Feds need to know their limits

While it is just a story from a town in Texas, it is a story that deserves wide attention because it involves outrageous overreach by a federal law enforcement agency.

The story concerns Craig Patty, the owner of a small trucking company who found out that the Drug Enforcement Agency was secretly paying one of his drivers to use one of his trucks to transport large quantities of marijuana as part of a string operation — all without Patty’s knowledge.

And he found out about it only after the truck was ambushed and shot up by gangsters aiming to hijack the truck and its valuable load. His driver died after being shot eight times.

Not only that, Patty thought his truck was in Houston for repairs at the time of the shooting, but a GPS system on the truck indicated that the driver took a 1,000-mile detour from the route he was supposed to travel, presumably at the direction of the DEA.

This is wrong on so many levels. The government commandeering a private company’s employee and $90,000 truck to do government business without the owner’s knowledge is bad enough. But to do so in a dangerous law enforcement action, risking the employee and property is beyond the pale. What if the hijackers had succeeded in stealing the truck? Most likely there would be an “oh well” and a lot of shoulder shrugging on the part of the DEA and Patty wouldn’t have a clue what happened to the truck or his driver.

But fortunately — plenty of sarcasm here — the truck was only riddled with bullets to a point where it was rendered inoperable. Patty had to dip into his retirement fund to cover more than $130,000 in repairs and the truck was out of operation for 100 days, putting his business at risk of failure. Now he is seeking compensation for the repairs plus $1.3 million for damages to himself and his family, who fear retaliation from a drug cartel because of his unwitting involvement in a fiasco that was essentially created by our federal government. The process of tangling with the DEA in court may very well be another long chapter in Patty’s story, unless the agency does the right thing and provides prompt compensation.

Most Americans like to think there are honorable people in the government doing good work, and there certainly are. They don’t want to think they can be affected by rogue agencies, officials or operations. That’s probably what Patty used to think.

But these things do happen. Operation Fast and Furious managed to walk thousands of guns, untracked, into Mexico where they were involved in dozens of murders, including the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

Then there was the General Services Administration scandal, which didn’t cost lives, but did cost a lot of taxpayer money so that bureaucrats could have extravagant parties.

The public should be outraged whenever these things happen. And when they do, some form of congressional restraint may be in order. Just this week, Sen. Jon Tester announced that the Department of Justice has created a position to protect whistleblowers within the department as a direct response to the Fast and Furious scandal.

Hopefully this move will encourage people to step forward to report wrongdoing, particularly the obnoxiously offensive kinds like the drug running boondoggle that happened in Texas.