The Obama administration handed over tens of thousands of documents it had previously withheld of the botched "Fast and Furious" gun-walking operation to Congress on late Monday, in a move Republicans claimed was an admission by President Obama that he overstepped his legal bounds.
A federal judge ordered the 64,280 pages of documents to be released on Monday despite Obama previously asserting executive privilege and claiming that the documents were part of the "deliberative process" of White House decision-making and therefore didn't need to be released for congressional review.
In an "election eve dump," as House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) put it, the documents represent a victory for House Republicans who have been seeking these papers for years, even suing in federal court to force the release at one point. However, the document release is still only a partial fulfillment of the committee's request, National Review Online reported.
"This production is nonetheless a victory for the legislative branch, a victory for transparency, and a victory for efforts to check Executive Branch power," Issa said of the release.
Fast and Furious was "an operation of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) that was intended to try to catch gun traffickers in Arizona. Agents knowingly let guns be sold to traffickers, and many of them ended up being carried across the border to reach Mexican drug cartels," according to The Washington Times.
"The operation was quickly halted after two of the weapons turned up at the scene where Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in a shootout with Mexican bandits, but by then several thousand weapons had gone unaccounted for."
"Initially, the Justice Department assured Congress that no guns were ever knowingly allowed to be taken into Mexico. But months later the department had to recant that assurance, admitting that officials did in fact know that agents weren't tracing the traffickers who were buying the guns."
Following the scandal, the Attorney General was held in contempt by the House over his failure to produce the "Fast and Furious" operation papers, according to TheBlaze.
"When Eric Holder wants to know why he was the first Attorney General held in criminal contempt of Congress, he can read the judge's order that compelled the production of 64,280 pages that he and President Obama illegitimately and illegally withheld from Congress," Issa said.
But Justice Department spokesman Brian Fallon said they had been trying to reach an accommodation on turning some of the documents over for some time, and said the release is part of that commitment, according to The Washington Times.
"We have long been willing to provide many of these materials voluntarily in order to resolve this matter outside of court, and believe that producing them now should bring us a big step closer to concluding this litigation once and for all," Fallon said.
Although the confidential documents have not been released to the public and it remains unclear what information they contain, both Issa and Holder have stated that the papers need to be protected.
Additionally, a letter accompanying the submission from the Justice Department stated that the department may have redacted too much in order to protect "law enforcement sensitive" information, and indicated that some of these redactions might be reversed later.
"Given the time constraints, in some circumstances it has been necessary for the department to employ redaction methods used in Freedom of Information Act processing to ensure that law enforcement sensitive information is not disclosed publicly, which may have resulted in more redactions than the department ultimately will want to press in this case," John Tyler, a department official, said.
Meanwhile, Issa, the House's chief investigator and the man who has pursued the documents, will still be seeking the rest of the documents.
"Since these pages still do not represent the entire universe of the documents the House of Representatives is seeking related to the Justice Department's cover-up of the botched gun-walking scandal that contributed to the death of a Border Patrol agent, our court case will continue," he said.
