The House Oversight Committee has decided to vote Wednesday June 20, on whether to hold Eric Holder the Attorney General in contempt of Congress. It is only the fourth time in the past 30 years that Congress will launch an action of contempt against a member of the executive branch.

The recent dispute stems from the Attorney General failing to hand over subpoenaed documents last October in the gunwalking Fast and Furious investigation. The Department of Justice maintained it had fully cooperated with the investigation by Congress, turning over thousands of requested documents and allowing Holder to testify in front of Congress eight times on the same topic.

Nevertheless, Darrell Issa a Republican House member from California says the Department of Justice refused to hand over thousands of documents. Issa said the material included documents from after February of 2011, following a letter the DOJ wrote saying that no incident of gunwalking had taken place. The denial was later retracted by the DOJ.

Issa said the DOJ could stop the process of the contempt charge by just turning over the documents subpoenaed. If the contempt citation were approved by the Oversight Committee in the House, the matter most likely would then be scheduled for a complete House vote.

House Republican leaders have met for several weeks to discuss moving forward against Holder, with some expressing worry that it could take away from the focus by Republicans on the economy, during the election. The Fast and Furious investigation came from an operation by the ATF, which allowed more than a thousand guns to end up in Mexican drug cartel hands with the hope it would help to take down one of the major cartels.

The lawsuit said Sheriff Joe Arpaio used racial profiling, indifferent and sloppy police work and a disregard for the rights of minorities. The DOJ sued the County of Maricopa, Arpaio and the sheriff’s office in District Court. The suit came after three months of unsuccessfully trying to get county officials and Arpaio to comply with the laws of federal civil rights.

Arpaio is up for reelection this November in a county that encompasses the metropolitan area of Phoenix. He is the face of the local effort to clamp down on undocumented immigrants.

The suit by the DOJ alleges that Maricopa County has developed an inadequately trained group of special units that target Hispanics for unjustified and unlawful arrests; has denied Hispanic prisoners civil rights while jailed, and under the direction of Arpaio has apprehended opponents for no specific or valid reason.

The lawsuit also alleged that Hispanics in the country are often times detained, stopped and arrested because of their color, race or national origin. In addition, the defendants in the suit pursued a practice or pattern of retaliating illegally against those they perceived to be their critics through unfounded lawsuits, baseless criminal prosecution and actions at the administrative level that were meritless.

The suit also mentioned the “volunteer posse,” a group of civilians who are untrained and help carry out the anti-Hispanic policies of Arpaio throughout the county of nearly 1.2 million Hispanics.

It turned out that US agents lost track of weapons. As many as 2,000 weapons were sold by gun dealers to people believed to be part of the Mexican drug cartels. But as of January 2011, fewer than 600 were recovered.

The Fast and Furious ran from late 2009 until early 2011. It came to light after two weapons from the operation were found in Arizona in December 2010 near the scene of a shootout between the US Border Patrol and illegal immigrants that killed agent Brian Terry.

Republican Representative Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, released a memo that described how other federal authorities were already tracking down the gun smugglers of the drug cartel a year before Terry was killed.

Issa and the other Republicans on the committee said that senior Justice Department officials could have known guns were sold without adequate surveillance from wiretap apps and the information they had about a similar sting during the Bush administration called Wide Receiver.