Asked for his position on whether to restrict access to assault weapons, Governor Romney brought up Fast and Furious, the botched gun-trafficking case that led to a politically charged oversight investigation by Congress. But Mr. Romney’s description of Fast and Furious, and what is known about it, was misleading in certain significant respects. Read More

Mr. Romney described it as a “program under this administration” under which thousands of weapons “were given to people that ultimately gave them to drug lords” who used them to kill their own people and Americans. He said he could not imagine what its purpose was. He also said that while it had been “investigated to a degree,” it was still unclear “how it worked exactly” or “who it was that did this” and “what the idea was behind it.” He said the Obama administration had asserted executive privilege to “prevent all the information from coming out.”

The operation was exhaustively investigated by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general office, which had access to all the disputed documents and which delivered a 471-page report last month that was praised by members of Congress across party lines as comprehensive and fair.

Operation Fast and Furious was an investigation that ran from late 2009 to early 2011 into a gun-trafficking network in Arizona. The ring was using “straw buyers” – front men without criminal records – to purchase weapons in American gun stores and then funneling them to a drug gang in Mexico, which has much stricter gun-control laws. Contrary to Mr. Romney’s statement, the network was not given guns; rather agents passively allowed suspects to keep buying guns from gun stores rather than moving swiftly to intervene with straw buyers and seize the weapons at the first opportunity.

This tactic – known as “gunwalking” — was internally controversial within the Phoenix Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives because it posed a risk to public safety and ran counter to agency traditions. But its purpose is not a mystery. The agents held back because they were frustrated with bringing cases against low-level straw buyers, who were easily replaced and whose cases presented certain legal challenges in Arizona.They wanted to identify higher-level criminals in the network in order to dismantle the entire organization.

As a result, however, the straw buyers continued to acquire weapons freely, obtaining hundreds of guns that are presumed to have reached criminal hands. In December 2010, two weapons that had been purchased by one of the suspects early in the investigation were found near the site of a shootout where a Border Patrol agent, Brian Terry, was killed, as Mr. Romney alluded.

It is also not a mystery who was behind it, and it is somewhat misleading to limit the discussion to the particular operation that took place during the Obama administration. The inspector report concluded that poorly supervised Arizona-based law enforcement officials had developed the gunwalking tactics on their own. It also found that they had used a similar strategy and tactics in an investigation of another Arizona-based gun smuggling network starting in 2006, a case called Operation Wide Receiver. In particular, the report said that William Newell, the special agent in charge of the A.T.F.’s field division in Phoenix at the time of Fast and Furious and part of Wide Receiver, “bore ultimate responsibility for the failures in Operation Fast and Furious.” The report also found that the field division had not alerted A.T.F. headquarters about its use of the tactics, and that no one at Justice Department headquarters, under either the Bush or the Obama administrations, had authorized or knew about each operation’s tactics at the time they were being used.

Mr. Romney is correct that President Obama asserted executive privilege to shield some Justice Department documents from a Congressional subpoena. The disputed documents do not date from the origins of Fast and Furious, however. They are from after February 2011, by which time the operation was over. The documents – many of which the inspector general quoted from in its report – are e-mails in which officials discussed how to respond to Congressional inquiries and media questions as they struggled to figure out what happened. Mr. Obama has claimed he has a legal right not to comply with the subpoena for them because it would damage the candor of internal executive branch deliberations to allow Congress to compel their disclosure. That dispute is now the subject of a lawsuit filed by Congress.