The House voted to hold AG Holder in contempt anyway, for a wingnut conspiracy-fueled version of Fast and Furious. A version that has been exposed as largely a fabrication (surprise!) by this great bit of reporting from Fortune.
This is a very long piece, but worth every minute:
Quite simply, there’s a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.
Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case. Several, including Voth, are speaking out for the first time.
Basically, Fast and Furious was meant to be an investigation into straw purchasers and then agents kept being frustrated by the local federal prosecutors who kept telling agents that the transfer of the guns under the multiple scenarios they were investigating was legal. So instead of a conspiracy to walk guns, we have an agency trying to nail straw purchasers. And the NRA and their like have run up the whole thing into some dark conspiracy, that the MSM has laundered into credibility.
Anyway, a number of Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, walked out of the manufactured outrage of the contempt vote:
17 Democrats voted for the contempt citation:
Jason ALTMIRE (D-PA).
John BARROW (D-GA).
Dan BOREN (D-OK).
Leonard BOSWELL (D-IA).
Ben CHANDLER (D-KY).
Mark CRITZ (D-PA).
Joe DONNELLY (D-IN).
Kathy HOCHUL (D-NY).
Ron KIND (D-WI).
Larry KISSELL (D-NC).
Jim MATHESON (D-UT).
Mike McINTYRE (D-NC).
Bill OWENS (D-NY).
Collin PETERSON (D-MN).
Nick RAHALL (D-WV).
Mike ROSS (D-AR).
Tim WALZ (D-MN).