Yeah, but not fired

Charlie Savage has a followup article in The New York Times about the BATFE:

The Obama administration has replaced two top Justice Department officials associated with an ill-fated investigation into a gun-trafficking network in Arizona that has been at the center of a political conflagration. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced the resignation of the United States attorney in Phoenix, Dennis K. Burke, and the reassignment of the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Kenneth E. Melson.
The two officials became the highest-profile political casualties yet in the fallout from a disputed effort to take down a weapons-smuggling ring based in Arizona and linked to Mexican drug cartels.
Run by the bureau’s Phoenix division, the operation, called Operation Fast and Furious, ran from late 2009 to early 2011. Its strategy was to watch suspected “straw” gun buyers, rather than moving as quickly as possible to arrest them and seize the weapons, in the hope of identifying higher-level conspirators, as drug investigations are often conducted.
The operation was internally controversial because the firearms bureau traditionally puts a priority on getting guns off the street. It also lacked adequate controls; one straw purchaser bought more than six hundred weapons, and agents lost track of hundreds. Many later turned up at crime scenes in Mexico, and two were recovered at a site in Arizona where a United States Border Patrol agent was killed.
After that killing, bureau agents opposed to the operation reached out to Congress, and two Republican lawmakers— Representative Darrell Issa of California, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, and Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa— began an investigation. On Tuesday, they vowed to press on. “Today’s announcement is an admission by the Obama administration that serious mistakes were made in Operation Fast and Furious,” Grassley said, “and is a step in the right direction, that they are continuing to limit any further damage that people involved in this disastrous strategy can do. We’re looking for a full accounting from the Justice Department as to who knew what and when, so we can be sure that this ill-advised strategy never happens again."
Democrats have been largely muted in response to the investigation. Holder also asked the Justice Department’s inspector general to examine the operation. And Democratic lawmakers have joined in criticizing its tactics, while objecting only to Republicans’ efforts to blame senior Obama administration officials for them.
Such accusations have been repeatedly contradicted by testimony from Justice Department and ATF supervisors, including Melson and Burke, that there was no policy directive from Washington or the administration to adopt such an investigative strategy. The two men have also said that they had not known the details of the operation’s tactics, let alone briefed their own superiors about them.
Issa repeated his claims on Tuesday, saying that his committee “will continue its investigation to ensure that blame isn’t offloaded on just a few individuals for a matter that involved much higher levels of the Justice Department.”
Holder did not directly address the operation in his statement thanking Burke, but he referred indirectly to the management distractions, commending “his decision to place the interests of the U.S. Attorney’s Office above all else.” Holder also named B. Todd Jones, the United States attorney for Minnesota, as the new acting director for the firearms bureau, a beleaguered agency that has long been hobbled by gun-rights politics. Five years ago Congress required that the agency’s director be approved by the Senate, but no nominee has since been confirmed. Jones, who also is the chairman of Holder’s advisory committee of prosecutors, will remain a United States attorney.
“I know it’s been a challenging time for this agency, and for many of you,” Jones wrote in an email to the firearms bureau. “As we move forward, we face a more important challenge than what’s been going on outside of ATF these last several months: what’s going on inside ATF.”
Other officials associated with the star-crossed operation have also been swept away in recent weeks. Two ATF Phoenix division supervisors, William Newell and William McMahon, received lateral transfers to positions in Washington. Emory Hurley, an assistant United States attorney in Phoenix who worked on the operation, was transferred to the office’s civil division from its criminal division.
Melson is taking a low-profile position as a “senior advise” for forensic science issues at the Office of Legal Policy in the Justice Department. By contrast, Burke— who was considered a rising Democratic star in a state run by Republicans— is returning to private life. Burke did not return calls on Tuesday. But, in newly released excerpts of his private testimony to Congressional investigators this month, he took responsibility for the operation even as he said he had not known about its tactics. “I get to stand up when we have a great case to announce and take all the credit for it, regardless of how much work I did on it,” he said. “So when our office makes mistakes, I need to take responsibility, and this is a case, as reflected by the work of this investigation, it should not have been done the way it was done, and I want to take responsibility for that, and I’m not falling on a sword or trying to cover for anyone else.”

Rico says it's too bad Melson wasn't named Hare...