Spoon-fed Propaganda. Dan Freedman, ATF's favorite press flack, strikes again.

Dan Freedman as a child, learning how to practice "investigative journalism."

Dan Freedman, Washington Bureau Chief for Hearst Newspapers has previously been excoriated by this column for first ignoring the Gunwalker scandal and then minimizing it. Now comes Herr Freedman once again: "Guns used in killing of ICE agent draw scrutiny."

Now, spoon-fed with 50 pages of CASE FILES by ATF & DOJ, Freedman concludes:

Court records and ATF case files reviewed by the Houston Chronicle indicate the investigation's plodding pace may have kept agents from short-circuiting the guns purchase, but there is no evidence of so-called "gun walking," or trailing weapons to see where they would end up instead of interdicting them.

In the Phoenix Fast and Furious operation, ATF agents did just that. But they lost track of the weapons and 2,000 or more guns were transported to Mexican cartels as ATF watched.

Two of those weapons were later recovered in Arizona at the murder scene of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in December 2010.

No undercover sting

AFT insists that wasn't the case in Baytown.

"We didn't know about Gomez until after the gun used in the Zapata murder was purchased," said the ATF's Franceska Perot in Houston. "There was no undercover operation where we witnessed guns being purchased and let them go. That didn't happen."

Fifty pages of ATF documents obtained by the Chronicle indicate that it took agents six months to arrest Barba and two months, from June to August 2010, to find and interview a key witness. That witness was the first to clearly point to Barba, saying he paid her $700 to buy nine weapons at a gun show in Pasadena.