Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ||||| That’s the rather startling finding of a Fortune investigation. The basic thrust is that for the most part, the ATF didn’t deliberately allow criminals to buy guns; instead, agents weren’t able to interdict weapons and make arrests because prosecutors told them they lacked probable cause. The only actual incident of gunwalking the investigation turned up, apparently, was allegedly the brainchild of John Dodson, one of the whistleblowers who now says he resisted the tactic. This use of the tactic was approved by an ATF supervisor, but it was not part of Fast and Furious. 
 
 All this is backed up by six months’ worth of reporting and numerous quotes from various sources, though many important figures were not available for comment. The investigation does confirm some comments that a source of mine made — it’s very, very difficult to prosecute people who buy guns with the intention of handing them off to someone else, and sometimes agents simply aren’t able to stop actions that are obviously illegal. It’s hard to explain away several key pieces of evidence that this was not the full extent of the problem with Fast and Furious, though. 
 
 For starters, several ATF officers, including Dodson, have come forward saying that they were told to let guns go when they could have interdicted them. (Fortune presents this as the result of grudges among ATF staff.) Also, while the Justice Department denied in February of last year that “gunwalking” had happened in Fast and Furious, it retracted the claim in December — it’s hard to imagine why they’d concede something like this if it isn’t true, especially when the administration is expending so much effort to fight the congressional Fast and Furious investigation in other ways. (Fortune says the administration is trying to avoid a fight over guns in the run-up to an election.) Further, there is an e-mail exchange between Justice officials about Fast and Furious containing the lines “It’s a tricky case given the number of guns that have walked” and “It’s not going to be any big surprise that a bunch of US guns are being used in MX, so I’m not sure how much grief we get for ‘guns walking.’” While the wiretap applications from Fast and Furious are not public, those involved in the congressional investigation say that they, too, discuss “reckless tactics.” 
 
 And gun dealers who cooperated with the ATF report a shift in policy that coincided with Fast and Furious — from stopping sales and questioning customers, to telling store owners to just go ahead and sell the guns. While Fortune reports that the ATF had no chance to interdict the guns that might have killed Border Patrol agent Brian Terry — the shop that sold the guns informed the ATF that the transaction was suspicious, but it was a holiday weekend and the fax wasn’t seen for days — the gun store’s owner has said he was told in advance to go ahead and sell guns to people he normally wouldn’t. The entire Fortune piece seems to neglect the distinctions between probable cause for an arrest, the act of at least questioning people who are trying to buy guns illegally, and the ATF’s advice to store owners that they refuse to make any sale that they “doubt” is legal. A big part of Fast and Furious is that store owners were told to make illegal sales when the ATF couldn’t follow up on them or chose not to. 
 
 The Fortune investigation dug up a treasure trove of new information, and presents and entirely different side of the story. But it’s far from the last word on Fast and Furious. 
 
 UPDATE: A spokesman for the House Oversight Committee sends along this response to the story:
– The shorthand version of the Fast and Furious scandal goes something like this: ATF agents purposely allowed illegal guns to get into Mexico, then lost track of them, leading to horrific results. But a six-month investigation by Katherine Eban of Fortune magazine comes to a surprising conclusion: That so-called "gunwalking" strategy never existed. "Quite simply, there's a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal," she writes. "Five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn." How the story morphed into its current version is the result of "distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies." Read the full Fortune piece here. At the National Review, Robert VerBruggen is skeptical about some of the conclusions.