Carrie Johnson

Key lawmakers in Congress are warning the Justice Department not to retaliate against whistle-blowers and leaders at the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. They're reaching out only days after the ATF leader met with congressional investigators to talk about a gun trafficking scandal.

In the fall of 1984, in a rain-soaked alley in Washington, D.C., a street vendor found a tiny woman lying dead on the floor of a garage.

She was Catherine Fuller, a mother of six, who left home to run a quick errand and never came back. She had been beaten, sexually assaulted and killed all within sight of a busy public street.

The murder horrified and frightened the city. Over the next few months, police arrested 17 people in connection with the crime.

The troubles that hit the sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn this week may find a place in history books. As presiding judge Michael Obus put it mildly in court Friday, "I understand that the circumstances surrounding this case, from the viewpoint of the parties, have changed substantially."

With full agreement from prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney's office, a man who spent weeks under house arrest walked out of the courthouse Friday with a smile, his arm slung around the shoulders of his wife.

As a young teacher fighting all the way to the Supreme Court for Haitian refugees, and later, as the dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh became one of the country's most prominent defenders of human rights.

But as the top lawyer at the Obama State Department, Koh has been defending a lot of things that surprise his friends, including U.S. involvement in Libya without the approval of Congress.

The scandal is widening over a U.S. law enforcement operation that lost track of guns later discovered at crime scenes on the Southwest border. The Justice Department and Republicans in Congress are trading accusations over who approved the operation. But what's getting lost in all the politics may be the larger effort to take down violent drug and gun traffickers.