Knew it all along, apparently

Charlie Savage has an article in The New York Times about recent moves by the BATFE:

Three White House officials were told about the existence of a gun trafficking investigation in Arizona that led to the replacement of the administration’s top firearms official, according to newly disclosed emails the Justice Department sent to Congress this week.
But the emails do not contain any discussion of the tactics of the investigation called Operation Fast and Furious that have made it the subject of a heated Congressional inquiry. The authorities monitored suspected “straw buyers” in an effort to identify who they were working with, rather than moving quickly to arrest them and take their guns off the street.
The documents, first disclosed by The Los Angeles Times, emerged days after a major shakeup related to the Fast and Furious oversight investigation. The Justice Department announced the resignation of the United States attorney in Phoenix and the replacement of the acting head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
After the shakeup, the two Republican lawmakers leading the oversight investigation. Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Representative Darrell Issa of California, said they would press on. One aspect of their inquiry has been an effort to identify any high-level Obama administration official who sanctioned or knew about the investigative tactics used in Fast and Furious.
No evidence has emerged that there was any high-level authorization for the tactics, however, and ATF supervisors and higher-level Justice Department officials have said they did not know about the tactics at the time, let alone brief their superiors about them.
While the newly disclosed emails do not supply evidence to the contrary, they do shed new light on a back-channel communication between the ATF supervisor on the case and a White House official that included some discussion of the existence of Fast and Furious.
The bureau supervisor, William Newell, testified in July that he occasionally spoke about Southwest border gun trafficking with Kevin O’Reilly, a member of the White House’s national security staff who handled North American issues. The two were old friends, and O’Reilly was then on loan to the White House from the State Department, where he has since returned.
The newly-disclosed emails show that their conversations about gun trafficking issues were more extensive than previously known. Newell made passing reference to the existence of a case that appears to be Fast and Furious, although he did not name it, in two email chains in July and August of 2010. In a third exchange, from February of 2011, he named the case, which had just been unsealed.
All three sets of emails focused on matters other than the operational tactics of Fast and Furious, however. Newell discussed the difficulty of getting access to evidence in Mexico, statistics of overall gun trafficking investigation efforts in the region, and how to get media attention in Mexico to the newly unsealed case.
The emails also indicate that this past July, after Newell told O’Reilly that a temporary “surge” of additional ATF agents to the Phoenix division was helping them to catch up with a backlog of leads on several investigations, O’Reilly passed on that information to two other national security staff officials: Dan Restrepo, the senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs, and Greg Gatjanis, the director of counterterrorism and counternarcotics. Newell had described one of the investigations as a “very large” case involving the Sinaloa cartel, apparently a reference to Operation Fast and Furious.
Fast and Furious, which was led by the Phoenix division of the federal firearms bureau, ran from late 2009 to early 2011. Its strategy of putting suspects under surveillance in an effort to identify a larger network is commonly used in drug trafficking cases. But it ran against the tradition of the ATF for gun trafficking cases, where the priority has instead been on moving as soon as possible to get weapons off the street.
The tactics were controversial among bureau agents, and the case exploded after last December, when a Border Patrol agent, Brian Terry, was killed in a shootout in Arizona. Two weapons found near the scene had been bought by one of the suspects in the Fast and Furious case earlier that year.
Other documents released by Grassley and Issa shed new light on the reaction by ATF officials in Phoenix and a federal prosecutor working on the case after Terry was killed; the agents arrested the suspected straw buyer who had originally acquired the weapons within hours of the discovery of the guns near the scene.
However, the documents show, ATF officials and the prosecutor decided to charge the man in connection with his purchase of a different set of weapons. One of the bureau officials wrote that doing so would avoid divulging the existence of “our current case (Fast & Furious) or the Border Patrol shooting case” and “not complicate the FBI’s investigation.”
In a letter to the new acting United States attorney in Phoenix, Ann Scheel, that accompanied the newly disclosed documents about the reaction to Terry’s death, Issa and Grassley demanded internal emails from her office and interviews with three prosecutors who work there. “Since your office directed and approved the daily tactical decisions in Operation Fast and Furious, it is hard to avoid the perception that a conflict of interest exists,” they wrote.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department this week reduced the number of violent episodes in the United States in which a firearm linked to Fast and Furious was recovered. It said there have been only two, one of which was the killing of Terry, not eleven, as it had previously told Congress, based on what it said was an ATF error. The department did not disclose what the other episode was. But it also disclosed that violent crimes were associated with 28 of the guns linked to the Fast and Furious investigation that were recovered inside Mexico. It did not say how many instances were involved.
The department has previously said that about two thousand guns were entered into a database as linked to Fast and Furious because they were purchased by suspected straw buyers, although several hundred had been bought before the buyer in question had attracted the attention of investigators. Of that number, about 600 had been recovered as of July.

Rico says this is yet a major fuque de clusteur, but he's still amazed that the producers of Fast and Furious, the movie, haven't tried suing somebody in the ATF over their purloining of the name...