The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee filed a civil lawsuit as the next step in forcing Attorney General Eric Holder to turn over tens of thousands of documents related to the Fast and Furious scandal.

Rep. Darrell Issa, head of the committee, asserts Obama's stonewalling by executive privilege in June was a "calculated political maneuver designed to stop the release of documents until after November's elections...the president is attempting to expand the reach of executive privilege to obstruct the truth about the reckless conduct that contributed to the death of a Border Patrol Agent and countless Mexican citizens."

If Issa does obtain the long-awaited legally subpoenaed documents, will they reveal the Obama administration's involvement with the drug cartels in Mexico as one of their drug kingpins Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla averred a year ago?

A Sinaloa cartel drug operative, Zambada-Niebla was arrested in Mexico in late 2009, and then extradited to Chicago to face federal drug charges. In a court pleading last year, he claimed the U.S. government not only okayed guns walked into Mexico, but that it conspired with Sinaloa as a trade-off for information about rival cartel gangs.

From IPS News Service August 2011:

In his two-page court pleading, Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla - the son of Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada Garcia, an alleged leader of the Mexico- based Sinaloa drug- and weapons-trafficking organisation - described a collaborative relationship between the cartel and the U.S. Department of Justice and its many arms, including agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

His delayed trial has now been scheduled for October 9, less than one month before the election.

The Blaze recently ran a story reiterating the news on the cartel's "logistics coordinator."

Zambada-Niebla claims that under a "divide and conquer" strategy, the U.S. helped finance and arm the Sinaloa Cartel through Operation Fast and Furious in exchange for information that allowed the DEA, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies to take down rival drug cartels. The Sinaloa Cartel was allegedly permitted to traffic massive amounts of drugs across the U.S. border from 2004 to 2009 - during both Fast and Furious and Bush-era gunrunning operations - as long as the intel kept coming.

Also in August 2011 Obama signed an executive order which stated the U.S.'s position on transnational crimes. I posted an article in American Thinker which questioned whether Obama had a deal with Sinaloa.

Why wasn't the Sinaloa Mexican drug cartel mentioned in Obama's recent executive order to stem transnational criminal activity in the U.S. whereas the rival cartel Los Zetas was specifically listed in the annex section of the order?

It seemed odd to omit Sinaloa from the order when its rival Los Zetas was specified.

If Zambada-Niebla's words are to be trusted then the Obama administration has conspired with a Mexican drug cartel to allow billions of dollars of drugs to flow into the U.S. while innocent Americans and Mexicans lost their lives during Fast and Furious. Issa's dogged chasing of the subpoenaed docs may get us closer to the truth.

Read more Ann Kane at Potter Williams Report