AG emails: Get to the bottom of Fast and Furious

WASHINGTON (AP) — “We need answers on this. Not defensive BS. Real answers.”

In email exchanges with subordinates in February and March 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder and the department’s second-highest official expressed growing concern that something might have gone wrong in a federal gun-smuggling probe called Operation Fast and Furious.

Two of Holder’s emails and one by Deputy Attorney General James Cole were among documents the Justice Department showed Tuesday to Republican and Democratic staffers of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee in an effort to ward off a criminal contempt vote against the attorney general.

The full contents of the emails were described to The Associated Press by two people who have seen them. Both people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about them publicly.

For the past year and a half, some Republicans have promoted the idea that Holder and other top-level officials at the Justice Department knew federal agents in Operation Fast and Furious had engaged in a risky tactic known as “gun-walking.”

Two of Holder’s emails and one from Cole appear to show that they hadn’t known about gun-walking but were determined to find out whether the allegations were true.