WITH regard to the Operation Fast and Furious scandal, Americans fall into two camps: those who haven't really been following it, and those who having been following it and are baffled that people aren't more upset about it. If any readers are in the former camp, I refer you to this story from the print edition earlier this month:

The operation, outlined in two congressional reports last summer, began in 2009 in the Phoenix, Arizona, field office of the ATF, which is under the Department of Justice. The department was trying to be more active in Mexico's fight against its drug gangs, and decided that agents would allow known “straw purchasers” to buy guns from American shops. The straw buyers, the ATF reasoned, would bring the guns to the gangs. When the guns turned up again, the agents might be able to use them as evidence to build bigger cases.

In other words, federal law enforcement agents in Arizona encouraged and even pressured gun dealers to sell weapons to known straw buyers. That some 2,000 guns were thereby lost was actually the purpose of the operation, rather than an unintended consequence. The idea was that when the agents recovered the guns, they might be able to connect them to bigger crimes, like murder or conspiracy, rather than the relatively minor crime of straw purchasing. The logic is vaguely reminiscent of the Drug Enforcement Administration's recent efforts to infiltrate trafficking organisations by facilitating shipments of money and drugs, with one key difference being that money is not, in itself, a weapon. Even if you're of the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" school of thought, Operation Fast and Furious clearly helped some of the people in question get the guns that they use. It came to national attention in December 2010, after Brian Terry, a Border Patrol agent, was killed in a firefight near the border. Two of the guns recovered at the scene were traced to Operation Fast and Furious.

The operation itself can be considered phase one of the scandal, and it has since ended. There is a phase two, however, which is that the Department of Justice has been less than forthcoming about the whole sordid episode, in a way that erodes confidence in the department and the attorney-general, Eric Holder. From the print edition again:

Last February the department issued a letter denying the allegations that the ATF had allowed gunwalking. In March Barack Obama told Univision that neither he nor Mr Holder had authorised the operation. Six weeks later, in May, Mr Holder told the House Judiciary Committee that he had “probably” first heard of Operation Fast and Furious “over the past few weeks”.

Last month the department withdrew its February letter, saying it was not correct. Testifying again a few days later, Mr Holder was sanguine when asked to clarify the difference between lying to Congress and misleading it: “Well, if you want to have this legal conversation, it all has to do with your state of mind.” He added that the department would not be turning over any materials related to the operation from later than February.

The most recent developments are that on January 25th, after being subpoenaed by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, a federal prosecutor in Arizona announced that he would invoke his fifth amendment right—that is, the right to remain silent so you don't incriminate yourself. And on January 27th—Friday evening—the Justice Department released a lot of additional documents, including nine pages of emails (available here in PDF) dating to the days after Mr Terry's death, including several from Monty Wilkinson, the then-deputy chief of staff to Mr Holder. "Tragic", wrote Mr Wilkinson on December 15th, 2010, in response to the news of Mr Terry's death. "I've alerted the AG, the acting DAG, Lisa, etc." Later that day Dennis Burke, the then-US attorney in Phoenix, wrote another note to Mr Wilkinson: "The guns found in the desert near the murder BP officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about—they were AK-47s purchased at a Phoenix gun store." 

While this doesn't necessarily falsify the claim Mr Holder made in May, that he only heard about Operation Fast and Furious "over the past few weeks", it does prove that his deputy chief of staff had heard about it in December—five months earlier. Many people therefore suspect that Mr Holder is not being fully candid; even if he hadn't heard anything about this until the spring of last year, you have to wonder why his staff didn't bother apprising him of the operation. It may be that Mr Holder is being reticent for a reason: Partisan polarisation is running so high that if he had been more forthright, Republicans would have used the frank talk as a weapon against him, his department, and perhaps the Obama administration more generally. That would be a sad and sobering thought for the American people—things have gotten so bad that well-meaning officials are afraid to tell the truth for fear of outsized punishment.

For Mr Holder, however, that would be at best an explanation, rather than an excuse. It's true that most of the criticism of Mr Holder has come from Congressional Republicans. In this case, however, the critics have a point, even if they are partisans. The ATF is a branch of the Justice Department, which is led by Mr Holder. No one is suggesting that he dreamed up this operation, only that he has a responsibility to address it squarely and honestly, which is entirely fair. Instead his response has been to spin it as a political witch hunt.

Mr Holder is scheduled to testify again on Thursday. Let's hope he is willing to be more forthcoming. At this point, the pressing threat to the department's reputation—and to that of the Obama administration—isn't coming from congressional Republicans. It's coming from the attorney-general's own stonewalling.

(Photo credit: AFP)