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Holder presses delay on Fast and Furious documents

Attorney General Eric Holder is again asking a federal court to delay the transfer of disputed documents relating to Operation Fast and Furious to a House committee.

In a new court filing Monday night, Justice Department lawyers asked U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson not to require Holder to turn over any of the roughly 64,000 pages of documents to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee until after her rulings can be appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

"The Department respectfully submits that it would be preferable for the parties, this Court, and the D.C. Circuit — if an appeal were taken — to have any injunctive order await the conclusion of the district court litigation to allow for orderly and complete appellate proceedings," DOJ lawyers wrote.

Jackson has previously denied DOJ permission to file an immediate appeal, although lawyers for Holder indicated in the new filing (posted here) that they may do so anyway. Any appeal is likely to take months and perhaps more than a year to resolve. If that process does not begin until Jackson rules definitively on the the executive privilege claim President Barack Obama has made for many of the documents, the timeline for the case being resolved could begin to approach the end of the Obama administration.

The documents in dispute relate to the Justice Department's response to congressional and media inquiries about Fast and Furious, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives operation that appears to have resulted in as many as 2,000 weapons reaching Mexican narcotraffickers through a tactic known as gunwalking. Holder has denounced and banned the practice, which he said he and other senior department officials did not know about.

DOJ has turned over thousands of pages relating to the operation and the initial department response to the controversy but has withheld internal records about its response after February 2011, when it sent lawmakers a letter that insisted department personnel never knowingly engaged in gunwalking.

In the legal fight with the House committee, which is headed by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the Justice Department has maintained that "the entirety of its work file" related to the congressional inquiries into Fast and Furious is immune from court-ordered disclosure to the committee. Jackson has rejected that stance and asked Holder to identify which documents are predecisional and deliberative in nature.

The committee's litigation is now in a horse race (albeit a very slow one) with another lawsuit filed by the conservative group Judicial Watch, seeking the same information under the Freedom of Information Act. Some of the Justice Department's positions in the case involving the House panel seem to suggest it should received less information than a FOIA requester like Judicial Watch. Typically, congressional committees get more information than is available under FOIA.