Arizona US Attorney resigns and ATF acting director is reassigned

PHOENIX - The US Attorney for the District of Arizona is resigning from his position, almost two weeks after testifying in front of Congressional investigators.

Dennis Burke, who testified about his involvement in the controversial ATF Fast and Furious investigation during a closed-door hearing August 18th in Washington, DC, delivered a letter to President Barack Obama regarding his decision to resign.

Read the letter Dennis Burke sent to President Obama.

He also sent an email to his staff Tuesday.

Burke made no mention of his involvement in the Fast and Furious case in any of his departure notifications.  He did not make mention of his recent testimony either.

The ABC15 Investigators have been covering this story for months. After searching through police reports and official government documents, we discovered assault weapons linked to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ controversial "Fast and Furious" case had turned up at crime scenes in Glendale and Phoenix communities.

During one Phoenix traffic stop from April, we linked 43 weapons to the ATF strategy.

According to the testimony of three Phoenix ATF agents, at least 1,800 weapons could be on the streets in the United States and Mexico, possibly in the hands of criminals.

RANKING HOUSE OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM DEMOCRAT RELEASES SOME OF BURKE'S TESTIMONY

According to Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the leadership changes will help the ATF move forward with its main mission.

“In their interviews with the Committee, Mr. Melson and Mr. Burke both acknowledged that mistakes were made and that Operation Fast and Furious lacked adequate protections for public safety," Cummings said.

"Fresh leadership will allow ATF to move forward and focus on its vital mission of enforcing our nation’s gun laws,” he said.

Cummings' staff also released the following details from Burke's testimony August 18, 2011:

Mr. Burke testified before the Committee on August 18, 2011, that he had been unaware of the tactical details of Operation Fast and Furious and did not know that agents were not interdicting weapons when they had probable cause to do so. He stated:

I take responsibility. I'm not going to say mistakes were made. I'm going to say we made mistakes. I am the United States Attorney for the District of Arizona.

I get to stand up when we have a great case to announce and take all the credit for it regardless of how much work I did on it. So when our office makes mistakes, I need to take responsibility, and this is a case, as reflected by the work of this investigation, it should not have been done the way it was done, and I want to take responsibility for that, and I'm not falling on a sword or trying to cover for anyone else.

I think that's literally how the system operates, which is I'm the chief law enforcement officer, Federal law enforcement officer for the District of Arizona. ATF doesn't report to me, FBI doesn't report to me, DEA doesn't report to me or CBP. With that said, if investigations are conducted in my district and that have gotten to the prosecution stage, I have a responsibility regardless of what I knew or when, I want the record to reflect that I really want to take responsibility for anything that occurred in this case and faults and what we can learn to do better in the future on cases like this.

Mr. Burke also testified that it was never DOJ policy to allow guns to “walk” across the border or to not interdict weapons when there was probable cause to do so:

Q: Did anyone from Main Justice, from the Justice Department headquarters, ever come down and tell you there is in fact a different policy that we are going to allow guns to go across the border in order to build bigger cases?

A: No.

Q: Did anyone ever discuss – from the Department of Justice main headquarters – your supervisors – ever discuss with you or raise to your attention that there was a new policy with respect to interdiction of weapons or surveillance of firearms?

A: No. Not that I can recall at all.

Q: And did anyone ever – from the Department of Justice, Main Justice I will call it, ever tell you that you were authorized to allow weapons to cross the border when you otherwise would have had a legal authority to seize or interdict them because they were a suspected straw purchase or it was suspected that they were being trafficked in a firearms scheme?

A: I have no recollection of ever being told that.

Mr. Burke concluded that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona did not adequately supervise the case and the conduct of the ATF agents in Phoenix. He stated: “There are steps that we should have taken in this investigation with the role of our office that should have been done differently at every level involved.”

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN ISSUES STATEMENT

"I thank Dennis Burke for his many years of dedicated public service to the people of Arizona and