What 'conspiracy' lies behind Eric Holder and 'Fast and Furious'?

But in the process, ATF lost track of 1,400 guns, some of which have been recovered at murder scenes in Mexico and two of which were found at the scene in Arizona where Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was gunned down by suspected drug smugglers.

To be sure, Holder, who has testified nine times about the program, has made some slips, including the fact that he told Congress he didn’t know about the program until after the death of Agent Terry, though it now seems clear that some of his direct reports may have had rudimentary knowledge of the program 10 months earlier.

Another event that piqued Republican interest came last year when Holder had to retract a letter sent to Congress on Feb. 4, 2011, which stated flatly that the ATF wasn’t allowing guns to walk. DOJ said it was relying on inaccurate field reports when it wrote that letter, and filled Congress in six months later when they could confirm and nail down the truth.

In the aftermath, both Holder and the President have acknowledged the gambit was a terrible idea, shouldn’t have happened, and won’t happen again. Though he contends he was never directly involved, Holder, as Obama’s top cop, has taken responsibility and apologized to the family of Agent Terry for his death. Meanwhile, half a dozen involved agents and officials have lost their jobs or been reassigned.

While tens of thousands of documents are in play, Congress say it wants to look specifically at a set of 1,300 documents, mostly emails, that investigators hope will shed light on who at Justice and the White House were directly involved. Holder has maintained that releasing some of the documents Congress wants could put cases and field agents in jeopardy.

At the least, the contents of the documents could fall short of conspiracy but still yield politically embarrassing information about how the administration crafted its response to the scandal, giving rise to charges that Republicans are on an irrational “fishing expedition” for political dirt.

“Though it’s not clear exactly what these documents may involve, it seems likely they consist of the Department of Justice’s reaction to the backlash against Fast and Furious,” writes Matthew DeLuca of the Daily Beast.

Given that most Americans “hold Congress in contempt,” as Duke University political scientist Michael Munger says, the President has portrayed the constitutional showdown as part of a running battle with obstinate Republicans, a situation he certainly elevated by stepping in to block the Congressional subpoena with executive privilege.

"The Republicans are succeeding in a strategy that they laid out for all of you at the beginning of last year," White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters on Friday. "They vowed to use their investigative powers to score political points against the administration and to further obstruct the President's legislative agenda."

Democrats on the Oversight Committee on Saturday filed a “minority view” to be included in next week’s scheduled contempt vote, noting specifically that, “The Committee’s investigation of ATF gunwalking operations has been characterized by a series of unfortunate and unsubstantiated allegations against the Obama Administration that turned out to be inaccurate.”

But while the political lines around Fast and Furious are thus clearly drawn, allusions to Watergate-sized conspiracy theories do, at the very least, also help bolster Issa’s central point: If only to quell such theories, Americans deserve to know whether it was really a hapless bureaucratic blunder or whether administration officials lied about the extent of their involvement in what became a deadly scandal.

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