A Tale of Two Pardons Prisoners and double-standards. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-tale-of-two-pardons/
Just before the White House doors slammed shut behind him, Joe Biden released more pardons and commutations. First came the commutation of 33 death-row inmates condemned to execution, so that President Trump couldn’t carrying out their sentences. Then it was the turn of various federal agency bureaucrats; Biden family members implicated in influence-peddling and other grifts; and Congressmen who served on the January 6 committee whom the erstwhile Marionette in Chief claims will be targeted by Trump for retribution. Meanwhile, the new president has pardoned nearly all the 1500 January 6 protestors, many of whom have been incarcerated for years for misdemeanors.
Each side of the partisan divide is criticizing these pardons. Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans have gone into high dudgeon because Trump included protestors and rioters accused of assaults on police, or who were members of white supremacist fringe outfits. Coming from lefty Democrats, this sudden concern for the police is grotesque hypocrisy. Where was this solicitude in the 2020 BLM summer riots that targeted police and burned not just cop cars, but police precinct headquarters?
Or how about their national war on law enforcement through a campaign to defund the police? How many innocent people have died because of cutbacks in the number of those who protect us? Or how about rabid anti-American George Soros using his billions to help elect anti-law enforcement attorneys general and prosecutors? As for January 6 protests, the violence was like a picnic compared to the 2020 months of riots, assaults, and arson––all supported, excused, and rationalized by Democrats, some of whom solicited donations so the thugs could make bail. And don’t forget how few Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters were even arrested or indicted, let alone spent any time in jail.
And let’s remember how ill- prepared the Speaker of the House and the D.C. Mayor were for handling a rally that was allowed to descend into chaos on January 6. Or why the Capitol police were escorting protestors into the building and unlocking doors for them. You’d think that authorities who believe that Donald Trump and his Maga base were “semi-fascists” who wanted to “destroy our democracy” would have been readier to defend what the Dems called our “temple of democracy.”
But the Capitol is just a building, and the heart of our Republic is the Constitution. How unseemly is it for a party that for a hundred years has degraded the Constitution and attacked the Bill of Rights, especially the First and Fourteenth Amendments, to now assume the mantel of guardian of “our democracy”? The House January 6 Committee egregiously trampled on the latter right, and its principle of equality under law, as did the prosecutors who for four years hunted down, arrested, charged, tried, and sentenced protestors for misdemeanors like trespassing, whereas thousands of 2020 rioters got off scot-free.
This ordeal undergone by innocent protestors in violation of their rights, is redolent of political show-trials typical of autocratic states where elites govern by serving of their personal interests and power, rather than by the rule by laws that respect citizens’ rights.
Moreover, the bipartisan dudgeon about Trump’s pardons overlooks one important distinction––no policemen died as a direct result of the riot. One officer hit by a fire extinguisher died later, and despite the media’s 24/7 attempt to call his death a murder, the DC medical examiner said he died of natural causes. Of course, the person who struck him was rightfully arrested, and his action was wrong. But the cop wasn’t murdered.
Contrast this treatment with the pass given to the Capitol Police Officer who shot and killed Ashli Babbit, a veteran who was unarmed and, by some accounts, trying to control some over-aggressive protestors. But several investigations ruled Babbit’s killing shot “lawful and within Department policy,” on the dubious pretext that perhaps a few dozen protestors might have breached the House chambers and slaughtered Congressmen wholesale.
The salient point is that such police-civilian encounters for decades have been treated with a double-standard based on the ethnicity of the policeman, usually white, when a man “of color” dies. Such politicized unequal treatment under the law was rife during the investigations of the January 6 riot, and factored into the Trump’s decision to pardon and commute the sentences of all those who were charged.
Next, Biden’s mass commutation of execution for 37 death-row inmates in December similarly reeks of politicization and hypocrisy, as a murderer of two FBI agents is allowed to live. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Those spared include a former Marine who killed two young girls and later a female naval officer; a Las Vegas man convicted of kidnapping and killing a 12-year-old girl; a Chicago podiatrist who fatally shot a patient to keep her from testifying in a Medicare fraud investigation; and two men convicted in a kidnapping-for-ransom scheme that resulted in the killings of five Russian and Georgian immigrants.” Three notorious terrorists did not have their sentences commuted.
The most egregious and shameful commutation was letting the notorious, cold-blooded murderer Leonard Peltier live. He’s the radical activist who in 1975 murdered two FBI agents and tried to kill an off-duty policeman. After wounding the two agents, he shot one in the head and the other in the face. He escaped to Canada, opening fire on an Oregon State Policeman along the way.
As the Journal writes,
“Mr. Biden’s clemency decision follows a years-long campaign from the left. In a letter to Mr. Biden last month, 36 Democratic lawmakers hailed Mr. Peltier as a ‘Native American rights activist’ and suggested his incarceration was a ‘grave injustice.’ Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and others have cited ‘serious concerns’ about the fairness of his trial.”
So for Dems, pardoning and commuting the sentences of January 6 rally goers who physically assaulted cops, is worse than letting live a heinous murderer like Peltier, just to gratify the preferences of anti-capital punishment activists and Native American advocates. Nor should we forget the grievous wrongs done to the families of the victims, who now will never get justice for their lost loved ones.
But politics and pandering to the base, not justice, was Biden’s aim. As Senator Tom Cotton remarked of Biden’s act, “Democrats can’t even defend Biden’s outrageous decision as some kind of principled, across-the-board opposition to the death penalty since he didn’t commute the three most politically toxic cases.”
Biden’s second set of pardons, as in the case of son Hunter, were preemptive, giving his family members implicated in the family’s influence peddling and money-grubbing a get out of prosecution and jail free cards, even though they haven’t been charged with crimes. Similarly, the regulatory factotums like Anthony Fauci are now protected from any accountability for politicizing their professional responsibilities, and violating their oaths to defend the Constitution.
One of the most egregious assaults on the Constitution that Biden pardoned preemptively was perpetrated by General Mark Milley, the military’s highest-ranking officer, who in 2020 violated his oath to honor the Constitution, the chain of command, and the foundational principle that the military is subordinate to the civilian government that is accountable to the voters. As well as being an act of election interference, some argue that Milley committed an actionable act of treason.
According to National Review at the time, on the preposterous pretext that President Trump was mentally unstable enough to attack China or provoke a nuclear war before leaving office, Milley allegedly went behind Trump’s back to speak with a foreign power. He “went to the head of the Chinese military to tell him, in effect, that Trump was bluffing. He reportedly ordered naval exercises canceled to avoid offending the Chinese. He even ‘went so far as to pledge he would alert his counterpart in the event of a U.S. attack . . . ‘General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.’”
Finally, Biden’s blanket pardons are violations of those “norms” that the Dems for nearly a decade have been castigating Trump for. Pardoning and commuting the sentences of people who attack and injure policemen doing their duty can reasonably be questioned. But Biden’s anticipatory pardons of federal bureaucrats are much more salient for the larger problem with our government––the regulatory Leviathan of federal agencies that comprise the fourth power of the government unaccountable to the people.
These bloated offices and bureaus have for nearly a century empowered the destructive policies and actions that have weakened our Constitution and its guardrails that protect our freedoms. It’s high time these hypertrophied wastrel institutions–– staffed with unaccountable “experts” trafficking in scientism and politicization–– be reined in, and the government held accountable to the citizens.
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