Concerning your responses...
I expect you are all theorizing as the rest of us and I suppose Issa is (create a crisis to legislate).
I do not believe in conspiracies. But if someone simply gave orders to not stop the guns at the border, then that becomes the keystone of the investigation. Who, then, gave that order and why?
Conspiracies aside...
That’s the base question Issa is asking and Holder isn’t answering.
Who gave that order aside...
Once across the border, the only way those items would be found again is if people died. Thing is, Mexican authorities were not clued in on the operation, so closing the loop wasn’t really part of the plan - leaving upstanding local police to wonder why illegal American guns were showing up next to dead Mexican citizens.
...which sounds a lot like a conspiracy at work.
Hanlon’s Razor (”Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”) applies in most cases, but sometimes the level of stupidity required to explain the act is so great that Occam’s Razor (to wit “the simplest explanation is most likely”) prevails and we must conclude malice.
Real conspiracies are rare, but they do exist.