El Chapo Found With ‘Fast and Furious’ Rifle Capable of Taking Down Helicopter

One of the guns funneled to Mexico via the Obama administration’s fatally flawed “Operation Fast and Furious,” was  found at Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s hideout in Mexico, sources confirmed to Fox News Tuesday.

The weapon found is a “.50-caliber rifle that can stop a car or, as it was intended, take down a helicopter.”

After the raid on Jan. 8 in the city of Los Mochis that killed five of his men and wounded one Mexican marine, officials found a number of weapons inside the house where Guzman was staying, including the rifle, officials said.

When agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives checked serial numbers of the eight weapons found in his possession, they found one of the two .50-caliber weapons traced back to the ATF program, sources said.

Federal officials told Fox News they are not sure how many of the weapons seized from Guzman’s house actually originated in the U.S. and where they were purchased, but are investigating.

Out of the roughly 2,000 weapons sold through Fast and Furious, 34 were .50-caliber rifles that can take down a helicopter, according to officials.

Federal law enforcement sources told Fox News that ‘El Chapo’ would put his guardsmen on hilltops to be on guard for Mexican police helicopters that would fly through valleys conducting raids. The sole purpose of the guardsmen would be to shoot down those helicopters, sources said.

This marks the third time a weapon from the Fast and Furious program has been found at a high-profile Mexican crime scene, according to Fox News.

Ironically, the purported purpose of Operation Fast and Furious was to see how high up the chain U.S. guns went in the international drug trafficking, crime syndicate Sinaloa Cartel. Now we know.

The operation involved federal agents allowing criminals to buy guns in the United States with the intention of tracking them to the drug cartel in Mexico.

Instead, because the guns lacked tracking devices, and because ATF agents were actually blocked from tracking the guns, they wound up in the hands of the cartels, who proceeded to use them with predictable results.  Ultimately,  the only way for the weapons to be tracked was when they were recovered at crime scenes in Mexico or the United States. The ATF lost track of 1,400 of the 2,000 guns involved in the sting operation. Hundreds of Mexican citizens and at least two Americans have been slaughtered with weapons from this criminally insane program.

 Conservatives have long suspected that Operation Fast and Furious was the Obama Administration’s first attack on the 2nd Amendment.

As Jeff Dunetz reminds us:

Emails released in 2011 revealed that ATF big shots wanted to use the illegal gun sales in operation Fast and Furious to justify a new gun regulation called “Demand Letter 3”. The new rule would require  U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or “long guns.” The fancy name, Demand Letter 3 comes from the fact that it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information. If that’s how then name projects, why didn’t they name Fast and Furious, “Asinine Project 1?”

Fast and Furious was a sick attempt to deprive Americans of their Second Amendment rights by selling guns to Mexican Gun cartels. The program was a train wreck whose effects are still being discovered.

In June of 2012, former Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt by Congress after he refused to divulge documents for a congressional investigation into the matter. Not that Holder cared. In February of 2013, he told ABC News the contempt vote didn’t bother him at all considering who voted in favor of it.

“It’s something that I think was unfortunate,” Holder said. “I think it’s a result of this kind of partisan sport that I think we engage in here in Washington far too often.” He added, “but I have to tell you that for me to really be affected by what happened, I’d have to have respect for the people who voted in that way, and I didn’t, so it didn’t have that huge an impact on me.”

Now, after three and a half years,  a federal judge has finally rejected Obama’s assertion of executive privilege to deny Congress access to records pertaining to Operation Fast and Furious.

U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled Tuesday that the Justice Department’s public disclosures about its response to the so-called “gun walking” controversy undercut Obama’s executive privilege claim.

“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,” Jackson wrote. “The Department itself has already publicly revealed the sum and substance of the very material it is now seeking to withhold. Since any harm that would flow from the disclosures sought here would be merely incremental, the records must be produced.”

“While the decision doesn’t give us access to all the documents, it is an important step forward,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said in a statement Tuesday. “We will continue investigating until we get to the truth.”

In November of 2014, Jackson ordered the DOJ to turn over 64,280 documents sought by the House Oversight Committee – which Justice did — in heavily redacted form.