That’s how the Congress should be dealing with the criminals running the Department of (In)Justice. Tossing up one scapegoat shouldn’t save Holder’s job. This should be the last straw.

[Update mid morning]

Was the operation a PR op to promote domestic gun control?

Sure looks like it to me. Tar and feathers is too good for these people.

[Update a few minutes later]

ATF Agent John Dodson, testifying in front of the committee, said that in his entire law enforcement career, he had “never been involved in or even heard of an operation in which law enforcement officers let guns walk.” He chttp://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/06/20/us.fast.and.furious/ontinued: “I cannot begin to think of how the risk of letting guns fall into the hands of known criminals could possibly advance any legitimate law enforcement interest.”

The obvious answer is that Gunwalker’s objective was never intended to be a “legitimate law enforcement interest.” Instead, it appears that ATF Acting Director Ken Melson and Department of Justice senior executives specifically created an operation that was designed from the outset to arm Mexican narco-terrorists and increase violence substantially along both sides of the Southwest border.

Success was measured not by the number of criminals being incarcerated, but by the number of weapons transiting the border and the violence those weapons caused. An ATF manager was “delighted” when Gunwalker guns started showing up at drug busts. It would be entirely consistent with this theory if DOJ communications reflected the approval of the ATF senior officials they were colluding with — but as we know, Holder’s Department of Justice refuses to cooperate.

At the same time in 2009 that federal law enforcement agencies (the ATF, the DOJ, and presumably Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security) were creating the operation that led to the executive branch being the largest gun smuggler in the Southwest, the president’s team was crafting the rhetoric to sell the crisis they were creating.

I don’t know about the fast part, but the American people should be furious.

[Late morning update]

There are going to have to be more consequences than this:

Kenneth Melson, acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, is expected to resign under pressure, perhaps in the next day or two, in the wake of the ongoing controversy over Operation Fast and Furious, two senior federal law enforcement sources said Monday.

Time for a special prosecutor. How else to investigate a recalcitrant Justice Department?

Ultimately, I think that this should a capital offense. I’d like to see the death penalty — for the ATF.