Free Republic

Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department sought to manipulate reporters’ coverage of Operation Fast and Furious during the days preceding a November 1 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, new emails obtained by The Daily Caller indicate. Emails between senior Justice Department officials and investigators in the office of Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley show that congressional staffers leading the investigation into Operation Fast and Furious requested information about Operation Wide Receiver — a Bush administration program – and other similar cases, more than a full month before the DOJ leaked information to selected media outlets on October 31. That Halloween document...

More than 1,000 pages of frenzied email exchanges were fired back and forth among Justice Department officials, as they weighed how to respond to initial inquires about the gunwalker scandal. Today, the agency turned over those subpoenaed records to Congress in advance of a hearing next week with Attorney General Eric Holder. The emails are marked by intra-office disagreement over how vigorously to defend the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives (ATF)....

The Department of Justice late Friday afternoon staged a “document dump” of more than 1,000 pages related to the Operation Fast and Furious investigation, including some e-mail exchanges critical of Senator Charles Grassley, and one exchange that raises questions about what some Justice Department officials should have known was an erroneous statement in a Feb. 4, 2011 to Grassley. An earlier estimate of the number of documents from one sources has been reduced down from about 2,000, reported earlier by this column. The documents have gone to the House committee investigating the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives operation....

NPR: Justice Withdraws Inaccurate 'Fast And Furious' Letter It Sent To Congress. Under fire for losing track of weapons that turned up at crime scenes along the Southwest border, the Justice Department has taken the extraordinary step of formally withdrawing an inaccurate letter about the episode that it sent to Congress earlier this year. Deputy Attorney General Jim Cole sent nearly 1,400 pages of emails and other documents to Capitol Hill late Friday afternoon that lay bare the raw and sometimes cringe-worthy process by which the letter was drafted. The materials contain clues into how misleading information about the botched...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department has provided Congress with 1,364 pages of documents detailing how the department gave inaccurate information to a U.S. senator in the controversy surrounding Operation Fast and Furious, the flawed law enforcement initiative aimed at dismantling major arms trafficking networks on the Southwest border. In a letter last February to Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department said that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had not knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser