'Your papers, please' must never be heard in America
Independent voices from the TWT Communities
The man who bought two semi-automatic assault rifles found at the scene of the fatal 2010 shooting of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Arizona was sentenced Wednesday in federal court in Phoenix to 57 months in prison over his role in the botched Fast and Furious gun-running investigation.
The man who purchased two semi-automatic assault rifles found at the scene of the fatal December 2010 shooting of a U.S. Border Patrol agent just north of the Arizona-Mexico border pleaded guilty Thursday to two felony charges in the federal government's botched Fast and Furious gun-smuggling investigation.
The central characters in the failed "Fast and Furious" firearms investigation were 19 men and one woman, accused of laying down hundreds of thousands of dollars in illicit cash at Phoenix-area gun shops to buy an arsenal of high-powered weapons for Mexican drug smugglers.
Two top Republican lawmakers say Arizona prosecutors "stifled" attempts by agents for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to interdict weapons purchased by "straw buyers" in that state that later were "walked" to drug smugglers in Mexico, and may have covered up the fact that two of those weapons were found at the scene of the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
Weapons purchased during ATF's controversial "Fast and Furious" undercover investigation, which included the sale to "straw buyers" of hundreds of AK-47 assault rifles, have turned up at a dozen violent crime scenes across the Southwest, the Justice Department told a Senate committee.
