For forty years, Jeffrey A. Cohen was the voice behind the ATF. This is the first in a series covering his story and his influence on the ATF and gun laws in America.
Jeffrey Cohen: Forty Years at the ATF – The Man Behind the Bureau’s Biggest Decisions
Jeffrey A. Cohen has been with the ATF since 1985, first as an Associate Chief Counsel, later as the Northeast Division’s top legal advisor.
By the time most agents had retired, Cohen was still issuing legal opinions, still speaking at task force meetings, still explaining the finer points of firearm and tobacco law to agents half his age.
The media called him the ATF’s General Counsel. That wasn’t technically true—just an assumption made so many times it became fact.
For nearly forty years, Cohen stayed inside the agency. There was no public trace of a family. No wife, no children. When he announced on LinkedIn in 2024 that he was “testing the waters” for part-time work, congratulations poured in. No one mentioned his home life.
Jeffrey Cohen was the legal opinion of the ATF. Not just a lawyer, not just another bureaucrat with a title, but the authority. The man who knew the rules better than the agents enforcing them. The man who saw every warrant before it was signed, every policy before it was put into action.
A Legal Titan: Cohen’s Influence Over the ATF’s Most Controversial Operations
Fast and Furious wasn’t the kind of operation they would hide from him. It was too big, too risky. Guns flowing into Mexico under the watch of federal agents, a strategy that hinged on tracking weapons no one could guarantee would be found again. A program like that didn’t move without legal clearance.
If his name wasn’t in the reports, his fingerprints were on the policies. He had advised on firearm trafficking cases before, weighed in on operations less explosive but no less dangerous.
The operation was presented as a sting to track weapons, identify the cartels, bring down the networks supplying them.
That was the official version.
Deadly Consequences: The Operation That Armed Cartels and Killed an American Agent
The ATF, under orders from higher up, allowed nearly 2,000 firearms to walk right into cartel hands. The guns weren’t traced. No arrests came. And when US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was shot and killed in December 2010, and two of those weapons turned up near the scene, the story fell apart.
The agency cut the operation off in 2011. Publicly, the Justice Department denied it had ever knowingly let guns cross into cartel hands. Then it retracted that statement. Resignations followed. The US Attorney for Arizona, Dennis Burke, stepped down.
The acting head of the ATF, Kenneth E. Melson, left his post.
Investigations mounted.
Congress demanded answers.
The fallout was political, but the damage was real. The ATF had armed the very people it was meant to dismantle. Guns from the operation turned up at crime scenes across Mexico. Some were used to kill civilians, others in cartel executions.
The full scope remained buried in classified reports, in redacted documents the Justice Department refused to turn over.
US Attorney General Eric Holder testified before Congress. He denied a cover-up. He refused to release all the files. President Obama invoked executive privilege.
They tried to pretend that Fast and Furious was a one-off.
The official version was simple. Track the guns, catch the traffickers, dismantle the cartels.
The dirty little secret wasn’t just that the guns walked.
It was why they walked.
Legal Cover or Rogue Mission?
Cohen, if he approved it—and it would’ve been near impossible for a program of that size and risk to move without his nod—would’ve done so under legal theory, not blind trust.
He wasn’t reckless. He was deliberate, which meant the risks were known. The bodies were anticipated.
Fast and Furious may not have been a sting operation. It may have been a pipeline of weapons and money.
Cartels didn’t just get guns—they got leverage. Every weapon that moved was a favor, a trade, a line of credit.
Some said it was about letting the cartels run longer so bigger fish could be caught. Others whispered it was not about stopping the flow at all. The operation gave cover.
There were rumors—none proven—that profits from cartel gun sales flowed into black budgets. Off-the-books operations for the CIA.
Sealed Files, Executive Privilege, and Denials: What the Government Didn’t Want You to Know
There was a reason those documents never made it to Congress. A reason executive privilege had to be invoked.
Cohen wouldn’t have talked about Agent Terry or the civilians in Sonora.
The mission, as defined, had failed. But missions rarely matched their definitions.
No one in power called it what it was: A death trade.
The mission did not fail.
It worked exactly as it was meant to.
The guns were never supposed to come back. That was the fiction in memos, read aloud in hearings, repeated in headlines. “We’ll trace them,” they said. “We’ll follow the guns to the top.”
Tracing wasn’t the goal. Guns walking—was the goal.
Fast and Furious wasn’t rogue. It was structured, approved, and embedded.
The operation armed men who didn’t need arming. Cartels with product, territory, and now US rifles.
The payoff came in destabilizing certain factions, strengthening others. Some said it allowed intelligence agencies to monitor routes, fund proxies, shift alliances that couldn’t be traced back to Langley.
The flow of money and guns wasn’t a failure. It was an outcome.
By the time the public knew the name Fast and Furious, the deaths had happened.
Cohen had written the language, cleared the permissions, built the legal frame. Not to stop the operation, but to protect it.
Terry’s death brought headlines. Resignations followed. The operation had burned lives. But no one went to prison.
Behind closed doors, some called it a success.
Not the First Time?
Fast and Furious wasn’t the first. It wasn’t the last.
How many operations like it had passed through Cohen’s hands? The ones where no American agents died, where no congressional hearings were called, where guns walked and never came back?
Where drugs moved north, money moved south, and the bodies weren’t counted in Washington.
The drugs were never meant to be stopped. The cartels weren’t meant to be dismantled.
The supply stayed open because drugs brought money, and money brought power.
Who profited? Not the men on the streets of Juárez or Tijuana, not the mid-level traffickers paraded in front of cameras, shackled.
Carlos Salinas, the former Mexican president, had long been rumored to have cartel ties, moving billions through Mexican banks. Carlos Slim, the telecom tycoon, had built an empire that required government favors, licenses, access—granted in exchange for silence or compliance.
And in the US?
The Clinton administration had turned a blind eye to drug flights landing in Arkansas, money washing through networks too big to trace.
Obama, when the scandal broke, sealed the documents, locked away under executive privilege.
How many guns crossed? How many kilos of cocaine?
How many bodies—Mexican, American—were buried, overdose deaths in cheap motels, execution-style killings in cartel strongholds?
Cohen wrote the memos, structured the policies, gave the cover. The numbers weren’t in his reports. They didn’t need to be.
The system worked exactly as intended.
To be continued…
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