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From Los Angeles Times

ATF director to resign, agency sources say

Kenneth E. Melson's exit would be the biggest response yet to the uproar over an operation that allowed the sale of weapons to suspected agents of Mexican drug cartels.

by Richard A. Serrano and Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times

June 21, 2011

The acting director of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is expected to step down because of a controversial gun-running investigation that allowed weapons to be sold to suspected agents of Mexican drug cartels, according to two sources inside the agency.

Kenneth E. Melson's resignation, which could happen as early as this week, is the most significant repercussion yet from a growing public outcry over the code-named Fast and Furious operation, under which ATF agents watched while straw purchasers acquired more than 1,700 AK-47s and other high-powered rifles from Arizona gun dealers and delivered them to others.

Hundreds of the weapons turned up at crime scenes in Mexico and the U.S., including in southern Arizona last December where a Border Patrol agent was shot to death.

At a House hearing last week, internal government documents showed that Melson was closely involved in overseeing the operation and received weekly briefings. Documents released by Congress showed that he asked for and received log-in information and a link to an Internet feed so that he could watch some of the illegal straw purchases taking place in an Arizona gun store.

Melson became acting director in April 2009 and has remained in place because gun rights groups have held up confirmation of the proposed permanent director, Andrew Traver, head of the ATF's Chicago field office.

"Traver has been deeply aligned with gun control advocates and anti-gun activities," the National Rifle Assn. said in January. "This makes him the wrong choice to lead an enforcement agency that has almost exclusive oversight and control over the firearms industry, its retailers and consumers."

Sources in the agency, who asked not to be identified because the process remained fluid, said Traver could not serve as acting director while his nomination remained under consideration. So it was not clear whether Traver would step in immediately or whether someone else would be named acting director.

"Melson is out," one source said. "Traver is flying into Washington to meet with the Justice Department," the ATF's parent agency. "The administration still favors him because he will do what the Department of Justice instructs him to do."

But the source said that Traver, although close to Obama through their Chicago connections, did not have "the rank and file" support from agents around the country.

"We need someone permanent in that slot," the source said. "It's been five years since we've had a permanent director. That's the rub."

A second source, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said "the feeling on the inside is that Melson is going to resign and that they will have Traver in place in Washington to do a press conference and show there is no gap in the leadership."

Officially, the ATF declined to address the reports.

"Melson continues to be focused on leading ATF in its efforts to reduce violent crime and to stem the flow of firearms to criminals and criminal organizations," Scot Thomasson, the agency's chief spokesman, said Monday. "We are not going to comment on any speculations" about his status as head of the agency.

Melson's resignation would mark the most significant response yet to the outcry over Fast and Furious. But it would probably fall far short of resolving questions in Congress and among Mexican lawmakers over who authorized the operation.

In interviews with The Times, several disgruntled agents have said they were told the operation had been approved at the highest levels in Washington.

The operation marked a rare instance in which ATF agents allowed guns to "walk" into the hands of criminals, ostensibly with the goal of catching higher-ups in gun-trafficking organizations.

"We want to know what felony stupid bad judgment led to allowing this investigation at the highest levels," Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said at last week's hearing.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement Monday that Melson's departure would not clear up his committee's questions.

"It would be a shame if the Justice Department makes Mr. Melson the only fall guy for this disastrous strategy — there's plenty of blame to go around at both the ATF and the Justice Department," Grassley said in a statement. "A resignation by the acting director would be, by no means, the end of our inquiry. Congressman Issa and I are eager to talk to Mr. Melson and hear his side of the story as soon as possible."

A clue to where the congressional inquiries are going might lie in a sealed document that was inadvertently released partially because of the investigation. The document makes it clear that at least one wiretap application under Fast and Furious, in March 2010, was signed by Assistant Atty. Gen. Lanny A. Breuer, head of the Justice Department's criminal division.

Department officials reacted angrily when the document's heavily redacted cover letter was recently made public, saying it justified their refusal to turn over other sensitive documents.

One ATF source, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to speak publicly, called Melson a career Justice Department attorney who "got terrible advice from his inner circle. Ken Melson is an attorney. He was not raised as an agent. …If you spend just 10 minutes in our academy for new agents, you know our mission is to deny guns to criminals. And yet they told Melson this was OK."

Three agents from ATF's Phoenix office testified before Issa's committee last week that they had repeatedly objected but were told to back off surveillance once the guns were transferred to third parties.

"Several special agents in the group, including myself, became increasingly concerned and alarmed at [Phoenix management's] refusal to address or stop the suspected straw purchaser from purchasing additional firearms," Agent Olindo James Casa told the committee.

"On several occasions I personally requested to interdict or seize firearms in such a manner that would only further the investigation," he said, "but I was always [ordered] to stand down and not to seize the firearms."

Mexican lawmakers believe that at least 150 Mexicans have been killed or wounded with weapons smuggled in the operation. And the ATF has estimated that at least 372 of the guns have been recovered in Arizona and Texas, mainly at crime scenes.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-atf-20110621,0,5452293,print.story

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From the Department of Homeland Security

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The “If You See Something, Say Something” Campaign Hits the Links

The Department of Homeland Security launched a new partnership with the U.S. Golf Association to bring the “If You See Something, Say Something ™” public awareness campaign to the U.S. Open—an effort that will help ensure the safety and security of spectators, employees, volunteers, and athletes by identifying and reporting suspicious activity.

The “If You See Something, Say Something ™” campaign—originally implemented by New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority and now licensed to DHS for a nationwide campaign—is a simple and effective program to engage the public and key frontline employees to identify and report indicators of terrorism and crime to the proper transportation and law enforcement authorities.

In preparation for the U.S. Open this weekend at Congressional Golf Course in Bethesda, MD, the Department conducted briefings for volunteers and security personnel on suspicious activity reporting. Also, posters are up in employee and volunteer areas directing them where to report suspicious activity.

DHS has recently launched “If You See Something, Say Something™” partnerships with organizations such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Football League (NFL), Indianapolis 500 as well as in several states including Colorado, Minnesota and New Jersey, more than 9,000 federal buildings nationwide, Walmart, Mall of America, the American Hotel & Lodging Association, Amtrak, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, the general aviation industry, and state and local fusion centers across the country.

In the coming months, DHS will continue to expand the “If You See Something, Say Something ™” campaign nationally to help America's business, communities and citizens remain vigilant and play an active role in keeping the country safe. More information about the campaign is available on DHS.gov.

http://blog.dhs.gov/2011/06/if-you-see-something-say-something.html

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From the Department of Justice

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Assistant Attorney General Laurie Robinson of the Office of Justice Programs Speaks at the National Center for Victims of Crime Annual Conference

Washington, D.C. ~ Monday, June 20, 2011

Thank you, Mai, and I'm delighted to be here, and good morning to all of you. I want to thank Attorney General Biden for his great commitment to these issues. I know he's been stalwart, throughout his career, in his work on behalf of crime victims. And, by the way, he's another Justice Department alum. We're so grateful for his leadership in the great state of Delaware.

And let me thank Mai and her staff for their partnership with OJP. They've been terrific allies in our mutual efforts to strengthen victims' rights and improve victim services. I'm grateful – and I know I speak for Mary Lou and Joye, as well – that we've been able to rely heavily on their guidance and direction. The National Center truly is a voice for all victims.

Today, more than ever, victims need advocates like the National Center – and like all of you. In spite of the good news about declining crime rates, victim services – like other criminal justice and public safety programs – are struggling to fulfill their missions in a tough economy. I doubt that's a surprise to any of you in this room. Victim assistance programs have always operated on marginal budgets, and the current fiscal climate is making it even harder for you to do your jobs.

On top of these budgetary hardships, you're also facing an array of new crimes and new types of victimization. If the sheer number of victims doesn't present problems – and I'm sure in some cases it does – then surely the diversity of your clients' needs poses a significant challenge.

And, of course, there's the ongoing struggle to meet the needs of historically underserved populations like Native American victims, victims with disabilities, immigrant victims, and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer victims. We're definitely doing a better job of reaching these groups today – and I want to applaud the National Center for its groundbreaking work with the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs to raise awareness of the issues faced by LGBTQ victims. But in spite of all this great work, there are still far too many service gaps.

We are, as I've said many times, at a crossroads in victim services and public safety – and I think it's a good time to re-assess where we are as a field and define for ourselves what we want victim assistance to look like in the 21 st century.

It's been 13 years since we've stepped back as a discipline to take stock of how we're doing. When I was Assistant Attorney General under Janet Reno, we released New Directions from the Field, which was the first time we had made a broad assessment of the field as a whole since the 1982 President's Task Force on Victims of Crime. New Directions highlighted the tremendous progress the nation had made in improving victims' rights and services – and issued a number of recommendations for improving the field's response to victims.

But here we are, more than a decade later, and while we've made good progress in many areas, we've frankly made too little progress in others. One of the problems, as all of you know too well, is that a number of new challenges have arisen. We've been forced to deal with the complicated issues stemming from mass violence and terrorism, and we've had to confront new problems related to technology.

And of course there are crimes we knew little if anything about in the late 90s that now demand special attention – human trafficking, for example, which presents significant cultural and language obstacles for service providers.

But the problem is even broader than addressing specific types of crime. We also need to renew our strategy. With the support of the Attorney General and the President – and members of Congress – the Crime Victims Fund is providing more resources to the field than ever before. But I don't think we do enough with those resources. In fact, from what we're hearing, the field is still struggling to maintain even basic services for our traditional constituencies.

As someone involved in this field of victim services for more than 30 years, I find this very unsettling when you consider the unprecedented deposits in the Crime Victims Fund.

In my view, we conceive of victim services too narrowly – it's a domestic violence shelter or a rape crisis center. We sometimes fail to think holistically and consider integrating victim services with other disciplines, both inside and outside the justice system. Traditionally, victim assistance has been seen as a function of criminal justice. But think about it, we know that most victims never see the inside of a courtroom, and many victims have no interaction with the system at all. We need to ask: Is our conception of victim services outdated?

The time has come to think more expansively about how and where victims receive services and to broaden our mission beyond serving individual victims to strengthening communities and improving public safety.

In other words, it's time we take a step back and re-focus our vision for victim services.

Beginning last year – and really even before that – we began setting the wheels in motion for a major reassessment of the victim services field that we call “Vision 21: Transforming Victim Services.” And I want to give credit where it's due here. Joye has been shepherding this initiative, and it really has been a labor of love on her part. It's hard to imagine more passion going into this effort.

This is an exciting undertaking, and we've already had some great conversations with the field. The goal of Vision 21 is to examine the state of the crime victims field and determine how to meet both the enduring challenges the field continues to face and the emerging issues that we're still trying to get our heads around. This is, as I suggested a moment ago, not just an exercise in filling in the gaps and trying to find out whether and how to shift resources. This is a strategic effort to assess where we are in being able to respond to victims' needs.

We've already held four stakeholder forums where we've brought together people from both the victim service field and from non-traditional groups to identify the issues and brainstorm ideas about how we can strengthen our service capacity. These forums have generated some interesting and lively discussions, and they've given us a great deal to think about.

For example, we've heard there's a huge need for more data and research on victimization. I couldn't agree more. I think we've become accustomed to relying, almost exclusively, on the power of victims' stories and on forceful advocacy, which have been effective and should remain central to our strategy. But in an era of diminishing resources, we're going to need hard data and solid evidence to inform policy and programming decisions.

This, by the way, has been my mantra. Shortly after I returned to OJP in 2009, I launched what we call the Evidence Integration Initiative – or E2I, for short. This is an OJP-wide effort, supported by the Attorney General, to expand our base of knowledge about “what works” in preventing and reducing crime and improving services.

And the goal is not just to expand our knowledge base, but to get that information out to practitioners in a way they can use it. This synthesis of research and practice is sorely needed throughout criminal justice, and I think clearly it can benefit the victims field.

We've gotten other feedback from the forums, as well. We've heard that our collective approach to serving victims is fragmented – that too often services are driven not by victims' needs but by the funding stream that supports the program. Service providers do their best to respond to the victims they see, but often they're spending a great deal of time looking for funding opportunities and dealing with the administrative tasks associated with grants – and that's – frankly – time taken away from services!

Another theme we've heard is the need for wrap-around legal services. Right now, victims' legal needs are partly addressed by a patchwork of clinics and organizations funded for different purposes. This puts the burden on the victim to sort out what she needs and where she should go for help – and I don't think any of us consider this an ideal approach. Ideas have been floated about institutionalizing a national network of legal clinics designed to meet victims' needs and enforce victims' rights. This may be one way of ensuring that holistic approach I mentioned earlier.

So these discussions have been thoughtful and enlightening. We'll be holding one more forum in Charleston in September to synthesize all the information gathered to date, and determine how to present it to the field. We're also conducting literature reviews to really make sure we have a thorough grasp of the issues and challenges facing victim services.

The outcome of all these meetings and information gathering exercises will be a final report that will include a set of recommendations on how we can move the field forward. It will also have a blueprint for a national demonstration project or multiple demonstration projects to implement the recommendations.

What we hope to have in our hands at the end of all this is a strategy that lays out actions that state, local, tribal, national, and federal agencies can take to meet the challenges of victim services in the 21 st century. In other words, a guide for the future of victim services in our country. Pretty ambitious? Yes. But critically important.

I want to really commend Joye and her staff – especially Meg Morrow – for the incredibly hard work they're putting into this effort. And I want to thank Mai and her staff – Susan Howley, in particular – for their partnership here.

This is the kind of visionary project that we need now. We hear a lot of talk these days about innovations in policing, transformative shifts in thinking about corrections and reentry, and national movements like Justice Reinvestment that transcend politics. The victims field also needs to be part of these era-defining trends in public safety.

I'm eager to see what the near future will bring here. I'm not sure we can envision exactly what it'll look like, but I know with all of us working together to shape it – thinking together in new ways and re-imagining our potential – the victim service field will be stronger, more effective, and better able to ensure a safer and more just world.

Thank you.

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