Richard Serrano of the L.A. Times brings us recently uncovered news about the results of the Obama Administration’s “Gun Walker” program:
In the second violent crime in this country connected with the ATF’s failed Fast and Furious program, two Arizona undercover police officers were allegedly assaulted last year when they attempted to stop two men in a stolen vehicle with two of the program's weapons in a confrontation south of Phoenix.
The officers, members of an elite Arizona Department of Public Safety law enforcement unit, said the driver rammed their cars and threatened them with the firearms, and then fled into the Arizona desert. The driver was caught and arrested, and two firearms –- a Beretta pistol and AK-47 semiautomatic assault rifle - were found in the stolen Ford truck, the police said.
The suspect, Angel Hernandez-Diaz, 48, believed to be a Mexican national, was charged with aggravated assault on a police officer, driving the stolen vehicle and illegal possession of the weapons. He has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to stand trial in Pinal County, Ariz., next month.
Also arrested in the incident was the passenger, Rosario Zavala, 30, of Mexico, who was charged with possession of narcotics and the stolen vehicle.
I can’t imagine why the President didn’t tout this wonderful program when he demanded another $450 billion in “stimulus” spending last night. After all, Operation Fast and Furious, along with other “gun walker” programs, were partially funded with money from the first Obama stimulus plan.
The incident described above occurred on March 4, 2010, but we’re just now learning about the Fast and Furious connection. It took five months from the beginning of Fast and Furious for a couple of its weapons to make their way to the scene of a violent crime in an American city. Just imagine how many more of those high-powered chickens have come home to roost in the ensuing year and a half!
The initial violent crime, alluded to in the excerpt above, was the murder of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. Two Fast and Furious AK-47s turned up at the scene. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Arizona made a spirited attempt to cover it up… and now, a matter of days after Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) began digging deep into the cover-up story, we learn about a guy ramming into Arizona undercover cops with a stolen truck full of Fast and Furious guns and narcotics.
As for the intrepid felons, Hernandez-Diaz and Zavala, I’m curious to know if their immigration status was determined, their connections to Mexican drug cartels, what they were doing in Phoenix, and what happened to them. The best information I could find was a Maricopa.com post from the time of the arrest, identifying them as “both residents of Mexico.” This report didn’t have any details about their guns, saying only that they were “booked into Pinal County Jail in Florence on multiple felony accounts.”
Say, do you suppose the ATF might know where they are? Wasn’t the stated purpose of Operation Fast and Furious to push American guns into Mexico so they could be traced to their ultimate buyers? How come these guys were able to appear out of nowhere and plow into an undercover police car in Arizona?
Update: Did I say two Fast and Furious guns were found at the Terry crime scene? Make that three. From a Fox News report:
A third gun linked to "Operation Fast and Furious" was found at the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, new documents obtained exclusively by Fox News suggest, contradicting earlier assertions by federal agencies that police found only two weapons tied to the federal government's now infamous gun interdiction scandal.
Sources say emails support their contention that the FBI concealed evidence to protect a confidential informant. Sources close to the Terry case say the FBI informant works inside a major Mexican cartel and provided the money to obtain the weapons used to kill Terry.
Unlike the two AK-style assault weapons found at the scene, the third weapon could more easily be linked to the informant. To prevent that from happening, sources say, the third gun "disappeared."
In addition to the emails obtained by Fox News, an audio recording from a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent investigating the Terry case seems to confirm the existence of a third weapon. In that conversation, the agent refers to an "SKS assault rifle out of Texas" found at the Terry murder scene south of Tucson.
