Opinion

What’s Bam hiding?

Executive privilege, conceptually speaking, is a lot like the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution: Assert it, and folks assume that there’s a coverup under way.

Not unreasonably.

So many malefactors have gone the executive-privilege route — Richard Nixon, most famously — that the public is entitled to its suspicions.

Now comes President Obama, taking Attorney General Eric Holder’s back in the seemingly endless “Fast and Furious” gun scandal.

Does he get the benefit of the doubt?

House Republicans have been investigating the matter for a couple of years now — to no avail, largely because Holder threw up a stone wall virtually on Day One, and he hasn’t given an inch since.

Let’s be clear: While there are political elements to the story (aren’t there always?), the bottom line is that a US Border Patrol officer and scores of Mexican citizens have been murdered by weapons the Justice Department lost track of.

In a nutshell, the feds released some 2,500 firearms to Mexican drug-cartel members in an effort to track gun-trafficking patterns. The weapons vanished, the body count started to grow — and how all that happened became the question around which the scandal revolves.

Obama asserted executive privilege Wednesday regarding House subpoenas for documents that might provide some clarity — subpoenas at which Holder & Co. have been thumbing their institutional noses for months.

Indeed, the privilege assertion comes 15 months after Obama claimed that neither he nor Holder knew about, to say nothing of authorized, the gun operation.

Holder himself testified in May 2011 that he’d only heard about the operation “in the last few weeks” — though memos later came to light that undermine that claim.

In recent weeks, Justice officials have “retracted” earlier sworn statements — including one this week that the operation began under the Bush administration.

All in all, it stinks on ice.

So much so, in fact, that the House Government Oversight Committee voted a contempt citation against Holder on Wednesday — and the full House could do the same as early as next week.

Now comes Obama, apparently attempting to derail the entire process with his assertion of privilege.

A principled claim? Or a coverup?

Given that the administration appears otherwise to believe in nothing whatsoever, we’ll go with coverup.