Senate Judiciary Committee Oversight Hearing with Attorney General Eric Holder, Nov. 8, 2011
Hernandez and Wide Receiver
Senator Feinstein: "My understanding is that the practice of letting guns walk first occurred in 2006 as part of Operation Wide Receiver, and again the next year as part of the Hernandez investigation."
Operation Wide Receiver ran from 2006 to 2007, and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer has said that approximately 350 guns were walked in the case. The Justice Department has produced very few documents from the time period when Wide Receiver was conducted, but what they have provided indicates that the case involved a cooperating gun dealer and real-time notice of suspect purchases, and yet multiple guns ended up in Mexico. When the Justice Department revived the case for prosecution in 2009 to 2010, the prosecutors recognized these factors constituted gunwalking.
On the other hand, the Hernandez investigation took place in late 2007 and involved a controlled delivery, not gunwalking. In a controlled delivery, law enforcement watches to see that their target goes through with the steps of a crime in order to see that they have the requisite intent, but then interdicts the guns afterwards. Documents produced by the Justice Department make clear that in the Hernandez investigation, Mexican law enforcement waiting on the other side of the border failed to interdict the weapons. The Hernandez investigation is different from Fast and Furious and apparently from Wide Receiver in that those cases involved no safeguards and the government of Mexico was never informed about them.
Documents supporting the FACTS.
