Lest anyone forget that the Obama administration has yet to fully come clean on the travesty that was Operation Fast and Furious — the not-“botched” but certainly crooked gunrunning scandal in which federal officials pressed American gun dealers into selling more than 2,000 weapons to known cartel smugglers, and then allowed those criminals to funnel the weapons back across the Mexican border with no way of actively tracing them — the results of the administration’s egregiously deficient enterprise are still popping up in the aftermath of deadly violence. Back in August, CBS reported on the unwelcome discovery of three Fast & Furious guns at cartel-related crime scenes, and now we’ve got another one, via CNN:

A U.S. official said Tuesday that investigators have traced at least one firearm recovered at a December 18 gunfight in Puerto Peñasco, across from the Arizona border, to Operation Fast and Furious. …

The shootout in Puerto Peñasco, also called Rocky Point by Arizona tourists, two weeks ago left at least five suspected cartel gunmen dead, including possibly a high level Sinaloa cartel chief, according to Mexican authorities.

Witnesses reported hours of shooting and grenade explosions, with Mexican authorities using helicopters to attack fleeing suspected cartel gunmen on the ground. …

The ATF, in a statement, said: “ATF has accepted responsibility for the mistakes made in the Fast and Furious investigation and at the attorney general’s direction we have taken appropriate and decisive action to ensure that these errors will not be repeated. And we acknowledge that, regrettably, firearms related to the Fast and Furious investigation will likely continue to be recovered at future crime scenes.”

…Yes, well, as reassuring as I’m sure it is that that Attorney General Eric Holder has directed the ATF to take “appropriate and decisive action to ensure that these errors will not be repeated,” that assurance would carry rather a bit more weight if the Justice Department would talk the talk and walk the walk by finally releasing the subpoenaed documents they are still willfully withholding from Congressional investigation. Being held in contempt of Congress over the same evidently didn’t even phase Eric Holder, and the administration is still trying to get the executive-privilege pull making its way through the judiciary dismissed out of hand. Fortunately, a federal judge completely rejected the administration’s farcical argument that it somehow isn’t the courts’ role to adjudicate the dispute (“dismissing the case without hearing it would in effect place the court’s finger on the scale, designating the executive as the victor based solely on his untested assertion that the privilege applies,” the judge wrote), but the administration is unapologetically looking to appeal that decision — because the rule of law as well as that little constitutional mechanism we like to call checks-and-balances clearly do no apply to the Most Transparent Administration, Evah.