Democrats’ longstanding embrace of radical leftists explains why Trump’s pardons of Capitol rioters who assaulted cops is not stirring the outrage they deserve.
It must be dispiriting for Democrats to watch a Republican president disgracefully grant clemency to scoundrels who attacked police and damaged property in the Capitol riot, but get no traction because — besides besotting himself with corrupt last-minute pardons of family members potentially implicated in his corrupt family influence-peddling business, and issuing preemptive pardons of the type he indignantly foreswore four years ago to public officials — the outgoing Democratic president made sure to pardon a radical leftist who murdered two FBI agents . . . over the vigorous objections of the FBI.
This merely continues our unending series on the left’s infatuation with political violence — see, e.g., here and here.
As Jim recounted yesterday, President Biden granted an eleventh-hour commutation of the double-life sentence of Leonard Peltier, who in 1975 murdered FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Peltier was released from a federal penitentiary and transferred to home confinement.
David Horowitz’s Discover the Networks provides this background:
Peltier was part of the “hired” violence that AIM [the American Indian Movement] brought into South Dakota in the 1970s, when inter-tribal conflict was at its worst. Peltier was already a fugitive, having unlawfully fled to evade trial for the attempted murder of a Milwaukee police officer. AIM asked Peltier to help defend its members against Pine Ridge tribal leaders who wanted AIM terrorists removed from the reservation. In turn, those tribal leaders asked the FBI to intervene, and thus the circumstances were created that led to Peltier’s 1975 murders.
On June 26, 1975, FBI agents Ronald A. Williams and Jack R. Coler were investigating an assault and robbery on the Pine Ridge Reservation that had them in pursuit of a pick-up truck. The agents radioed that they had come under high-powered rifle fire from the occupants of the vehicle and asked for backup. At 4:30 that afternoon, authorities recovered the bodies of Williams and Coler at their vehicle, which had been pierced by some 125 bullets; FBI investigators later concluded that the agents had been murdered at close range by a .223 caliber rifle.
With the FBI on his trail, in September 1975 Peltier fled to the Northwestern U.S. where he was stopped by an Oregon State Trooper who noticed that the vehicle Peltier was driving matched an FBI description. Following an exchange of gunfire with the trooper, Peltier ran from the scene. Law-enforcement authorities who later examined Peltier’s abandoned car found Agent Coler’s handgun in a bag that had Peltier’s fingerprints on it.
In 1975 one of Peltier’s fellow AIM members, Arlo Looking Cloud (an Oglala Lakota), participated in the brutal murder of Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a Mi’kmaq Indian from Canada. Journalist Paul DeMain has reported that the motive for her killing was “her knowledge that Leonard Peltier had shot the two [FBI] agents.” In testimony delivered at the trial of Arlo Looking Cloud, Ka-Mook Banks, wife of AIM leader Dennis Banks, stated that she had heard Peltier admit to killing the agents. “The ‘MF’ was begging for his life,” she quoted Peltier as having said. “But I shot him anyway.”
At the tail end of his presidency, Bill Clinton granted clemency to Weatherman terrorists Susan Rosenberg and Linda Evans. (See Jay’s 2004 article on them and their confederates here; mine on Rosenberg et al. here.) Similarly, President Obama commuted the sentence of FALN terrorist Oscar López Rivera — a leader so unrepentant that Clinton did not grant him clemency, even as he commuted the sentences of other FALN terrorists, because Rivera refused to renounce violence. Before leaving office in disgrace in 2021, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo orchestrated the release of David Gilbert. Gilbert and his wife Kathy Boudin (who are the parents of former San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin) — a fellow Weatherman terrorist — were convicted, along with Black Liberation Army members, in the infamous 1981 Brinks robbery, in which Nyack police officers Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady and Brinks security guard Peter Paige were murdered. As Dan related in writing about the case and the cast of characters, Cuomo had already freed another of the terrorists, Judith Clark, in 2019.
President Trump’s despicable pardons of Capitol rioters who assaulted cops and damaged property are not causing the kind of stir I would have predicted, even after Vice President Vance previously said that such rioters “obviously” shouldn’t be granted clemency, and Trump’s attorney general nominee, Pam Bondi, condemned violence against law enforcement when asked at her confirmation hearing about the prospect of pardons — if you were wondering why, the embrace of murderous radical leftists by Democrats is why.
The solution is to treat all politically motivated violence equally. Pardoning it is not the brand of equality I have in mind.