Judge: Turn over Fast and Furious documents

Washington • A federal judge has ordered the Justice Department to provide Congress with a list of documents that are at the center of a long-running battle over a failed law enforcement program called Operation Fast and Furious.

In a court proceeding Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson set an Oct. 1 deadline for producing the list to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The Justice Department says the documents should remain confidential, and President Barack Obama has invoked executive privilege in an effort to protect them from public disclosure.

The House panel says the Justice Department documents might explain why the department took nearly a year to admit that federal agents had engaged in a controversial law-enforcement tactic known as gun-walking.

The Justice Department has long prohibited the risky practice. But the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives used it with disastrous results in a federal law-enforcement probe in Arizona. In the operation, federal agents permitted illicitly purchased weapons to be transported unimpeded in an effort to track them to high-level arms traffickers.

Federal agents lost control of about 2,000 weapons. Many of them wound up at crime scenes in Mexico and the U.S. Two of the guns were found at the scene of the December 2010 slaying of border agent Brian Terry near the Arizona border city of Nogales.