Without understanding how this plan looked good on anything but the back of a napkin, the ATF’s intentions have to be taken at face value. As does White House spokesman Jay Carney’s remarks as he says that Obama “did not know about or authorize the operation”.

Now who doesn’t remember when Enron CEO Kenneth Lay said those famous words and his lawyers laid out that well-known  defense.

But certainly I didn’t know he was doing anything that was criminal.

Ignorance of your subordinates’ actions does not make you innocent.

Darrell Issa (R-CA) has been leading an inquiry into project GunRunner and while Obama’s Justice department seems to be putting up obstacle after obstacle, ATF employees are acting much differently:

“Over the last few days, Justice has conveniently turned over 200 pages of documents prior to our public hearings,” Issa spokeswoman Becca Glover Watkins said in a statement to TPM. “To date, we’ve still received an exponentially higher number of documents from concerned agency insiders than from the Justice Department itself.”

The administration is using the same “I didn’t know” tactics that Kenneth Lay employed while also trying to stall justice.

Now, according to Fox News,  the Obama administration may be taking a new tact: Operation Scapegoat.

The Justice Department is expected to oust the head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to people familiar with the matter, amid a troubled federal antitrafficking operation that has grown into the agency’s biggest scandal in nearly two decades.

Moves toward the replacement of Kenneth Melson, acting ATF director since April 2009, could begin next week, although the precise sequence of events remains to be decided, these people said.