The Presidential Pardon in Action

One might well ask, with Matt Margolis, whose side are they on? (via Maggie’s Farm) When President Trump pardoned Lt. General Michael Flynn the armies of the American left rose up to denounce the abuse of presidential pardon power. Of course, there was no abuse, Alan Dershowitz remarked clearly. But it does not really matter. Democrats can say anything they want, distorting the facts and the law as they please, and the supine American media will simply fall in line-- with cheers.

Then again, Flynn was a general in the United States Army. For his service he was set up by the Obama FBI and harassed judicially by the Mueller commission and rogue judges. Clearly, in the culture war between soldiers and lawyers, the lawyers won several rounds. They destroyed Flynn’s life. Only Trump’s pardon began to set things straight.

Margolis reminds us:

President Trump granted a full pardon to former National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. If there was ever a case where there was a miscarriage of justice, it was this one, and the pardon was a long time coming. Flynn was set up by the Obama administration and railroaded by the FBI. Simply put, they went after him for something that was not a crime, then set up a perjury trap for him in order to get him fired as Trump’s national security advisor. Obama officials also withheld exculpatory evidence, launched and carried out a bogus investigation over claims of Russian collusion where there was no empirical evidence.

Pardoning a general who had his life destroyed because he did not support the Iran nuclear deal-- because that was the issue-- is a crime against whatever the left considers holy. 

And yet, Barack Obama issued more pardons and commutations than any other president in modern times. If you ask who he pardoned, it turns out that he was not only pardoning criminal drug dealers, but was happy to commute sentences of terrorists and traitors. Obviously, the Democratic Party is not the party of patriotism:

Remember when Barack Obama commuted the sentence of Bradley Manning (you may also know him as Chelsea), who leaked hundreds of thousands of sensitive government documents to WikiLeaks? He was convicted in 2013 and sentenced to 35 years in prison. Manning was a traitor in every sense, but became a hero of the political left for declaring himself to be transgender, and Obama made his controversial commutation just days before leaving office. Manning maintains hero status amongst the left today.

Obama also commuted the sentence of convicted terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera, the leader of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (FALN), a Puerto Rican terrorist group. FALN was responsible for 130 attacks in the United States, and at least six deaths. An unrepentant Lopez-Rivera was serving a 70-year sentence when Obama set him free. The Congressional Black Caucus had repeatedly lobbied for Lopez’s release during the Obama years, and the commutation was met with praise from Democrats like Bill de Blasio, Congressman Luis Gutiérrez, Bernie Sanders, and others.

Obama also granted clemency to hundreds of drug offenders he claimed were non-violent and deserved a second chance, because of racism or something. It later came out that many of the people he released were actually violent offenders guilty of gun crimes. Obama granted more acts of clemency than any president since Truman, though he saved much of that executive use of power for the latter months and days of his presidency.