Three “bigoted meth heads,” armed with high-powered sniper weapons, were consumed by a seething hatred of Barack Obama, federal authorities said yesterday.
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Authorities recovered a terrifying arsenal: a Remington Model 721-270 bolt action rife, a Ruger M77, Mark II 22-250 bolt action rifle, boxes of Remington and Winchester ammo, two-way radios, bulletproof vests, camouflage gear 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, as the feds tried to downplay the seriousness of the threat.
But sources said more serious charges could be filed after the convention.
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 plot 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.
Authorities want to how and why the men had amassed the arsenal, sources said.
Police said they also found 4.4 grams of methamphetamine in the truck.
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,” court papers said.
Johnson further related that Adolf said that he wanted to kill Obama on the day of his inauguration,” according to the papers.
After Gartrell was busted, Johnson was arrested in his hotel room near Denver, while Adolf, 33, jumped out of a sixth-floor hotel window before being nabbed.
An unidentified female pal of Adolf’s told the feds of a Saturday-night gathering of the three men and another woman in Johnson’s hotel room, according to court papers.
Adolf’s female friend said the men kept calling Obama the n-word and saying they “could not believe how close he was to becoming president,” the federal affidavit said.