It just has to be a conspiracy

On October 11th, 2001, federal Prosecuting Attorney, Thomas Wales was murdered in the dead of night at his home. He was shot through the window of his Seattle home office as he sat working at his computor.

Mr. Wales was a gun-bigot of the highest order, and took great zeal in using his position to invesigate and prosecute people who he believed were breaking federal firearms laws. You could say that he, like is his predecessor, William Redkey, relished the harrassing of firearms owners with investigations and then using string and bubblegum to put cases together against them. With good use of the jurist selection/denial system, Wales got a number of firearms ignorant juries to convict a goodly number of lawful firearms owners and collectors, and that doesn’t count the number of families who were put in debt from having to defend themselves against cases brought by Mr. Wales before a grand jury would refuse to issue prosecution orders.

Which is why the FBI originally believed that it was a 2A zealot who murdered him.

Later they focused on, and did everything but file charges and name, a local airline pilot whom Wales was investigating for fraud.

If you take a look at the date of Wales’ murder you will notice that it was exactly 30 days after September 11th, 2001. Since that horrible day, and especially in the first couple years that followed, the FBI focused a great deal of their attention in the investigation of domestic terrorists and had little more than an agent or two to the Wales murder. Sadly, no charges have been filed in this case nearly six years later, as you have probably already guessed.

I mention all of this because leftosphere bigwig, Digby, wrote about this case in relation to the Gonzales/US Attorney Firing kerfuffle after reading a post by James Fallows in The Atlantic Online.

At Fellows’ post you will read that

Other reports over the years have emphasized that this same “prime suspect” was a gun enthusiast and zealous opponent of anyone he considered anti-gun. If – as is generally assumed – Wales was murdered for reasons related to his gun safety efforts and his past prosecutions, he would be the first federal prosecutor killed in the line of duty.

This is a rumor most likely started started by someone at the local Brady affiliate, Washington Ceasefire (whom Wales just-so-happened to also be the head of during his time as a federal prosecutor). After this idea was presented to the media, local area 2nd Amendment groups made a FOIA request of the available records on the case involving the airline pilot and not a single one of them show any correllation to anything involving firearms. If you were to go to Washington Ceasefire today and ask for a statement on this topic, they would probably give you the exact same line of BS, quite possibly verbaitm, since they ar fond of repeating it.

But now I’m straying off the topic.

The connection Fallows makes from this case to the kerfuffle is that one of the US Attorneys fired was John McKay, also of the Seattle area prosecutor’s office. Nearly a year and a half before his actual firing, Gonzales had recommended McKay for dismissal. His reasons for this recommendation was simple:

McKay wanted to violate federal law to investigate the murder of Thomas Wales

Since the time of Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Seattle Office of the FBI had been attempting to get their hands on the records of NICS background checks. McKay had been pushing relentlessly to help them get their hands on these records. And since they have been doing so, both Ashcroft and Gonzales have been, thankfully, denying them access to the records.

As you probably already know, in the legislation that set up the NICS “Instant-Check” system, set up a list of rules which strictly forbid the keeping of records of firearms purchases for more than 90 days; and that those records were only to be used to audit the NICS system.

Attorney General Janet Reno was sued by the NRA for keeping these records open for over six months (and other sources claim “years”) in what was believed to be an attempt to start up a defacto registration database of firearms purchases (it was after this set-up was shut down that the BATFElchers started regularly visiting FFL’s and transcribing their sales record longbooks).

Yet again, I have strayed from the topic.

Fellows contends that it was McKay’s vigorous and repeated attempts to help his and the FBI’s hands on these records sealed the deal, so to speak, in Gonzales’ decision to fire him.

I would seriously hope that a US Prosecuting Attorney’s attepts to violate federal law in the wake of his prosection would be grounds for dismissal. The courts said back in 2001, months before Wales was murdered, that six months was as long as the government could hold the records and that the records could be used for auditing the NICS system only. No other use was allowed. To get this changed, McKay would have had to sue his employer or break the law.

Never mind that the records he would have needed to find the possible purchase of the murder weapon had already been destroyed and that his attempts to get at them for his stated purpose was just a bullshit excuse to open the NICS system for prying federal eyes. That he had not the balls to take his employer to court over something he supposedly felt very stronly about makes me wonder whose agenda he was working for: The grieving family of Thomas Wales or the Brady’s.

Which is what pissed me off so much about Digby’s post (linked above); he takes Ashcroft’s and Gonzales’ blocking of the FBI’s attempts to get at the NICS records for supposed “terror investigation” purposes as their being at the end of the NRA’s leash.

When it was discovered that the federal government was keeping a database of anti-depressant prescriptions, the left went apeshit nuts. When it was leaked that the FBI was tapping the phones of known terrorists outside the country who were calling into the US, the left went apeshit nuts. Etcetera, etcetera, on and on, when even a fantasized possibility of a civil rights violation is brought out into the guano-light, the left goes apeshit.

Unless you are a gun owner. Then any and all violations of your civil rights are hunky-dory, so long as they “feeeeel” safer.

Hypocrites all. I swear.

And make sure you click on the link to the comments of Digby’s post. It begins with a commentor who actually claims that it was the ChimpyMcHilterBurtonCroft conspiracy to kill Wales and progresses to repeated accusations that “the NRA is keeping dangerous pilots in the air”.