ATF & DOJ: Corruption in action

As I was graduating from high school in Prescott, Arizona, My father, Neal Knox, was in Washington, D.C., making war plans as the head of NRA's lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action. By the following year, Dad had publicly declared war on a government agency and the laws that agency enforced. The agency was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the laws were the federal gun laws collectively known as the Gun Control act of 1968. From Dad's perspective, BATF had been actively waging war on gun owners for years, and he had left his dream job as editor and publisher of two prominent gun magazines based in Arizona, with the specific objective of destroying the BATF and reforming the Gun Control Act, which had been passed 10 years earlier.

The BATF started as a special tax collection and enforcement branch of the Internal Revenue Service. It was tasked with the regulation of machine guns under the National Firearms Act, or NFA, and overseeing licensed firearm manufacturers, importers and dealers under the Gun Control Act, or GCA. The agency's mission was to make sure proper paperwork was maintained, taxes and fees were paid, and violations were investigated and served up for prosecution.

By the mid-1970s, the BATF had earned a reputation for being excessively aggressive, nit-picky, vindictive and often unscrupulous. Dozens of stories emerged of ATF abuses, and analysis of their arrest and prosecution records showed that a majority of their cases didn't involve malevolent criminal activity, but instead targeted ordinary gun owners who were tripped up by confusing regulations and federal red tape.

When Dad began waging the war on BATF, he exposed the horror stories, published the records and showed the ruined lives of regular citizens that littered BATF's wake. In 1979, he convinced Sens. Jim McClure, R-Idaho, and Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz., to hold hearings on the BATF's enforcement practices and abuses. In the hearings, Dad made it clear that, while the BATF's actions were atrocious, the real culprit in the sad saga was the GCA. As he said in his Senate testimony, any agency tasked with enforcing such poorly written laws would be hard pressed not to fall into a similar pattern of abuse.

As a direct result of this process of sanitation through sunlight, the ATF received harsh rebukes from Congress and had millions of dollars pulled from its annual budget. President Reagan was actually on the verge of dissolving the agency entirely and turning its enforcement responsibilities over to the FBI. My father opposed that move on the grounds that the real problem was the laws, not who was enforcing them, and that a crippled and scrutinized BATF would be easier to keep in check than the more powerful and respected FBI.

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There has been a lot of second-guessing and criticism over that call, but by keeping the focus on BATF as a symptom resulting from bad laws, rather than allowing the agency to be used as a scapegoat, Dad was able to more effectively treat the symptoms, while still going after the underlying disease – the GCA.

Dad's primary objective in accepting the leadership position at NRA-ILA was to reform the GCA, removing from the law as many booby-traps and nonsensical restrictions as he could. With this in mind, he and the ILA staff worked closely with the staffs of McClure and Rep. Harold Volkmer, D-Mo., on a sweeping "gun de-control" bill. The bill became known as the Firearm Owner Protection Act, and a somewhat watered-down version of it was finally passed in 1986.

Now, almost 30 years since passage of the McClure-Volkmer Bill, the BATF remains plagued with scandals and accusations of abuse of authority. In 2002, as part of a broad restructuring of federal agencies after the attacks of 9/11, BATF's enforcement branch was taken out from under the Treasury Department and placed under the Department of Justice alongside the FBI and DEA. The move, which was supposed to help restore the BATF's sullied reputation, did nothing to slow the chronic mismanagement and abuse. What it has done, however, is highlight the role of the Department of Justice in BATF's misdeeds.

Like any law enforcement agency, BATF relies on two things to justify its budget requests: threats and results. While it's easy to paint all sorts of pictures of imminent threats with which to scare Congress into throwing more money at them, BATF must rely on federal prosecutors from the DOJ to validate their results. Elaborate operations and large arrest numbers fall flat when accompanied by very low conviction rates, and that's exactly what BATF has been producing for decades. But during this time, they have been working with prosecutors to try and turn that around, asking them what types of cases they wanted pursued and what types of evidence they needed to move forward with prosecutions and gain convictions.

In a number of cases, it's clear that prosecutors encouraged ATF to "bend" evidence, cooperated in misrepresenting laws and regulations, and conspired with BATF to suppress evidence that could be harmful to the prosecution. The latest, most blatant case of this involves a lawsuit from one of their own, in which a former agent, who was a principal in an undercover operation to infiltrate the Hells Angels motorcycle club, sued the agency for defamation of character and breach of contract. The judge barred 17 DOJ lawyers from his court and suggested that, along with BATF acting in a vindictive and "Kafkaesque" manner toward its own agent, prosecutors and BATF might have engaged in perjury and fraud upon the court.

BATF and DOJ misdeeds were also apparent in the treatment of Albert Kwan, the Reese family, David Olofson and the notorious Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal.

The pattern is symptomatic of government spiraling out of control with bad laws being enforced and prosecuted by rogue agencies operating without adequate supervision or accountability. And the problem just seems to keep getting worse.

Media wishing to interview Jeff Knox, please contact [email protected].