Three “bigoted meth heads,” armed with high-powered sniper weapons, were consumed by a seething hatred of Barack Obama, federal authorities said Tuesday.
Authorities recovered a terrifying arsenal that could have been used in a shocking attack: a Remington 270 sniper rife, a Ruger 22-250 sniper rifle, boxes of Remington and Winchester ammo, two-way radios, bulletproof vests, camouflage and wigs.
And in a chilling interview late Monday night, one of the men made his murderous hatred crystal-clear.
“[Obama] don’t belong in political office,” Nathan Johnson, 32, told a TV station in Denver. “Blacks don’t belong in political office. He ought to be shot.”
Yet the suspects – at least one of whom allegedly has white-supremacist ties – were slapped only with minor drug and gun charges, although more serious indictments could come after the convention, sources said.
US Attorney Troy Eid called Johnson, Tharin Gartrell and Shawn Robert Adolf “hateful and bigoted meth heads,” but added that they were high all the time and that investigators were not convinced they had a solid plan to assassinate Obama.
Still, “the investigation is . . . ongoing. It is an open case,” Eid said.
The alleged scheme unraveled when Johnson’s cohort, 28-year-old Gartrell – a professional club-music DJ who had a suspended driver’s license – was stopped Sunday for driving erratically in Aurora, Colo. Inside his pickup truck was the cache of weapons, officials said.
Police said they also found 4.4 grams of methamphetamine.
Although the feds brushed off the possibility of a real assassination plot, they still want to know how and why the men had amassed such an arsenal, sources said.
Johnson later asserted that it was clear what the weapons were supposed to be used for.
“[We were] going to shoot Obama from a high vantage point using a . . . rifle . . . sighted at 750 yards,” he told Denver’s KCNC-TV.
But hours before his TV interview, Johnson had told the feds something different: that he and buddies had the powerful guns to go hunting in Denver, according to a federal affidavit.
Then, once FBI agents began picking apart his story, “Johnson began to cry and admitted that Adolf had threatened to kill Obama on a prior occasion. Johnson further related that Adolf said that he wanted to kill Obama on the day of his inauguration,” according to court papers.
After Gartrell was busted, Johnson and Adolf, 33, were collared in two separate hotel rooms around the Denver area.
Adolf jumped out of a sixth-floor window to flee but was soon nabbed trying to hobble away on a broken ankle.
All three men have criminal records involving drugs.
Eid insisted that the suspects had no real chance to carry out their evil desires.
“We can say this: We’re absolutely confident that the meth heads were not a true threat to the candidate, the Democratic National Convention or the people of Colorado,” he said.