US attorney general Eric Holder is granted executive privilege over response to Fast and Furious investigation – live coverage 10.32am: By way of background: the House committee’s investigation into Fast and Furious – a gun-running sting involving smuggled weapons across the US border to Mexican drug cartels that went badly wrong – has been continuing since early 2011, with Republicans alleging a cover-up by Eric Holder and the justice department. Fast and Furious was designed to track illegal gun purchases along the Southwest border between Mexico and Arizona, to trace the guns to drug cartels. Disasterously, some 1,700 guns used in the operation were lost and some of the weapons have subsequently been discovered at crime scenes in Mexico. Two guns connected to Fast and Furious were found after a US Border Patrol agent was killed in Tucson in 2010.

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