It looks more and more as if the Justice Department erred not bringing in Vin Diesel for their peculiar remake of Fast and Furious. Or is it a remake of Gun Crazy?

U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith of San Antonio, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has insisted Attorney General Eric Holder be made to account for all of the Ws for - let us get this straight just once more -  a taxpayer-financed, U.S. government-supervised gun buying program for Mexican drug traffickers in Phoenix, according to a story today in the San Antonio Express-News.

Did we mention one of the guns is believed to have been used to kill a U.S. Border Patrol agent in December 2010, that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms lost track of many of the more than 2,000 guns sold and that those lost guns have been linked to other crimes?

Holder, brandishing .44 Magnum understatement, has called Fast and Furious “clearly a flawed enforcement effort.”

But wait, it gets better. A similar undercover operation called Operation Wide Receiver, which Diesel has so far chosen not to option, was carried out during the Bush Administration with limited success, according to Associated Press.

Holder said he first heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the past few weeks. Justice Department documents turned over to Smith’s committee indicate the National Drug Intelligence Center began its briefing of Holder no later than July 5, 2010, the Express-News story says.

Among the other casualties of Fast and Furious are Kenneth Melson, the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who has been reassigned, and Dennis Burke, the U.S. attorney in Phoenix, who resigned under pressure.

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Contact Mark Lisheron at 512-299-2318 or mark@texaswatchdog.org or on Twitter at @marktxwatchdog.

Photo of AK-47 by flickr user brian.ch, used via a Creative Commons license.

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