Gowdy: Fast & Furious Deaths, Consequences Will 'Last for the Rest of Our Lives'

South Carolina Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy told Breitbart News that murders will continue to be connected to Operation Fast and Furious for the rest of most Americans’ lives, if not longer.

Gowdy’s comments came on the heels of the revelation earlier Tuesday by CBS News that Fast and Furious weapons were found at the murder scene of a young Mexican beauty queen.

Authorities had said that Maria Susana Flores Gamez was likely used as a human shield and that an automatic rifle had been found near her body after the Nov. 23 shootout. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, tells CBS News that the Justice Department did not notify Congress that a Fast and Furious firearm was found at the scene in Sinaloa. CBS News learned the Romanian AK-47-type WASR-10 rifle found near her body was purchased by Uriel Patino at an Arizona gun shop in 2010. Patino is a suspect who allegedly purchased 700 guns while under the ATF’s watch.

Gamez was named the 2012 “Woman of Sinaloa,” a beauty pageant, in February.

Gowdy said this news “surprises absolutely nobody.”

“The fact that she was a beauty queen was why we found out about it,” Gowdy told Breitbart News. “How about folks who don’t have that title who have either been killed or will be killed? You know why you’re asking me about this? Because she had a crown on her head.”

“How about someone who didn’t have a crown on their heads?” Gowdy added. “How about someone whose name we didn’t know before who’s not a beauty queen? There will be consequences from Fast and Furious that last for the rest of our lives.”

Gowdy said that the next steps on Fast and Furious need to come from the media. “You can report it and put pressure on the White House and the Department of Justice to give us the documents they haven’t given us,” he said.

Fast and Furious weapons were used in the murders of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in December 2010, and have been used in numerous crimes south of the border for years – and clearly are continually being used.

Mario Gonzalez, the brother of Mexican government official Patricia Gonzalez, was murdered with those weapons. So were several teenagers, who were massacred at a birthday party with the weapons President Barack Obama’s administration gave the cartels.

An estimated 300 or so Mexican citizens have been mowed down with Fast and Furious weapons.

The cartels got the weapons because Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice and its Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives “walked” the AK-47s and other rifles into Mexico. That means they didn’t interdict the weapons they knew were being trafficked to cartels by straw purchasers.

Straw purchasers are people who purchase guns for criminals and others who wouldn’t pass the basic background checks that would allow them to buy weapons. It’s illegal to straw purchase firearms because, when someone purchases a weapon, they sign an ATF form that requires them to declare the weapon is for them. Since they’re buying the weapon for someone else, they’re lying on federal forms – which is a crime.

At the orders of higher-ups in the Obama administration’s Department of Justice and ATF, agents allowed these purchases to happen and didn’t stop the guns from getting into Mexico, even though they easily could have intercepted them.

Holder is in both criminal and civil contempt of Congress for his failure to cooperate with a congressional investigation into Fast and Furious. He and President Obama are hiding tens of thousands of pages of Fast and Furious documents from the American people and the Congress; Obama has asserted executive privilege over those documents.