Have they no shame?  Just days before it was announced that documents regarding the Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal were to be released after being hidden for six years under executive  privilege, there was former Obama attorney general Eric Holder responding to a question on Bill Maher's show:

"Did you protect President Obama?" Maher asked Holder on Friday.

The former attorney general drew applause from the studio audience when he quipped: "The difference between me and Jeff Sessions is, I had a president I did not have to protect."

Holder had used nearly the same line in an interview with The Washington Post last month.  Maher didn't challenge him to defend it, but some critics have accused Holder of protecting Obama for years.

In 2012, Holder became the first sitting attorney general to be held in contempt of Congress – in a 255-to-67 vote – for refusing to turn over documents related to a botched gun-running investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Holder did have a president to protect, as well as himself, partners in a criminal scheme to run guns into Mexico and into the hands of Mexican drug lords, guns that led to the deaths of border agents Brian Terry and Jaime Zapata.  He was protecting a president who recently made his own self-serving and false claim:

When Barack Obama spoke at the 12th annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, MA, many of us scratched our heads as to why the event was off-the-record.  No photography, recording, or social media posting about Obama's appearance was allowed.  Obviously, he would not be talking about golf.  But, with over 3,500 people in attendance, there was no way this speech would be hidden for long.  As expected, a recording of Obama's appearance was leaked. 

Obama said a lot of things over the course of an hour, but I'd like to focus on his claim that, while some people in his administration made mistakes, "We didn't have a scandal that embarrassed us." ...

Obama may not be embarrassed by Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the VA scandal, Solyndra, the OPM hacking scandal, the GSA scandal, the Iran Ransom scandal, Uranium One, or the FISA abuse scandal currently being unraveled, but he should be.  And the media should be embarrassed at how they failed the American public by pretending these scandals didn't exist, or weren't important.

You can't be embarrassed if you are incapable of feeling shame over causing the death of two border agents and hundreds of Mexican nationals targeted by Mexican drug lords.  This may change with the announced release of the documents hidden away by Eric Holder:

The Justice Department said Wednesday it will turn over documents withheld by former Attorney General Eric Holder related to the Operation Fast and Furious scandal during the Obama administration.

The Justice Department entered into a conditional settlement agreement with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.  The settlement agreement was filed in federal court in Washington D.C., and ends six years of litigation arising out of the previous administration's refusal to produce records requested by the committee.

"The Department of Justice under my watch is committed to transparency and the rule of law," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement Wednesday.  "This settlement agreement is an important step to make sure that the public finally receives all the facts related to Operation Fast and Furious."

Holder's obstruction of justice and lying to Congress were crimes that went unpunished.  As Rep. Darrell Issa, who headed the House Oversight Committee during the Fast and Furious investigation, has noted.  But as with the current scandals involving Hillary Clinton and Uranium One, pay-for-play at the Clinton Foundation, and the corruption of the FISA court process by the FBI and DOJ to aid one party's attempt to collude with the Russians to overturn a sitting president, Holder was not counting on a Trump election to expose his corruption:

Estimates peg the number of deaths as a direct result of the gun-running scheme – which evidence indicates was intentional – at a staggering 200 or more.  In Fast and Furious: Barack Obama's Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-Up, Townhall editor Katie Pavlich made the compelling case that former President Barack Obama and then-Attorney General Eric Holder.  Holder "did willfully and knowingly sanction the program in order to advance their anti-second amendment agenda." ...

"They (the new documents) will show what we already know.  That Eric Holder was directly involved in the cover up.  He is a lawyer and should be disbarred," Rep. Issa said.  "Eric Holder has systematically obstructed justice not just against the Senate and House but against the Terri [sic] family's legitimate right to know.  And then he lied to me personally about all the documents that were necessary to be fully compliant with our requests."

Holder and Obama tried to hide the truth not only from the American people, but from the grieving family of Brian Terry. Recently, in the shadow of the Russia investigations and the testimony of former FBI director James Comey, the House Oversight Committee produced a fact-laden report documenting the collusion between the administration of President Barack Hussein Obama and Mexican drug cartels and the obstruction of justice by Attorney General Eric Holder in this...er, "matter."  As Fox News reported:

Members of a congressional committee at a public hearing Wednesday blasted former President Barack Obama and his attorney general for allegedly covering up an investigation into the death of a Border Patrol agent killed as a result of a botched government gun-running project known as Operation Fast and Furious.

The House Oversight Committee also Wednesday released a scathing, nearly 300-page report that found Holder's Justice Department tried to hide the facts from the loved ones of slain Border Patrol [agent] Brian Terry – seeing his family as more of a "nuisance" than one deserving straight answers – and slamming Obama's assertion of executive privilege to deny Congress access to records pertaining to Fast and Furious[.] ...

Terry's death exposed Operation Fast and Furious, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) operation in which the federal government allowed criminals to buy guns in Phoenix-area shops with the intention of tracking them as they were transported into Mexico.  But the agency lost track of more than 1,400 of the 2,000 guns they allowed smugglers to buy.  Two of those guns were found at the scene of Terry's killing.

"More than five years after Brian's murder, the Terry family still wonders about key details of Operation Fast and Furious," the committee's report states.  "The (Holder) Justice Department's obstruction of Congress's investigation contributed to the Terry family's inability to find answers."

Former ATF agent Dodson has long tried to reveal the truth about Fast and Furious and the running of deadly weapons to Mexican drug lords.  Dodson repeatedly attempted to spread the truth on the Obama administration's effort to supply Mexican drug lords with semiautomatic weapons:

ATF Special Agent John Dodson is a national hero who in 2011 blew the whistle on Operation Fast and Furious, the Obama administration's gun-running operation to Mexico.

Testifying before Congress, he disclosed that his supervisors had authorized the flow of semiautomatic weapons into Mexico instead of interdicting them, weapons that found their way into the hands of Mexican drug cartels with deadly results.

Dodson has put his intimate Fast and Furious knowledge into a book titled "The Unarmed Truth."  It provides the first inside account of how the Obama administration permitted and helped sell some 2,000 guns to Mexican drug cartels, guns used in the murder of two federal agents and hundreds of Mexican citizens[.] ...

The operation was exposed when Brian was killed in December 2010 by an illegal immigrant [sic] working for the Sinaloa Cartel near Nogales, Ariz., just 10 miles from Mexico. Two Fast and Furious weapons were found at the murder scene.

Two such weapons also were used to murder Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata in Mexico on Feb. 15, 2011, came [sic] from suspects who were under ATF watch but not arrested at the time[.] ...

"Allowing loads of weapons that we knew to be destined for criminals, this was the plan.  It was so mandated," Dodson, then attached to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' (ATF) Phoenix office, testified before Rep. Darrell Issa's House Government Reform and Oversight Committee on June 15, 2011.

"Rather than conduct enforcement actions, we took notes, we recorded observations, we tracked movements of these individuals for a short time after their purchases, but nothing more," Dodson testified.

"Knowing all the while, just days after these purchases, the guns that we saw these individuals buy would begin turning up at crime scenes in the United States and Mexico, we still did nothing."

Hopefully now we will learn everything and do something about the criminal enterprise that was the Obama administration and the criminal who was Eric Holder.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.