Biden Re-Ignites the Waco Fire

Last week, President Joe Biden nominated David Chipman to be head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the premier federal firearms enforcement agency. Biden complemented that announcement with a call for a national red flag law to entitle police to preemptively confiscate firearms from citizens suspected of being a threat to themselves or others.

Chipman was a 25-year ATF agent and a key official at the 1994 federal trial of the Branch Davidians who survived the ATF and FBI assaults the prior year. Many federal agents posed for grisly “victory photos” in the rubble of the Branch Davidians’ Waco, Texas, home after it burned to the ground during an FBI assault. One photo allegedly shows Chipman proudly holding a rifle in front of the wreckage where scores of children died shortly before. The White House and Chipman’s current employer, the antigun Giffords organization, did not respond to repeated email requests to confirm or deny that Chipman is the federal agent in that photo; the Daily Mail and many online sites have tagged Chipman as the agent. In a Reddit public question and answer session in 2019, Chipman sought to spur support for an assault weapons ban by falsely claiming that the Davidians shot down two federal helicopters that were attacking their compound.

Biden’s nomination of Chipman has thrust Waco back in the national spotlight. Millions of Americans permanently lost faith in the federal government after ATF and FBI attacks concluded with more than 80 civilians dead. But few Americans are aware of Biden’s role, first in helping cover up the debacle and later, after ample damning evidence had surfaced, exonerating federal law enforcement and instead blaming Americans who distrusted Washington. Biden’s behavior on Waco is a bad portent for anyone who expects federal agencies to be leashed during his reign.

At the time of the federal assault at Waco, Biden was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which had primary oversight jurisdiction over the conduct of federal law enforcement agencies. How did Biden react to an FBI tank and toxic gas assault that ended with shocking carnage? On the day after the fire, Biden “cautioned that lawmakers should wait until all the details become available before it begins second-guessing the Justice Department,” the New York Times reported. Biden declared, “We’ve got to wait to figure out what happened before we have hearings.” Delaying hearings until after the federal agencies that had blundered (or far worse) announced the “facts of the matter” would have horrified earlier generations of congressional leaders who courageously exposed federal lies and cover-ups, from Sen. William Fulbright’s investigation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s to Sen. Frank Church’s investigation of FBI and CIA rampages in the 1970s.

Biden conducted zero hearings on Waco while he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. After Republicans captured control of Congress in the 1994 elections, committee chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT) held hearings in late 1995. Despite plenty of damning disclosures of federal misconduct at Waco in the prior two years, Biden was emphatic that the real problem was “a growing number of people across the country who are seizing on the incidents at Waco as well as at Ruby Ridge to suggest that law enforcement is our enemy.”