For months now, efforts to assess blame for the conduct of the botched Fast and Furious federal gun investigation have been, in a word, compromised.
Congressional Republicans had motivations to make the administration look bad, and the Democrats in power had reason to fend them off.
However, the release of a thoroughly documented, 471-page inspector general report on the matter this week has finally cleared the air.
It makes a solid case that the U.S. Department of Justice was asleep at the wheel while agents and prosecutors carried out an ill-conceived gun-running investigation that resulted in the circulation of 2,000 illegally purchased weapons.
It’s bad stuff.
But the report also puts to rest Republican conspiracy theories that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder knew about the mishandled operation before early 2011 and tried to cover it up.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz said he found no evidence of that, and Horowitz was privvy to tens of thousands of documents, many of them not in the public domain.
Nevertheless, the report leaves Holder with a long list of scathing criticisms that must be dealt with in order to restore the department’s credibility. There were management failures, poor judgment and a disregard for public safety.
“There needs to be supervision; there needs to be oversight,” Horowitz said Thursday in testimony before Congress.
Fast and Furious began in October 2009 in the Phoenix office of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is charged with enforcing federal gun laws.
Agents were tracking “straw buyers,” who were thought to be purchasing weapons on behalf of Mexican drug cartels, but not busting the low-level buyers. The idea was to track the guns back to the cartels.
What happened was that thousands of guns were floating around, with some of them turning up at crime scenes, including the killing of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.
It’s clear from the report there were oversight failures at Justice that allowed the situation to get dangerously out of hand.
Holder must discipline those responsible, tighten up accountability measures and prohibit any more “gun-walking” operations.
Only then will the controversy surrounding the Fast and Furious operation finally be put to rest.
