Investors Business Daily: White House Knew about Fast and Furious

When former Special Agent in Charge (SAC) for the Phoenix division, William Newell, testified before the House Oversight Committee on June 26th, Rep. Labrador (R-UT) asked him about some e-mail correspondence Newell had with Kevin O'Reilly, it may have been the most revealing line of questioning of the day.

Via IBD:

A former ATF special agent tells Congress a National Security Council staffer was informed about Operation Fast and Furious before guns allowed into Mexico wound up at the murder scene of a U.S. agent.

The latest evidence that both the White House and attorney general knew and approved of Project Gunrunner and its deadly offshoot, Operation Fast and Furious, came this week in the testimony of William Newell, ATF special agent in charge of the Phoenix office, before Rep. Darrell Issa's House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

That the "stench of cover-up," as Fox News analyst Brit Hume described the administration's handling of the matter, may reach even into the Oval Office itself was evidenced by Newell's testimony that he communicated with Kevin O'Reilly, a staffer on President Obama's National Security Council, about Operation Fast and Furious in September 2010.

O'Reilly was national security director for North America tasked with monitoring the activities of Mexican drug cartels. We are asked to believe he inquired about a program that was providing the cartels with guns but kept what he found out to himself.

As if that didn't implicate Newell enough, in his e-mail to O'Reilly, he included the phrase, 'You didn't get this from me.' When asked why he was communicating with a White House staffer, Newell said it was because the two had been friends for several years.

Uh, yeah, right.

Read it all.