By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Published: July 4, 2011

Pat Sullivan/Associated Press

Kenneth E. Melson, acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

 

WASHINGTON — The last time the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was caught up in scandal, its director faced accusations of lavish spending on his new office. Before he resigned, Congress, flexing its oversight muscles, decided the Senate would confirm all future A.T.F. chiefs.

That was five years ago. Nobody has been confirmed, and the nation has been without a chief firearms inspector ever since.

Today, the bureau is again under scrutiny, this time over a gun-trafficking investigation in which federal agents knowingly let weapons slip across the Mexican border; two later turned up in Arizona, where an American Border Patrol agent was killed in a shootout. Congress and the Justice Department are investigating; President Obama vowed last week to take “appropriate actions” when the facts come out.

The fracas over the operation, called Fast and Furious, could cost another A.T.F. official — Kenneth E. Melson, the acting director — his job. But it has also renewed long-simmering questions about whether the bureau — hobbled by the volatile gun politics of Washington, a lack of permanent leadership and its own missteps — should even continue to exist.

“There are those in Congress and outside of Congress that would like for the A.T.F. to just go away, but I’m not one of them,” said Representative Elijah E. Cummings, a Maryland Democrat who, just back from a fact-finding trip to Mexico, plans to introduce legislation this week to strengthen the bureau’s powers. “They catch hell inside and out.”

The A.T.F. is a scandal-scarred outfit with a storied past. It traces its history to Alexander Hamilton and the days of the Whiskey Rebellion; during Prohibition, detectives from its precursor agency, a division of the Treasury Department, went after bootleggers, moonshiners and cigarette smugglers. Eliot Ness, the famed Chicago crime fighter, was among the agents.

In modern times, the bureau, now housed in the Justice Department, is concerned mostly with enforcing gun laws and regulating the gun industry, an unusual dual mission that has put it at odds with the National Rifle Association, one of the most powerful lobbying forces in the capital. The bureau has botched some high-profile operations, like the deadly 1993 raid on the compound of the Branch Davidian cult near Waco, Tex., which prompted the N.R.A. to brand its agents “jackbooted thugs.”

The Fast and Furious operation has plunged the A.T.F. into its worst crisis since the Branch Davidian assault. A report issued last month by two powerful Republicans, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Representative Darrell Issa of California, found that agents of the bureau, using a surveillance technique known as gun-walking, watched loads of legally bought weapons move from straw purchasers to third parties, hoping the guns would lead to bigger criminal targets.

But some agents, troubled by the operation, blew the whistle to Congress after two of the guns were found at the scene of the killing of the Border Patrol agent, Brian A. Terry. Now, critics like Mr. Grassley and Wayne LaPierre, the head of the rifle association, are casting the A.T.F. as a bureau run amok.

“Honest to gosh, it sure appears as a rogue agency at this point,” Mr. LaPierre said, while Mr. Grassley complained of a “cowboy mentality” and a “culture of stonewalling.”

The bureau’s defenders, including former agents and gun control advocates, take a different view. They see an agency that has resorted to operations like Fast and Furious because Congress, under the influence of the gun rights lobby, has left it weak and ineffective.

The Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986, for instance, banned the A.T.F. from conducting more than one unannounced inspection of a gun dealer per year, and made it tougher for the agency to revoke the licenses of dealers who break the law.

Congress has blocked the bureau from keeping a centralized computer database of gun transactions. Advocates say a database would make it easier to trace weapons, reducing the need for complex surveillance operations like Fast and Furious.

“They’re left with literally trying to physically follow these guns out of the gun shop,” said Dennis Henigan, vice president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

At the same time, the N.R.A. has fought hard against measures intended to limit the number of guns that can be bought at a single time. That makes it easier for legal bulk purchases to morph into illegal trafficking, said Joe Vince, a retired A.T.F. agent who runs a consulting firm and also directs criminal justice programs at Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland. “Normal people don’t buy 10, 50, 100 guns at a time,” Mr. Vince said. “If you do, you’re a crook. Why aren’t we doing something about that?”

Mr. LaPierre, of the rifle association, scoffs at the notion that he or his four million members are to blame for the A.T.F.’s troubles, calling it “preposterous nonsense.” Yet even the agency’s lack of a permanent director is caught up in the Washington debate over gun rights.

In 2006, while the last permanent director, Carl J. Truscott, was being investigated for his spending habits, the N.R.A. prodded Congress to require Senate confirmation for the job. Mr. LaPierre said his organization wanted “more light and more scrutiny” on the bureau. Michael Bouchard, a retired A.T.F. agent, says he was among a number of employees who warned against it.

“We said, ‘We’ll never get a director confirmed, even if it was the pope,’ ” Mr. Bouchard recalled.

Michael Sullivan, nominated by President George W. Bush in 2007, never won Senate approval and ran the agency in an acting capacity. Mr. Obama installed Mr. Melson as acting director in April 2009. In November 2010, the president nominated Andrew Traver, who runs the Chicago A.T.F. office and is opposed by the N.R.A. He has yet to get a hearing before the Judiciary Committee. A spokeswoman said the panel was still reviewing documents.

“I think they are trying to make sure that somebody who’s anti-Second Amendment doesn’t get in, but what’s wrong with that?” Mr. Grassley said, referring to the rifle association. “You wouldn’t want somebody who’s anti-civil rights running the civil rights division.”

With 2,500 agents and a budget of roughly $1 billion, the A.T.F. has long been a stepchild to the bigger and more prestigious Federal Bureau of Investigation, and some say the two agencies should merge. Among them is Jim Kessler, a founder of Third Way, a centrist policy organization here, who said a merger would insulate the bureau.

“It needs to be within the cocoon of a much stronger, unassailable law enforcement agency,” Mr. Kessler said, adding that the N.R.A.’s aim is to “keep it weak, but keep it alive.”

Indeed, the idea of putting the A.T.F. out of business draws opposition from various quarters for different reasons.

Mr. LaPierre said Congress must give the bureau “a complete scrub from top to bottom” before deciding its future. Mr. Grassley wants to find out if Justice Department higher-ups were “pulling the strings in Fast and Furious.”

Representative Cummings, who concedes that the bureau made mistakes, wants to strengthen the agency, though his bill is unlikely to pass. And he would like to see it have a leader.

“All this is about life and death,” he said. “This is serious stuff. At some point we have to leave our political hats at the door.”

Chris Keane/Reuters

Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Association.

Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press

Michael Sullivan never won Senate approval for the post.

Joshua Roberts/Getty Images

Carl J. Truscott, the last permanent director of the A.T.F.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/us/politics/05guns.html?_r=1&hp