By Anthony Martin; Examiner.com

A brewing scandal at the Department of Justice involving an illegal scheme to pad statistics on U.S. guns in Mexico threatens to erupt as U.S. Senator Charles Grassley of the Senate Judiciary Committee begins an investigation.  ATF agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives–a DOJ agency–allegedly smuggled U.S. guns into Mexico in order to bolster the Department’s disputed contention that Mexican drug cartels are armed primarily with U.S. guns.  Whistleblowers within the ATF contend that one of the these guns was used to kill Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry in December of 2010. News of the murder and the underlying scandal that prompted it was first reported on December 28, 2010.

Rather than launch an internal investigation into the murder and the illegal scheme, the Department of Justice under Eric Holder, according to ATF whistleblowers, instead attempted a coverup.

The continually breaking scandal has been reported by Fox News, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, Politico, CBS News, Newsday, the Mexican press, and various TV and newspaper outlets in Arizona.

However, the Washington Post story merely parrots the official DOJ coverup line that the gun smuggling by ATF agents never happened.

Denials are now part of standard operating procedure at the DOJ as the news media and Senator Grassley close in. Grassley’s inquiries have been met with stonewalling.  But it appears that Grassley’s office so far isn’t buying DOJ denials. National Gun Rights Examiner David Codrea reports that Senator Grassley sent a personal memo to Eric Holder stating, ‘The Terry family deserves answers.’

And the American citizens deserve answers.

As violence continues to erupt along the southern border due primarily to the dangerous activity of the Mexican drug cartels, the standard explanation of the Obama Administration has been that the mayhem of the cartels can be laid squarely at the feet of so-called ‘lax U.S. gun laws’ that supposedly enable armed criminal activity.  Were it not for U.S. guns, so the explanation goes, then dangerous Mexican gangs would not be so dire a threat to the safety and security of citizens who live in border states.

Not only has it been demonstrated that such an allegation is entirely false, the new revelations concerning the activity of rogue ATF agents show that so desperate was the agency to prove its bogus charge that cartels are armed with U.S. fireams that some agents were willing to smuggle American guns into Mexico, placing them directly into the hands of the cartels.

Whistleblowers at the agency insist that their allegations are true, which casts a new cloud of suspicion over the Holder Justice Department.

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