‘El Chapo’ Rifle Linked to Operation Fast and Furious
Sources at Fox News Politics have confirmed that a rifle found after Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s arrest was one of the guns channeled through Operation Fast and Furious, part of the ATF’s “gunwalking” program. According to Fox, the gun was a .50-caliber anti-materiel rifle, one of two found at Guzman’s hideout.
Operation Fast and Furious was one of a series of “botched stings” conducted by the ATF, part of Project Gunrunner. During the operation as many as 1,400 firearms were knowingly and illegally transferred as straw purchases. As many as 34 of these guns were .50-caliber rifles like the one found after the Guzman raid.
Investigators are still working to identify if any of the other guns seized in the raid originated in the U.S., although the ATF confirmed that the .50-cal. rifle in question was a Fast and Furious gun. Eight firearms were seized in the raid including two .50-cal. rifles.
Guns tied to the operation have been linked to several high-profile crimes including the 2010 murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. The ATF lost track of all but 600 guns transferred during the operation.
The resulting scandal has been a thorn in the White House’s side since 2011 after members of the Congress and the Senate began to respond to allegations of ATF misconduct. President Obama went on to state that neither he nor Attorney General Eric Holder was aware of the operation.
The controversy flared when Holder refused to turn over Justice Department documents on the operation to congressional investigators. He was later held in contempt of Congress. At the same time the President used executive privilege to suppress the documents.
See Also: Another Fast and Furious Gun Recovered at a Crime Scene
Earlier this week a federal judge challenged the President’s use of executive privilege to deny Congress access to the records as any damage they may cause to those involved is only a small part of the fallout from the operation, and the operation has already been made public.
“There is no need to balance the need against the impact that the revelation of any record could have on candor in future executive decision making, since any harm that might flow from the public revelation of the deliberations at issue here has already been self-inflicted,” ruled U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, reports Politico.
“The Department itself has already publicly revealed the sum and substance of the very material it is now seeking to withhold,” argued Jackson. “Since any harm that would flow from the disclosures sought here would be merely incremental, the records must be produced.”
In the wake of the ruling current U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch has stated that the Justice Department has not decided whether or not to invoke executive privilege by continuing to withhold the documents. The judge ordered the documents to be turned over by Feb. 2.
“We did receive that ruling,” said Lynch to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “We are still reviewing that ruling. I am aware of that provision in it. We, of course, want to study it carefully and determine what appropriate steps to take and the timeliness of them.”
The Attorney General said that the department will make their final decision in the allotted time, reports CNS News.
The picture in this article is misleading. 8 guns is less than in the picture. I saw in the original news release a Barret type .50BMG and wondered where it came from. Never did hear where the firearms came from in the extremist Muslim inspired Garland, TX shooting.
spineless officials ruin OUR COUNTRY. point them out, try them and hang them. repeat process.
Show me your tears, Mr. President, for the hundreds of Mexican citizens and our own Border Patrol agent killed by thousands of guns you and AG Holder gave to the Mexican Cartels under the botched “Fast and Furious” program. What hypocrisy.
Careful now! Guns don’t kill people, people do. If they didn’t have F&F guns, do we really think the result would be different? It is not the guns, it is the people pulling the trigger. Don’t fall into the media’s fallacy, my friend!
So, I guess from your comment that you have no problem with our government giving guns to KNOWN bad guys thus enabling their KNOWN propensity for USING them!
I would like to ask Donald Trump if he is elected President would he prosecute Obama and Holder for crimes committed while they were in office?
The article leave out a bit of history.
1) The GAO issues a [faulty] report stating that 84% of the drug cartel’s weapons come from the U.S.
2) The Pres goes on the air asking for stricter gun laws because 85% (later 90%) of the drug cartels weapons are illegally bought in the U.S. and smuggled into Mexico.
3) Someone tells the Pres that the math in the GAO report was B.S., even Homeland told them it was a crock before publication, and that the real number is less than 12%.
4) The Pres says do something about it!
5) Holder says “easy, lets start shipping guns to Mexico and bring the numbers up.”
I’ve no inside information to back this up, but it is the only scenario that seems to fit the facts.
It’s not the “only” scenario. The other scenario is that they are being honest (lol) about the whole thing, that they were trying to track them in order to find out where they were going. I believe that is likely the case, but then it got out of hand and they realized that they couldn’t really track them. From that point forward it became a game of “CYA”.
There can ONLY be one answer why they do not want to produce the records. It will ONCE AGAIN show that Bo BO and Eric the Idiot LIED !!
This is the third or fourth article I’ve seen on this & I have yet to see or read just which .50 caliber rifle it was. We are being dazzled with a lot of bullshit & blather . . .
Well Norm, I’m not sure how the exact type of rifle is so important. However, the term “anti-Material” in the text suggest an auto loading version such as the Barret M82A1, as that is the term used by our military for that rifles application designation under SASR, or Special Application Scoped Rifle.
The bolt action McMillan TAC-50 is classified as an anti-material rifle. Remember where these reports originate. The MSM still believes any semi-automatic rifle is an AK47
Operation Fast & Furious may or may not have been started by “the Shrub” and the “Draft Dodger” but it was O’bummer, Buckshot Biden and Eric the Red Holder who implemented and botched it. They need to have their feet put to the fire on this one, with that .50 going to a Mexican drug Cartel Drug lord.
Now there are only 49 of the 50—-50 cal. sniper rifles Obama sold to islamic terrorists and drug cartels. Two AR-15’s were found at the civic center at the Gellar art show.
But that is nothing, it seems this administration lost over 150K new AK-47’s all non-stamped and unmarked.
We know that Fast and Furious was initiated during the GW Bush presidency, right? It doesn’t work the leave all the bits that we don’t like. If we continue the sound bite system then gun control will get all it wants. The only way to keep what we have is to show all the cards, both sides, then make our case. Changing opinions is extremely difficult and we are a minority.
Not exactly. The plan under Bush was done with the cooperation and assistance of the Mexican government and was aimed at getting the gun runners. It was stopped after it likely failed to achieve anything. It was secretly restarted under Obama without the Mexican government’s support and without sufficient resources to track the guns in Mexico. It probably was intended to create enough sympathy for the Mexicans being killed by our guns to ram through another assault weapons ban. I know Feinstein was in all the papers braying at every chance about it until it was exposed as an Obama plan.
Fast and Furious was not started during the Bush administration. There was an attempt to track guns going to Mexico in coordination with the Mexican government—known as “Operation Wide Receiver”—but it was discovered that it wasn’t working so it was ended. Fast and Furious took an idea that had already failed, and implemented it without the attempt to keep track of the guns or the cooperation of the Mexican government. What could possibly go wrong with that?
More details here: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/282606/fast-furious-was-bushs-fault-andrew-c-mccarthy
While there may have been some simularities between Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious, they were not the same program as obamatons and other libertards would have you believe.
I’ve seen very smart people lie to themselves about this subject.
They will not believe their saint of a president could and hundreds of grenades and thousands of rifles to terrorists. So they blame Bush.
Obama appointed officials admitted on a live press conference Obama signed the stimulus money check to do the new operations. Bush notified and worked with the Mexican government.
Obama initiated new programs (sending grenades, too) and his administration admitted to it. Liberals don’t care and will call you the liar.
another outrage where nothing ever came of it except we kept hearing about hearings. typical congressional and govt delaying action and then after enough time the public losses interest and o yeah the ‘big game’ is on some where and then its ‘fast and furious what’? who?
Oh, it’s not over. Earlier this week the judge hearing the case against the administration told them to hand over the rest of the Holder documents on Fast and Furious. There’s more coming soon, just don’t expect to hear about it on NPR or MSNBC.
Was a background check done on El Chapo before he received the weapons?Oh wait ,that only applies to law abiding citizens .
Wish I had the choice to decide which Federal judge rulings I wanted to obey. The whole bunch of them need to be in prison.
Hey Barry,
Before you go signing executive orders and circumventing the Constitution and Congress in one of your lame attempts at gun control, how about you try to control the amount of machine guns that fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels??
You communists can run and hide but eventually we will bring you to justice.
It’s no wonder the Obama Administration is fighting like hell to keep theese FF documents protected by Exec. Privilege; this would expose their insidious plan to destroy the gun industry thus allowing them (Feds) to heavily regulate them.
It, (the gun) should be checked for finger prints. Holder and Obama may have left them on the gun, but then again maybe HRC has already taken a cloth and wiped them clean. They sure are a tidy bunch of law breakers and 2A abusers.