Fast and Furious in a nutshell: “U.S. guns have been widely used by Mexican drug cartels. While U.S. gun dealers aren’t supposed to sell weapons to the cartels, a lot of dealers have been selling guns to straw purchasers who smuggle the guns to the cartels. The ATF could arrest and prosecute some individual gun smuggler, but solving the problem requires building a case against the big fish gun dealers who know their guns are going to the cartels. The idea was to follow the little guys until they meet up with the big bad guys. This sometimes meant preventing local law enforcement from arresting the guy they were using as bait. In the end, they were supposed to…arrest everybody and grab all the guns. Then they could build a legal case against some seriously bad guys.” Read more 

Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan of Politico report this morning: “[T]he House is expected Thursday to vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for failing to fork over thousands of pages of internal Justice Department documents detailing why federal officials allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. [...] If the House approves the measure, it will be the first time in U.S. history that one of the chambers has voted to hold a sitting attorney general in contempt. Adding to the political pressure: The National Rifle Association said in a letter to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) that it would use the contempt vote in its influential political scorecard.“

From a former ATF agent: “The National Rifle Association (NRA), one of the most powerful lobbies in the US, has relentlessly tried to destroy the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) since it was created in 1972. They came close under Ronald Reagan in 1981, when the NRA pushed legislation to abolish the agency. Realizing that federal gun law enforcement would transfer to the then much esteemed Secret Service, the NRA scuttled the proposal. [... the NRA's] support of the national database for criminal background checks was conditioned on prohibiting local ATF offices or other law enforcement agencies from accessing this information… the NRA also required that all records pertaining to the background checks be immediately destroyed. The NRA’s Republican allies in congress also blocked legislation that would ban cop-killer bullets and assault weapons and close the gun show loopholes.”

Republican Rep. Darrell Issa admitted yesterday: The congressman heading an investigation into a botched gun-trafficking case said on Sunday he had no evidence the White House was involved in a cover-up about the operation or in providing misleading information to Congress. That’s despite what “several Republican lawmakers, including House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), charged last week that President Obama’s decision to invoke executive privilege over documents related to the probe suggested that top administration officials were involved in withholding information.”

History: ATF ran a series of “gunwalking” sting operations between 2006 and 2011. This was done under the umbrella of Project Gunrunner, a project intended to stem the flow of firearms into Mexico by interdicting straw purchasers and gun traffickers within the United States…