If you haven’t done this already, you really should sit down and read through this investigative story by Katherine Eban published by Fortune Magazine (“The truth about the Fast and Furious scandal“).

Eban tracks the background of this issue through dozens of insider interviews and pieces together the dysfunctional inner workings of a small ATF group in Arizona.

Eban writes:

Quite simply, there’s a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.

Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case. Several, including Voth, are speaking out for the first time.

It’s a long, detailed story, but it’s well worth your while to read through to the end.

You might want to follow-up with this story that quotes from Eban’s appearance on the Rachel Maddow show (here’s a transcript of the Maddow show), and this one on the GOP’s wild conspiracy theory.