U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder made a smart pick when he tapped U.S. Attorney B. Todd Jones to try to clean up the troubling mess at the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Jones, the top federal attorney in Minnesota, will bring experienced, stabilizing leadership to the ATF, which is reeling from a failed attempt to track firearms moving from the United States to drug cartels along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The agency's "Operation Fast and Furious" was supposed to monitor illegal gun sales from small-time gun buyers to large weapons traffickers, but after the sting operation failed an ATF analyst concluded that about 1,400 of the more than 2,000 weapons linked to the operation have not been recovered.
However, some of the guns the ATF sold to suspected smugglers with the intention of tracking them were found at the scene of the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
That embarrassment prompted a congressional inquiry and no doubt contributed to the Justice Department's decision this week to reassign the acting ATF director, Kenneth Melson. That led to Jones being selected as his replacement.
It's been reassuring to see dogged Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley take a lead role in the congressional investigation. While Jones, who will continue to serve as U.S. attorney in Minnesota, works to straighten out the agency's internal operations, the American people deserve a thorough review of what went wrong in Operation Fast and Furious.
Even after this week's shakeup at ATF, Grassley told the Wall Street Journal that there could be more fallout.
Wherever the investigation leads, it's already clear that the ATF has suffered from being without a permanent director since 2006, when Congress began requiring Senate confirmation of the position.
