Justice Department Finally Releases Fast and Furious Documents, With Eric Holder On His Way Out the Door

As noted on
Reason 24/7, Christmas came early for the House Oversight and
Government Reform panel. On the eve of the midterm elections, the
Justice Department (DOJ) finally sent Congress
over 64,000 pages of documents related to the “Fast and
Furious” gunrunning scandal. How about that timing?

While the DOJ had originally
released some 7,600 pages, congressional investigators have
unsuccessfully been seeking access to all the documents for years.
In 2012, President Barack Obama
invoked his executive privilege to keep these documents
classified. The House of Representatives then held U.S. Attorney
General Eric Holder
in contempt for refusing to hand them over.

But despite the Obama administration’s
best efforts, this August a judge rejected Obama’s claims and

ordered the DOJ to release the documents.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa
(R-Calif.)
said that he would continue to seek more documents related to
the scandal:

Since these pages still do not represent the entire universe of
the documents the House of Representatives is seeking related to
the Justice Department’s cover-up of the botched gun-walking
scandal that contributed to the death of a Border Patrol agent, our
court case will continue.

Issa also expressed concern that the DOJ had been too liberal in
redacting some of the documents. Nonetheless, he called the release
a “victory for the legislative branch.”

The scandal broke back in 2010, when two guns sold to Mexican
drug traffickers under the Fast and Furious program were found at
the scene of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry’s death. The
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) had been
“gunwalking” during operations in Arizona from 2006 to 2011,
allowing guns be sold to known drug traffickers in a foolhardy bid
to trace the weapons to high-ranking cartel members.

The ATF ultimately lost track of thousands of guns, hundreds of
which
later turned up at crime scenes, including bloody
massacres. Mexican officials
claim that hundreds of people have died at the hands of
weapons knowingly sold to drug cartel members. Holder himself
stated in 2011 that the effects of Fast and Furious could
linger for quite some time. After all, guns put in the hands of
violent Mexican drug traffickers don’t just disappear
overnight.

Obama
claimed that neither he nor Holder approved the operation.
Holder also stated that he hadn’t heard of it until a few weeks
before the scandal, but memos leaked in 2011
contradict this claim. A DOJ Inspector
General report released in 2012 exonerated Holder from blame,
however—pinning the colossal screwup on rogue agents.
Yeah, right.

Some of the documents declassified on Monday
offer tepid evidence that perhaps Holder didn’t know the full
details of Fast and Furious after all. In response to the leaked
memos discussing the operation, he reportedly stated, “I didn’t
read them. I rarely do.”

But even if Holder doesn’t suffer from acute mendacity, his
appeals to ignorance aren’t doing him any favors. If anything, they
just prove that he is
as oblivious as he is incompetent.

This scandal, four years in the making, could get a lot more
interesting with the document dump. Just don’t expect Holder, who
has already announced he’s stepping down, to be around to face any
consequences. Or the ATF to stop drafting
gun control regulations without a hint of irony.

See a Reason reader on Holder’s track record as U.S. Attorney
General
here.