Mexican drug cartels’ US reach expanded over 300 percent in two years

New Fast and Furious docs released by White House
WASHINGTON - Late Friday, the White House turned over new documents in the Congressional investigation into the ATF "Fast and Furious" gunwalking scandal.

The documents show extensive communications between then-ATF Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix office Bill Newell - who led Fast and Furious - and then-White House National Security Staffer Kevin O'Reilly. Emails indicate the two also spoke on the phone. Such detailed, direct communications between a local ATF manager in Phoenix and a White House national security staffer has raised interest among Congressional investigators looking into Fast and Furious. Newell has said he and O'Reilly are long time friends....

Fast & Furious “smoking gun”?
...There are two possible explanations. The first is that the anti-gun Obama administration deliberately wanted American guns planted in Mexico in order to demonize American firearms dealers and gun owners. The operation was manufacturing “evidence” for the president’s false claim that we’re to blame for the appalling levels of Mexican drug-war violence.

If this is true, then Holder & Co. have got to go — and the trail needs to be followed no matter where it leads. For the federal government to seek to frame its own citizens is unconscionable.

A second notion is that the CIA was behind the whole thing, which accounts for all the desperate wagon-circling. Under this theory, the Agency feared the los Zetas drug cartel was becoming too powerful and might even mount a coup against the Mexican government. So some 2,000 weapons costing more than $1.25 million were deliberately channeled to the rival Sinaloa cartel, which operates along the American border, to keep the Zetas in check.

Of course, there’s a third explanation — that both scenarios are true, and that those in charge of Fast and Furious saw an opportunity to shoot two birds with one Romanian-made AK Draco pistol....

Friday night F&F document dump shows “extensive” communication with White House
...In other words, the White House knew that the guns had gone over the border, and treated it like an academic exercise. O’Reilly apparently never asked in his capacity as a national security adviser, “What the hell were you thinking in allowing the guns to get across the border?” Instead, O’Reilly wondered if a similar operation in Texas produced a cool map, too.

It sounds as if the Obama administration was on board the idea to allow guns to transit the border, and at the very least shows that no one can claim surprise at the outcome. The White House’s lawyer tried to spin it anyway, writing to the Oversight Committee that “none of the communications between ATF and the White House revealed the investigative law enforcement tactics at issue in your inquiry, let alone any decision to allow guns to ‘walk.’” That may be true — at least as far the documents the White House released, but that’s not all of the communications...