There’s a long chain of Obama scandals and ‘Fast and Furious’ has been mostly forgotten except by its victims. The people responsible? They went on to bigger and better things.

Take the resume of Ed Siskel. Media accounts keep mentioning the irrelevant fact that he’s the nephew of film critic Gene Siskel. More relevantly, Siskel was a key figure in the Fast and Furious arms trafficking scandal, who performed so well that Obama brought him in as a crisis manager to fight Republican investigations into Benghazi and Solydra.

Here are excerpts though from Siskel’s glory days at the DOJ when arms were flowing down to Mexico.

The Office of the Deputy Attorney General was also involved. Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler and his staff were briefed extensively on the enormous volume of firearms involved in the case. Individuals in that office, including Ed Siskel, received constant updates on recoveries of large numbers of weapons connected to Fast and Furious.

Siskel knew nothing. So he went on to help Obama cover for various other scandals, like Benghazi, in which everyone also knew nothing.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler, Associate Deputy Attorney General Ed Siskel, and other officials from the Office of the Deputy Attorney General attended a detailed briefing on Operation Fast and Furious in March 2010. Despite the evidence presented at the briefing of illegally-purchased firearms being recovered in Mexico and in the U.S., Grindler and Siskel failed to ask probing questions or take any significant follow-up action to monitor and supervise the conduct of the case.

No one at Justice Department headquarters have provided complete and accurate answers to the Terry family. During their respective transcribed interviews, Monty Wilkinson stated 38 times that he “did not recall” or “did not know.” In a similar fashion, Gary Grindler did so 29 times, and Ed Siskel 21 times. In two different transcribed interviews, Dennis Burke said he “did not recall” or “did not know” a combined total of 161 times.

Obama officials quickly had to master the art of I “did not know” how a diplomatic facility came under siege with no relief and why they lied about it. And Ed was on the case.

Siskel’s first big task was to handle subpoenas and prep witnesses for the inquiry into Solyndra, a solar panel company that got a government-backed loan but then went bankrupt. As members of Congress explored how the loan was granted, Siskel dug through the evidence and built an argument that the loan went through the regular channels.

Not long after, as an inquiry began into how the administration responded to the terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, Siskel set to reading all of the email traffic from the days in question.

When an unnamed source described one of the emails to a reporter, triggering news stories about whether the White House had sanitized what happened, Siskel pointed out that the email did not say what the source had claimed it did about Benghazi, helping the White House defuse the controversy.

Over the months, Ruemmler said, Siskel got better at spotting what was “going to be ‘a thing.’”

“The way those battles are won is by having a thorough understanding of the facts,” she said. “Just like he knew what the email said, what the context of it was, why it shouldn’t be interpreted the way it was being interpreted … he had a mastery of the facts.”

Clearly, a skill now in demand at the Biden administration prepping to fight congressional investigations.

“Ed Siskel’s many years of experience in public service and a career defending the rule of law make him the perfect choice to serve as my next White House Counsel,” Biden said in a statement Tuesday, announcing the new hiring.

Is that how we’re defining “the rule of law” now?

The March 12, 2010, briefing presented Siskel and Grindler with overwhelming evidence of illegal straw purchasing during Fast and Furious. The presentation included a chart identifying the straw purchasers, 31 in all, and the number of weapons they had acquired by that date, Three of these straw purchasers had already purchased over 100 weapons each, with one straw purchaser having already acquired over 300 weapons. During this briefing, they learned that buyers had paid cash for every single gun. Grindler made a handwritten note of this fact, along with the fact that the money for the purchases was being wired to Western Union:

It’s okay. Ed just explained, “why it shouldn’t be interpreted the way it was being interpreted.”

Article posted with permission from Daniel Greenfield

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