The Federalist91%
Dems’ Star Witness For AG Hearing Pushed Clemency For ‘Rapists, Child Molesters, And Murderers’ 57%
By M.D. Kittle85%
7/15/2026, 11:43:33 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Biased Writer Voice, and Ad Hominem, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 40.2% saturation with 467 hits. Analysis detected 2,932 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,162 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 54.6% and a BS Rank of 57% (6,889 of 15,907 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 56.70% of the article peer group.
Expect Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats to deliver another crazed production of confirmation theater Wednesday, rolling out every political weapon in their arsenal to try to block Acting AG Todd Blanche’s promotion to U.S.
Attorney General.
Old, shriveled Dick Durbin, the committee’s ranking member, believes he’s got an ace up his sleeve as Blanche’s confirmation hearing begins Wednesday morning.
He’s called Liz Oyer, the Department of Justice’s former “nonpolitical” pardon attorney, to testify.
Oyer carries a deep loathing of President Donald Trump and an ax to grind against Blanche.
In a statement released Tuesday, the Illinois senator asserted that Blanche fired Oyer “for refusing to rubberstamp gun ownership rights to Mel Gibson, a convicted domestic violence abuser and friend of Donald Trump.”
Yes, that Mel Gibson — actor and director — who had been barred from purchasing firearms following a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction in 2011.
Gibson was one of 10 people who received pardons from the Trump administration last year for their decades-old crimes.
Oyer was shown the door after she refused to include Gibson on the list of pardons.
Blanche signed the firing memo terminating the pardon attorney’s job.
“I had been asked to recommend restoring the firearm rights of a famous friend of the president who had lost his right to own a gun due to a domestic violence conviction,” Oyer wrote in a self-serving Rolling Stone op-ed.
“I declined to do so based on concerns about public safety.”
Oyer didn’t seem to have many concerns about the victims of the 37 convicted killers on federal death row who got a get-out-of-execution card thanks to the pardon attorney’s soft spot for psychopaths.
The pardon attorney recommended that then-Attorney General Merrick Garland “encourage” President Joe Biden to “use his clemency power to reassess the 40 remaining federal death sentences through the lens of current policy and practice.”
“Disparity and undue severity of sentence, which are present in many if not all of these cases, have long been recognized as grounds for clemency,” Oyer wrote in a Nov. 4, 2024 memo obtained by The Federalist.
“In this context, clemency could take various forms, ranging from the broadest approach of commuting all death sentences, to the narrower approach of considering clemency on a case-by-case basis.”
Clemency Bender
As noted in her memo, the Biden administration had received an “influx of requests” to commute federal death sentences before the autopen president left office less than three months later.
Biden, or at least his autopen, saved 37 of the 40 convicts from a kinder death than their victims suffered.
They will be wards of the state, ongoing expenses for taxpayers, until the day they die — most likely from natural causes.
Unlike their victims.
Biden, or at least his autopen, went on a clemency bender in the final days of a disastrous administration marked by a merciless, weaponized Department of Justice.
The former president granted a record number of clemency requests — 4,245, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of statistics from the U.S.
Department of Justice.
Biden bested every president in the category, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who granted about 550 fewer clemency requests in his 12-plus years in the White House.
And Biden cleaned out most of death row after reinstating the moratorium on federal capital punishment.
In her 73-page memo, Oyer stressed that her fellow death penalty opponents feared “the possibility that executions could quickly resume when a new administration takes office.”
The new administration did just that.
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that restored the death penalty in the name of public safety.
In the order, he noted Biden’s commutation free-for-all that spared the lives of 37 of the 40 “most vile and sadistic rapists, child molesters, and murderers on Federal death row: remorseless criminals who brutalized young children, strangled and drowned their victims, and hunted strangers for sport.”
‘Blood on their Hands’
But in her memo, Oyer suggested the death row inhabitants shouldn’t have faced capital charges in the first place.
Fine folks such as Chadrick Fulks and Brandon Basham, each convicted of murdering 19-year-old Samantha Burns after grabbing her from a mall parking lot in 2002.
“Burns' murder happened after Fulks and Basham broke out of jail and went on a multi-state crime spree.
A woman from South Carolina was also killed during the spree,” WSAZ in West Virginia reported.
Then there are sweethearts like Ricordo Sanchez Junior and Daniel Troya, the dynamic duo behind the 2006 Florida Turnpike murders.
They killed a mother, father, and two young children in a “drug-debt” hit.
“Just four and three years old at the time, the boys died wrapped in their mother’s arms,” CBS 12 in Florida reported.
“At no point did the president consider the victims,” Heather Turner, daughter of a woman killed during a bank robbery, wrote on Facebook about Biden.
“He, and his supporters, have blood on their hands.”
‘Not a Compelling Candidate for Clemency’
Oyer made a particular pitch for clemency in the case of mass murderer Dylann Roof, who in 2015 stormed into Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. and shot and killed nine black members.
In an Oct. 30, 2024 memo obtained by The Federalist, Oyer conceded to DOJ big wigs that “Roof is not a compelling candidate for clemency.”
But that didn’t stop her from recommending it.
It’s complicated, she wrote.
The jury sentenced Roof to death without knowing that “he suffers from mental health developmental disorders including autism and schizophrenia spectrum disorders.”
He dealt with “crippling anxiety.”
No doubt his heinous crimes caused crippling anxiety for some of the survivors.
Roof was among just three federal death row inmates that didn’t make Biden’s clemency list.
The others are Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Robert Bowers, who shot and killed 11 congregants of a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.
It remains the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S history.
In her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in April, Oyer groused that “the new administration showed little interest in considering our clemency recommendations.”
She was still bitter about Mel Gibson’s gun rights being restored.
Weaponized Against Them
The “nonpolitical” former DOJ employee sure has gotten involved with some Trump-hating Democrats in her lawsuit against the DOJ.
She’s being represented by Democracy Forward, “a left-of-center litigation and advocacy nonprofit created in early 2017 by high-level Democratic Party operatives,” according to nonprofit tracker InfluenceWatch.
“The organization has been aggressive in targeting the Trump administration,” InfluenceWatch wrote about the lawfare group.
Durbin, who cheered on the Biden Justice Department targeting the Democratic Party’s political enemies, said Oyer will offer “compelling testimony about the dangers of Todd Blanche weaponizing the Justice Department in service of Donald Trump, rather than the American people.”
The families and friends of the victims of the death row inmates that Oyer protected must feel like Biden’s DOJ was weaponized against them.
Analysis
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