The Most Dangerous Man at the ATF You Probably Never Heard About

The ATF is not the favorite federal law enforcement agency of anyone except, maybe, the gun control crowd. It’s an agency that has been covered in controversy and one with almost zero actual victories to capture the public’s imagination. The FBI went after deadly gangsters and vicious terrorists…and caught them. The ATF killed women and children in botched raids.

The two agencies are not the same.

But it seems that there was one guy who was knee-deep in at least some of the ATF’s more recent issues–a man now retired, apparently–who was potentially one of the most dangerous people there, and most people have never heard of him.

Jeffrey Cohen was an attorney with the ATF. He wasn’t the general counsel, but apparently people thought he was.

And it seems that he was likely at the heart of Fast & Furious as well as the reason gun stores started losing their licenses over typos.

Jeffrey Cohen had spent decades interpreting the Gun Control Act – about how the law could be interpreted and enforced.

From a quiet boy at Hackley School in Tarrytown to a suit behind a desk in Princeton, Cohen carved out a career in law enforcement.

He wasn’t chasing cigarette trucks or storming gun shows. He was in his office, engineering ways to seize property, revoke licenses, and close businesses.

A quiet architect. He was the ATF lawyer who always said, “It’s within the scope of our authority.”

His work involved revoking Federal Firearms Licenses (FFLs) for “willful” violations, a standard Cohen helped define.

Zero Tolerance: The Strategist Behind the Scenes

The Second Amendment was his battlefield.

Zero tolerance was the mantra.

Cohen knew how to turn policy into a weapon. He knew how to aim it at civilians, small business owners, citizens trying to make a living selling guns.

Firearms License revoked? That was Cohen. Asset seizure? That was Cohen. Compliance violations no one understood? Cohen.

When they wanted to squeeze firearms dealers out of business, Cohen wrote the strategy.

When Fast and Furious let cartel thugs walk away with thousands of weapons, Cohen helped cover the legal fallout.

Cohen’s ATF let actual traffickers move guns across the border and let violent criminals slip through the cracks.

But an honest gun store owner who missed a decimal point on a form? A retired cop selling a rifle without the right paperwork? They were the ones who felt the ATF’s full force.

This is from a part two of a look at Cohen. Part one suggests rumors that Fast & Furious wasn’t a gun tracing operation so much as a rehash of the Iran Contra scandal from the Reagan era, something I have little difficulty believing. Though, with so many of the official documents considered matters of national security, it’s impossible to prove.

Though I’d argue the fact that it’s considered national security is suggestive to me that there’s truth to those allegations.

Regardless, it seems like this is the man behind many of the worst abuses by the ATF over the years. What role could he have played in Ruby Ridge or Waco? I honestly don’t know, and it’s probably better for my blood pressure not to find out.

Cohen seems to be gone, which is probably for the best. With Robert Leider in the role of actual general counsel, I doubt we’ll see the abuses that Cohen reportedly rubber-stamped.

That’s a very good thing.

The problem is that I don’t see how anyone looking at the law could have justified any of the things he’s said to have approved.