on the planet, that they should also be going rogue. One would think they need more oversight, not less oversight because of the things they are working with and the potential, the cost in human life. I'm not mad at individual ATF agencies, I'm just mad at how sometimes the decisions get made to go after individuals or to go after organizations in ways that go pear-shaped really fast.
J. Aughenbaugh: We recognize that the ATF has a difficult job simply because at least three of the four items they're supposed to regulate; alcohol, tobacco, and firearms are enjoyed by millions of Americans.
N. Rodgers: Exactly. It's not like it's a rare thing they're dealing with. They're dealing with extraordinarily commonplace, deadly objects.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is an agency that's supposed to go ahead and regulate and make sure that these items are purchased correctly and that they are taxed. A whole bunch of Americans are just like, why are you telling me how to go ahead and drink my alcohol or whether or not I can make alcohol? Why are you telling me that I need to go ahead and pay a tax on tobacco. I'm an adult, I can make my own decisions. Well, yeah, but you should be purchasing legally trafficked tobacco products. Don't tell me how many guns I need to have, I live in a crime-infested neighborhood. Yeah, but you need to buy them legally. We need to be able to track this stuff.
N. Rodgers: I don't want to be tracked, I'm not a criminal. In fairness to the ATF, there's 5,000 of them, and there's 330 million people in the United States. They're outnumbered hugely. That's got to have a psychological effect of there's very few people actually doing what we might think is a very important function. Taking shortcuts is not a surprise. When you have that few people trying to do that big a job, they're going turn whatever corner they can turn. It often ends up deadly, and that's really scary.
J. Aughenbaugh: We start off this series with a bang. I'm sorry.
N. Rodgers: Metaphorical, and horrible.
J. Aughenbaugh: Literally and figuratively. Listeners, hopefully, you'll enjoy this series as we progress. Thanks, Nia.
N. Rodgers: Thank you, Aughie
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