The Operation Fast and Furious scandal, as reported by the Washington Post, contains two scandals in one, with the latter being far more egregious. First, the Republicans, most notoriously in the form of Representative Darrel Issa from California, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is holding Attorney General Eric Holder’s feet to the fire, blowing whistles and triggering sirens, for more documents in the Fast and Furious scandal.

That is, “Operation Fast and Furious was run out of the Phoenix division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives between 2009 and 2011, with the backing of the U.S. attorney in Phoenix. Federal agents targeting the Mexico-based Sinaloa drug cartel did not interdict more than 2,000 guns they suspected of being bought illegally, in the hope of later tracking them to the cartel. The ATF lost track of most of the firearms, some of which have been found at crime scenes in Mexico and the United States.

Two of the guns connected to the botched operation were found at the Arizona site where U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agent Brian Terry was killed in December 2010.” That’s the scandal in a nutshell—with all due respect to Agent Terry.

Yet, “As part of a congressional inquiry and a subpoena issued last year, Justice officials have given the Issa committee 7,600 pages of Fast and Furious documents, but he has said that they represent a sliver of the 80,000-plus documents that officials have turned over to the DOJ inspector general, which is also investigating the gun operation.

In recent weeks, Issa narrowed his request to the internal Justice deliberations since early February 2011, when Grassley first began asking Justice about Fast and Furious. On Feb. 4, 2011, the Justice Department sent the committee a letter denying use of the “gunwalking” tactics used in Fast and Furious. Officials were later forced to retract the letter after whistleblowers came forward and said they had used those very tactics.

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