WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The head of the agency that oversaw a botched attempt to track arms flowing to drug cartels in Mexico is being reassigned to Justice Department headquarters, the Obama administration said on Tuesday.
Kenneth Melson, who has been acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, has been under fire and admitted mistakes in the sting operation meant to try to crack down on the flow of weapons to violent drug gangs.
He will be reassigned to the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy as an adviser on forensic science, the Justice Department said. The attorney for Minnesota, Todd Jones, will serve as acting ATF director.
In further fallout from the operation, the attorney for Arizona, Dennis Burke, has resigned and the lead prosecutor on that case in the office has been reassigned, according to an administration official.
Another administration official said this is a chance for a "fresh start given everything they've gone through lately" at ATF.
The operation, dubbed "Fast and Furious," has spawned congressional and internal Justice Department probes and put the Obama administration on the defensive about whether dangerous weapons were knowingly allowed to cross the border.
Republicans in the U.S. Congress have been demanding the Obama administration explain who knew what and when about the ATF program, which was conceived of and run out of the agency's Phoenix division.
Authorities had hoped they would be able to follow the guns to cartel leaders, but ATF agents did not track the weapons after they were transferred from the initial buyer to others. Some agents have said they were not allowed to continue the pursuit.
Instead, numerous weapons from the operation, which began in late 2009 and ran through 2010, have shown up at crime scenes in Mexico and the United States.
U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry died in a December 2010 shootout on the American side of the border and two guns found there have been traced to the sting. It is not yet known if those guns were used to fire the fatal shots.
Mexican authorities have complained bitterly about the thousands of guns that cross the border from the United States each year and want Washington to do more to stem the flow.
President Barack Obama has nominated a permanent director for ATF, Andrew Traver of the agency's Chicago office, but the gun industry has opposed him. Melson is a career federal employee.
Melson took the unusual step of being interviewed on the July 4 holiday by congressional investigators. During those discussions he acknowledged mistakes had been made and other law enforcement agencies had had critical information that they did not share about their targets.
(Reporting by Jeremy Pelofsky and Steve Holland, editing by Deborah Charles and Eric Beech)
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