Eric Holder, Obama’s embattled attorney general, was under mounting pressure from Congress to explain the botched ‘Fast and Furious’ sting operation, in which 2,000 assault rifles and other firearms were sold to suspected traffickers for the Mexican drug cartels. It was intended as an intelligence-gathering ploy, but U.S. agents lost track of most of these weapons.

A drug war covert operation run by the Phoenix branch of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), Fast and Furious remained a secret until the murder of an American border patrol agent in December 2010. Two guns found at the scene of the murder had been sold during the Fast and Furious operation. Arms from the same misbegotten cache were subsequently linked to many other crimes.

For several months Holder stonewalled, disavowing any knowledge of the caper despite documentation showing that high-level Justice Department officials aided the surveillance mission. The fact that Fast and Furious had its roots in a similar Bush-era ATF operation mattered little to GOP Rep. Darrell Issa, the grandstanding chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who went so far as to accuse the Obama administration of purposely allowing the guns to escape as part of a […]