Fortune reporter: ‘Fast and Furious’ the fault of weak laws pushed by gun lobby

The “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal has blown up in Republicans’ collective faces just one day before a major House vote on holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over related documents.

Despite the insistence of the National Rifle Association (NRA), the nation’s largest gun lobbying group, it was not an Obama administration conspiracy to create gun violence in Mexico as a pretext for banning guns in the U.S. Quite the opposite, actually.

In a devastating investigation published Wednesday by Fortune reporter Katherine Eban, the “Fast and Furious” scandal is revealed to have actually been the product of one guy who screwed up and let several guns vanish over the border.

That guy, former Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (ATF) agent John Dodson, told reporters last March that video of gun sales in Arizona was part of a program in which the government was allowing guns to be sold to Mexican drug cartels.

Turns out, not so much.

In other words, the thing that the NRA and their Republican allies in Congress have been hyping for months — the thing that could see Attorney General Eric Holder held in contempt of Congress for — is actually and entirely a creation of those same Republican lawmakers and that same gun lobby, and virtually everyone in the media had the story wrong thanks to a phony whistleblower.