Democrats endorse candidate challenging incumbent St. Louis mayor
ST. LOUIS – The St. Louis Democratic Central Committee officially endorsed Alderwoman Cara Spencer for St. Louis mayor in a rare move that shows support for a challenger against an incumbent of the same party.
The committee voted to throw its support behind Alderwoman Cara Spencer over current St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, who made history in 2021 when she took office as St. Louis' first Black female mayor. Spencer's endorsement comes following the St. Louis City Primary Election, which saw Mayor Jones finish as a distant second behind Alderwoman Spencer.
Of the 28 members from all 14 wards who met with the Democratic Central Committee, 15 voted for Spencer and 9 for Jones, while two abstained from voting. Additionally, in the vote for St. Louis Comptroller, the committee showed support for current comptroller Darlene Green over challenger Donna Baringer in a 19-6 vote.
Local Gold Star parents speak out after terrorist behind deadly attack captured
After the committee announced their support for Spencer, Mayor Jones shared that she was disappointed by the endorsement but not surprised. 'This is an attempt by their organization to create relevance and power for themselves,' said Jones. 'The last thing our city needs is an untested and inexperienced executive with a history of avoiding hard conversations and quitting when the going gets tough.'
St. Louis residents will be able to decide the race for St. Louis mayor in the general election on April 8.
St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones and Alderwoman Cara Spencer are set to face off in a St. Louis Mayoral Debate on FOX 2 AND ST. LOUIS 11 on March 13 at 7 p.m. If you have a question you would like to have answered during the debate, you can submit it by clicking here.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Boston Globe
3 hours ago
- Boston Globe
How Amy Coney Barrett is confounding the right and the left
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Now Trump is attacking the judiciary and testing the Constitution, and Barrett, appointed to clinch a 50-year conservative legal revolution, is showing signs of leftward drift. Advertisement She has become the Republican-appointed justice most likely to be in the majority in decisions that reach a liberal outcome, according to a new analysis of her record prepared for The New York Times. Her influence -- measured by how often she is on the winning side -- is rising. Along with the chief justice, a frequent voting partner, Barrett could be one of the few people in the country to check the actions of the president. Advertisement Overall, her assumption of the seat once held by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has moved the court's outcomes dramatically to the right and locked in conservative victories on gun rights, affirmative action and the power of federal agencies. But in Trump-related disputes, she is the member of the supermajority who has sided with him the least. That position is making her the focus of animus, hope and debate. In interviews, some liberals who considered the court lost when she was appointed have used phrases like, 'It's all on Amy.' When Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan agreed on nonunanimous decisions this term, Barrett joined them 82% of the time -- up from 39% of the time in her first term. Some of Trump's allies have turned on her, accusing the justice of being a turncoat and calling her -- a mother of seven, with two Black children adopted from Haiti -- a 'DEI hire.' Her young son asked why she had a bulletproof vest, she said in a speech last year, and her extended family has been threatened, including with pizza deliveries that convey a warning: We know where you live. 'We had too much hope for her,' Mike Davis, a right-wing legal activist with close ties to the Trump administration, said in a recent interview. 'She doesn't have enough courage.' This spring, on Steve Bannon's podcast, Davis tore into her in such crude terms, even mocking the size of her family, that Justice Neil Gorsuch, for whom Davis had once clerked, phoned him to express disapproval of his comments, according to people aware of the exchange. Trump has privately complained about her too, according to two people familiar with his thinking. Advertisement But she rarely abandons the other Republican appointees in the most significant cases. 'It's a mistake by ignorant conservatives and wishful liberals to believe she's moderating,' said Noah Feldman, a Harvard University law professor who befriended her when they clerked at the court. Like others who know her, he said that both the right and the left had misread her. 'She's exactly the person I met 25 years ago: principled, absolutely conservative, not interested in shifting . " Friends, former colleagues and people from the court describe the justice as more of a methodical problem solver than an architect with grand plans for the law. 'A law professor to my bones,' she said in a 2022 talk, referring to her years teaching at Notre Dame Law School. When others tried to draft her for the bench, she was uncertain about becoming a judge, according to those who know her well. She still maintains a tucked-away office at Notre Dame. Some on the right are turning her scholarly background against her, complaining that she is too fussy about the fine points of the law and sounding a rallying cry of 'no more academics' for future appointments. On the court, she stands somewhat alone. One of only two former law professors, she is also the least experienced judge, the youngest member of the group, at 53, and the only mother of grade-school children ever to serve. The sole current justice who was not educated at Harvard or Yale University, she is a Washington outsider and foreigner to the power-player Beltway posts that shaped most of her colleagues. Advertisement She strikes an earnest tone in talking about her job. 'The day that I think I am better than the next person in the grocery store checkout line is a bad day,' she said in a 2022 talk. Her apartness shows in her votes and her signature move of joining only slices of her colleagues' opinions. She agrees with most of the supermajority's outcomes, but sometimes writes to say they took the wrong route to their conclusion. (One person from the court called her the Hermione Granger of the conservatives, telling the men they're doing it wrong.) Or she joins the liberal justices but stipulates that she can't fully buy in. 'She hasn't found a team,' said Sarah Isgur, a legal podcast host, pointing to her habit of marking where she departs from conservative colleagues, and to a recent death penalty ruling in which she was sitting 'in the middle of that decision.' But the Trump administration's conflict with the courts and pushing of constitutional boundaries may force her to take a more decisive stance. Of the three justices at the center of the court, where the most influence lies, she is the only one without a long trail of views on how much power a president should have -- the issue at the heart of nearly all these cases. 'She doesn't have 10 years to mellow into it,' Feldman said. 'Now is the crisis.' The professor and the beltway One morning in April, the justices formed a nine-person frieze of contrasts as they heard oral arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor, over whether parents of public elementary school students are entitled to religious exemptions from lessons involving books about LGBTQ+ people. Alito, quick to favor exemptions, clashed with Sotomayor, who was skeptical. As she spoke, Alito shut his eyes and leaned far back in his chair. Advertisement Barrett composed herself into a portrait of someone in listening mode, eyes trained, chin resting on hands. She asked open-ended, just-trying-to-understand questions, then sharper ones, moving in on a factual hole in the school's argument and politely forcing the lawyer to admit it. By the time the justices rose, American parents seemed likely to gain more control over the ideas their children encounter in public school. Her queries made a similar impression when she arrived as a student at Notre Dame Law three decades ago: She was so incisive that several instructors said they were learning from her. She won a clerkship with Justice Antonin Scalia but then chose the quiet work of a law professor. Not the hotshot kind: 'She wasn't trying to break big new ground,' recalled Joseph P. Bauer, her civil procedure teacher and, later, fellow faculty member. 'She is not going to present an argument that shifts the paradigm, or reconceives ways of looking at things, or makes big moves.' The courses she taught were about the rules of the road -- evidence, procedure, the fine-grained reading of laws. In her own scholarship, she delved into questions that even some academics considered too nerdy to answer. Mark McKenna, a former faculty member, said, 'I remember people pushing her, 'Does anyone care about these things?'' Although others envisioned her on the bench, she was not sold. By 2017, when a seat opened up on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, covering three Midwestern states, she had a stack of teaching awards and a brimming family life, including a young child with Down syndrome. William Kelley, a Notre Dame colleague with Washington connections, encouraged her but figured she would not pursue it, he said. Advertisement 'Attention, power, cool things, elitism -- she has zero interest,' he said of his friend, who once served on the university's parking committee. But she said yes. During Senate confirmation hearings Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked her a maladroit question about her Catholicism. 'The dogma lives loudly within you,' the senator said, implying that her rulings would flow from Rome. It was insulting -- and lucky. The nominee became an instant lodestar for religious women. The White House counsel's team made mugs emblazoned with her face and Feinstein's words. That year, Donald F. McGahn II, the head of that office, showed up at her judicial investiture. Six months later, Trump was interviewing her for the Supreme Court seat that went to Judge Brett Kavanaugh. She had been on the bench for only a year and barely had a record. Two years later, in 2020, she was nominated before Ginsburg was even buried. Though the presidential election was only six weeks away, Republicans raced her through the confirmation process, four years after they blocked President Barack Obama's nominee on the grounds that an election was coming in eight months. Trump's comments about Barrett in 2020 and his more recent complaints were relayed by several people who requested anonymity to share confidential information. Harrison Fields, a White House spokesperson, said that Trump 'may disagree with the court and some of its rulings, but he will always respect its foundational role.' The ramrod-straight jurist had little in common personally with Trump. 'When I think of Amy, I think of someone deeply devoted to family and faith, who does not seek out the limelight, who is humble and just wants to quietly do the work,' said Amanda Tyler, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley; former clerk to Ginsburg; and longtime friend to Barrett. To lawmakers, the nominee stressed her independence. But the president had already said the justices he appointed would be 'automatic' votes to overturn Roe v. Wade. On the public stage, certain facts (her large family and membership in a religious community that had once called women leaders 'handmaids') overshadowed others (when she became a federal judge, every member of her clerkship class, liberals included, endorsed her). Partisans said she stood for their greatest hopes or worst fears. She was confirmed without a single Democratic vote. The new justice arrived at a Supreme Court that was operating under pandemic conditions and still in mourning. 'I didn't know how I would be received,' she would later say. Liberals were unsure how the court would ever again garner the five votes necessary to prevail in a case. Barrett set her own path in the first major case she heard. In Fulton v. Philadelphia, the justices considered whether the city could exclude a Catholic agency from its foster care system because it refused to work with LGBTQ+ couples. Alito had long sought to overturn a 1990 precedent, written by Scalia, that said religious beliefs were not a basis for refusing to comply with generally applicable laws -- say, ones banning drug use. A year earlier, four conservative justices signaled that they were ready to undo the decision and expand religious rights. Now they appeared to have the votes. But Alito's effort failed. The court settled on a unanimous bottom line, requiring the city to do business with the agency but skirting bigger questions and dividing on the reasoning. Alito wrote a furious 77-page concurrence. 'The court has emitted a wisp of a decision that leaves religious liberty in a confused and vulnerable state,' he wrote. Barrett countered in just three paragraphs, explaining that she was skeptical of the precedent but wanted to know what could replace it. Others inside and outside the court took notice: She was willing to confound expectations. An independent streak To many Americans, the conservative supermajority can look like a unified front reshaping the law through blunt force. Internally, the coalition is more fractured -- six people debating how quickly to move, how far to go and whether public perception matters. Barrett has favored a more deliberate approach than some of her colleagues. In classroom lectures, she used to say that the country had bound itself to the Constitution the way Odysseus had tied himself to the mast of his ship, to resist whatever political sirens swam up. 'She wants to be seen as apolitical,' said Sherif Girgis, a Notre Dame faculty member. He argued that she was sending a message in the neutral-sounding lines of her opinions: 'The method made me do it, the theory made me do it, not my policy preferences.' Although Scalia, her mentor, is remembered as a leader of the legal right, he also surprised the public at times. He famously signed onto an opinion that said burning the American flag was protected by the Constitution. 'Justice Scalia used to say, and I wholeheartedly agree, that if you find yourself liking the results of every decision that you make, you're in the wrong job,' Barrett said in 2024. 'You should sometimes be reaching results that you really dislike because it's not your job to just be deciding cases in the way that you'd like them to be seen.' As a junior justice, she is rarely assigned high-profile opinions. But she has defined herself through her concurrences, particularly ones that argue the other conservatives are going off track. Several times, she has told Justice Clarence Thomas that he leans too heavily on history in making decisions, including last year, when the court rejected a lawyer's attempt to trademark the phrase 'Trump Too Small.' Although Barrett agreed with the outcome, she wrote that Thomas' reasoning was faulty, in part because 'the historical record does not alone suffice' as a basis for the decision. She was drawing a line on how far originalism, the dominant method of interpretation on the legal right, could go. The differences between Barrett and Alito are deeper, say people who have worked with them, as well as outsiders who see them as foils in a debate over how to interpret and shape the law. Alito, 75, is in a hurry to take advantage of the conservative dominance on the court, barely disguising his annoyance at times when the other conservatives don't go along with him. Barrett, who is likely to have a much longer future at the court, measures every move. 'We can see from her opinions that she's a careful, precise thinker, and she's been thrust into this very volatile environment,' said Ed Whelan, a conservative legal commentator. In Barrett's first weeks on the court, soon after arguments in the foster care case, the court heard the third major Republican challenge to Obama's health care law. Alito voted to overturn it. Barrett and others took the position that the suit was invalid because the plaintiffs lacked standing. As his colleagues were declining to remedy what Alito saw as an egregious problem, he once again wrote a blistering critique. In a patent case, he and Barrett wrote dueling dissents, both claiming that Scalia would have favored their positions. That term, he was pushing to hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the case that would eventually overturn the federal right to abortion. Barrett initially voted with him, but voiced concerns about taking on such a big issue so soon after her arrival at the court, then switched to a no, according to two people familiar with the process. Alito and three other male justices, the minimum to accept a case, greenlighted it and bet correctly that she would vote with them on the ultimate decision, upending a right that had stood for a half-century. Alito's criticisms have been amplified by outsiders on the right who accuse Barrett of being conflict-shy -- a 'trimmer' who goes partway, in that universe's parlance. Some fear she is a 'drifter' like Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and David Souter, who were appointed by Republican presidents but moved left. (Justices on the ideological move have tended to come from outside Washington.) She holds conservative principles but is reluctant to act on them, critics charge. In a politically fraught case from Idaho last year, she spoke for the two other swing justices, Roberts and Kavanaugh, in dismissing the case and temporarily allowing emergency abortions. Alito wrote that her reasoning was 'patently unsound.' After Barrett's second term, her agreement on outcomes with Alito slid from 80% to 62%, according to the analysis prepared for the Times, by Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, both of Washington University in St. Louis, and Michael J. Nelson, of Penn State. At the same time, Barrett was forging bonds with Sotomayor and Kagan. For them, nearly all roads to victory run through the justice from South Bend, Indiana. From the beginning, Sotomayor has treated her warmly, offering a congratulatory call after her confirmation, the first from the court; Halloween candy for her children; and a gift for her daughter's 18th birthday, according to Barrett's speeches. The new justice's first-ever dissent was with two of the liberals, and she has described how happy she was to speak for the group. In April at the court, Barrett and Sotomayor, along with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, helped lead a celebration of two federal judges' civil rights work. Initially, the mother of seven appeared to have little in common with Kagan, who had cracked senators up at her confirmation hearing with a joke about spending Christmas at a Chinese restaurant. Some conservatives who have worked at the court are wary of Kagan, because of her record of crafting compromises and narrowing decisions with which she disagrees, and her practice of gathering internal intelligence about the views of her colleagues to see where decisions are going. Kagan, though, is the only other academic on the court. She also votes with conservatives more than Sotomayor. When Barrett wrote her critique of Thomas' approach in the 'Trump Too Small' case -- which amounted to a declaration that some versions of originalism went too far -- Kagan signed on. But few of Barrett's alliances with liberals have come in marquee cases. 'People are treating her as a cipher and projecting liberal desires on her, like we want her to be like John Paul Stevens or Souter,' said Melissa Murray, a New York University law professor. 'I'm waiting for a case in which her break with some of the other conservatives really makes a difference,' said Michael C. Dorf, a law professor at Cornell University. The glare of the spotlight This spring, days after the menacing pizza deliveries to Barrett's relatives, authorities received a threat to her sister, who lives in South Carolina. 'I've constructed a pipe bomb which I recently placed in Amy Coney Barrett's sister's mailbox at her home,' the note said, according to a police report. The bomb was made of 'a 1x8-inch threaded galvanized pipe, end caps, a kitchen timer, some wires, metal clips and homemade black powder,' the note said, adding, 'Free Palestine!' The mailbox was empty, but the incidents caused 'terror and grief' throughout the family, Bruce Nolan, an uncle, said in an interview. Barrett has said she was trained by her father to control her emotions, and in public, she presents a picture of judicial poise. But friends say that while she embraces the intellectual parts of the job, the degree to which her life has been turned upside down has stunned her. She wasn't really fully prepared for 'the shift into being a public figure,' she said in 2022. In the 1990s, Barrett worked as a clerk for an institution that required far less security, where a chief justice would hop into clerks' cars for spontaneous tennis matches on public courts. In recent years, those on the bench have drawn protests at their homes and faced an assassination attempt and threats. A convicted Jan. 6 rioter said last year that he wanted to slit Barrett from 'ear to ear.' She limits excursions, friends say, because she's been screamed at in public. In an interview, Davis said that because of his friendship with Gorsuch, he was tempering his comments about Barrett. 'Out of respect for him I toned down my rhetoric,' he said, adding that he was sorry for mentioning her children. Amid the hostility, Barrett plans to speak directly to the public, through a book to be published in September. According to several people who have read drafts of the book, 'Listening to the Law,' she is trying to bring the public inside the court, show how it works and how she decides cases. In major ones, Barrett has been in the majority more than any of her colleagues, a measure of her rising influence. Last month she effectively decided a case by recusing herself. The court was weighing whether government money could fund the nation's first religious charter school. Barrett stepped aside, presumably because a friend was an adviser to the school. The court deadlocked 4-4 in what could have been a precedent-setting case, and some conservative activists pounced on Barrett for walking away. There will be even more focus on her in coming months as she and her colleagues deal with a conveyor belt of cases involving much of the president's agenda. So far, Barrett's record on Trump-related votes is short but suggestive. Usually, justices show what scholars call 'appointment bias,' leaning slightly in favor of the presidents who appointed them. She has gone in the other direction. Because emergency orders are tentative, and not every vote is disclosed, the evidence is limited. But she is the Republican appointee who appears to have voted least often for Trump's position, based on three cases decided last year stemming from his attempts to subvert the 2020 election, as well as 14 emergency applications since then arising from his sentencing in New York and recent blitz of executive orders. Now, one group of cases will determine whether and how Trump's deportations can proceed. Another concerns whether lower-court judges can issue nationwide injunctions, which some have used to block or delay Trump's actions. Questions about the legality of Trump's tariff hikes, his strike at Harvard, the firing of federal workers, along with other actions by the Department of Government Efficiency, and his attempt to ban transgender people from the military have been or soon will be subject to the justices' scrutiny. In explaining how she reaches her decisions, Barrett has said that she is open to persuasion, particularly in response to a strong oral argument. 'I have changed my mind,' she said last year, 'even at the Supreme Court.' About the Data: The data in this article come from an analysis prepared for the Times by Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, both of Washington University in St. Louis, and Michael J. Nelson, of Penn State. The researchers used the Supreme Court Database, which contains information about every Supreme Court case since 1791. More information on how decisions are coded 'liberal' or 'conservative' can be found on the database website. This article originally appeared in
Los Angeles Times
6 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Political violence is threaded through recent U.S. history. The motives and justifications vary
The assassination of one Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband and the shooting of another lawmaker and his wife at their homes are just the latest addition to a long and unsettling roll call of political violence in the United States. The list, in the last two months alone: the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, D.C.; the firebombing of a Colorado march calling for the release of Israeli hostages; and the firebombing of the official residence of Pennsylvania's governor — on a Jewish holiday while he and his family were inside. Here is a sampling of other attacks before that — the assassination of a healthcare executive on the streets of New York City late last year; the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally during his presidential campaign last year; the 2022 attack on the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) by a believer in right-wing conspiracy theories; and the 2017 shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) by a gunman at a congressional softball game practice. 'We've entered into this especially scary time in the country where it feels the sort of norms and rhetoric and rules that would tamp down on violence have been lifted,' said Matt Dallek, a political scientist at Georgetown University who studies extremism. 'A lot of people are receiving signals from the culture.' Politics have also driven large-scale massacres. Gunmen who killed 11 worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, 23 shoppers at a heavily Latino Walmart in El Paso in 2019 and 10 Black people at a Buffalo, N.Y., grocery store in 2022 each cited the conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of Jews was trying to replace white people with people of color. That has become a staple on parts of the right that support Trump's push to limit immigration. The Anti-Defamation League found that from 2022 through 2024, all of the 61 political killings in the United States were committed by right-wing extremists. That changed on the first day of 2025, when a Texas man flying the flag of the Islamic State group killed 14 people by driving his truck through a crowded New Orleans street before being fatally shot by police. 'You're seeing acts of violence from all different ideologies,' said Jacob Ware, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who researches terrorism. 'It feels more random and chaotic and more frequent.' The United States has a long and grim history of political violence, including presidential assassinations dating to the killing of President Abraham Lincoln, lynchings and other violence aimed at Black people in the South, and the 1954 shooting inside Congress by four Puerto Rican nationalists. Experts say the last few years, however, have reached a level not seen since the tumultuous days of the 1960s and 1970s, when political leaders the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., President Kennedy, Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Ware noted that the most recent surge comes after the new Trump administration has closed units that focus on investigating white supremacist extremism and pushed federal law enforcement to spend less time on anti-terrorism and more on detaining people who are in the country illegally. 'We're at the point, after these six weeks, where we have to ask about how effectively the Trump administration is combating terrorism,' Ware said. One of Trump's first acts in office was to pardon those involved in the largest act of domestic political violence this century — the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob intended to prevent Congress from certifying Trump's 2020 election loss. Those pardons broadcast a signal to would-be extremists on either side of the political debate, Dallek said: 'They sent a very strong message that violence, as long as you're a Trump supporter, will be permitted and may be rewarded.' Often, those who engage in political violence don't have clearly defined ideologies that easily map onto the country's partisan divides. A man who died after he detonated a car bomb outside a Palm Springs fertility clinic last month left writings urging people not to procreate and expressed what the FBI called 'nihilistic ideations.' But each political attack seems to inspire partisans to find evidence the attacker is on the other side. Little was known about the man police identified as a suspect in the Minnesota attacks, 57-year-old Vance Boelter. Authorities say they found a list of other apparent targets that included other Democratic officials, abortion clinics and abortion rights advocates, as well as fliers for the day's anti-Trump 'No Kings' parades. Conservatives online seized on the fliers — and the fact that Boelter had apparently once been reappointed to a state workforce development board by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz — to claim the suspect must be a liberal. 'The far left is murderously violent,' billionaire Elon Musk posted on his social media site, X. It was reminiscent of the fallout from the attack on Paul Pelosi, the former House speaker's then-82-year-old husband, who was seriously injured by a man wielding a hammer. Right-wing figures falsely theorized the assailant was a secret lover rather than what authorities said he was: a believer in pro-Trump conspiracy theories who broke into the Pelosi home echoing Jan. 6 rioters who broke into the Capitol by saying: 'Where is Nancy?!' No prominent Republican ever denounced the Pelosi assault, and GOP leaders including Trump joked about the attack at public events in its aftermath. On Saturday, Nancy Pelosi posted a statement on X decrying the Minnesota attack. 'All of us must remember that it's not only the act of violence, but also the reaction to it, that can normalize it,' she wrote. After mocking the Pelosis after the 2022 attack, Trump on Saturday joined in the bipartisan condemnation of the Minnesota shootings, calling them 'horrific violence.' The president has, however, consistently broken new ground with his bellicose rhetoric toward his political opponents, whom he routinely calls 'sick' and 'evil,' and has talked repeatedly about how violence is needed to quell protests. The Minnesota attack occurred after Trump took the extraordinary step of mobilizing the military to try to control protests against his administration's immigration operations in Los Angeles during the last week, when he pledged to 'HIT' disrespectful protesters and warned of a 'migrant invasion' of the city. Dallek said Trump has been 'both a victim and an accelerant' of the charged, dehumanizing political rhetoric that is flooding the country. 'It feels as if the extremists are in the saddle,' he said, 'and the extremists are the ones driving our rhetoric and politics.' Riccardi writes for the Associated Press.
Politico
11 hours ago
- Politico
Pardon hopefuls pitch themselves as judicial system victims — just like Trump
President Donald Trump has railed against the judicial system for years. And prospective pardonees, in turn, are modeling themselves after Trump to increase their chances of winning his favor. The bulk of the over 1,500 clemencies the president has issued in his second term have been granted to celebrities, politicians, Trump donors and loyalists — including those convicted in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol riot — many of whom have used their platforms to make the case that the judicial system was manipulated against them for political reasons, just like the president himself. After Trump pardoned his longtime supporter and former Virginia sheriff, Scott Jenkins, of conspiracy to commit bribery at the end of May, the Department of Justice pardon attorney, Ed Martin, took to X to make clear the administration's priorities: 'No MAGA left behind.' That spirit appears to have pervaded the administration's pardons process — or at least, the perception of it has. Some people in search of clemency, like former New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, a Democrat, have appeared to be angling for a pardon by hooking into Trump's argument about judicial weaponization, arguing that they, too, are victims of the system. Menendez has penned multiple lengthy tracts on X about his victimhood from the weaponization of the Justice Department, and made a thinly veiled plea for clemency in a post shortly after he was sentenced to 11 years in prison at the end of January. 'President Trump is right. This process is political and has been corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores integrity to the system,' Menendez wrote at the time, tagging the president's official account. The New Jersey Democrat has yet to receive Trump's blessing. A lawyer for Menendez did not respond to a request for comment. Menendez isn't the only Democrat who has seemingly cozied up to the president to clinch a pardon. New York Mayor Eric Adams appeared to pounce on the suggestion that Trump was open to granting him a pardon in his now-dismissed federal corruption case earlier this year, even showing up at the president's inauguration after repeatedly saying he was unlikely to attend the event. Adams' decision to pass on New York's Martin Luther King Jr. Day events to show face at Trump's inauguration rankled Black political and religious leaders in his home state, who said the choice indicated the mayor was more interested in a pardon than his constituents. His case was ultimately dismissed — over the objection of attorneys working on it — after Adams signaled he would assist the Trump administration on immigration and national security measures. White House deputy press secretary Harrison Fields maintained that the president is wielding his pardon powers 'to right many wrongs,' adding that Trump's actions fall 'within his constitutional authority.' 'President Trump doesn't need lectures from Democrats about his use of pardons,' Fields said in a statement, bashing Joe Biden's pardons of his son and Anthony Fauci, among others. 'President Trump is using his pardon and commutation powers to right many wrongs, acting reasonably and responsibly within his constitutional authority.' Others, like reality TV couple Julie and Todd Chrisley, have had better luck than Menendez. In a case that garnered national attention, Trump at the end of May pardoned the longtime reality stars, who had been convicted of bank and wire fraud in 2022 and sentenced to seven and 12 years in prison. The pardons came after a relentless messaging campaign by their daughter, Savannah, who publicly supported Trump throughout his 2024 presidential campaign and made an appearance at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee to speak about the justice system that she said was targeting both her family and Trump. 'We have a two-faced justice system. Just look at what they're doing to President Trump,' she said at the 2024 convention. 'All while, let's face it, Hunter Biden is roaming around free and attending classified meetings.' After their May 28 pardon, the Chrisleys held a press conference where they thanked the president and his administration — and previewed their new TV series. Virginia Tech political science professor Karen Hult, who specializes in the powers of the presidency and the executive branch, said that while issuing pardons in arenas of personal interest to the president isn't necessarily unusual — see Jimmy Carter's pardon of people who evaded the Vietnam War draft — repeatedly circumventing the Justice Department's pardons process, as Trump has done, is a less-than-common occurrence. 'Mr. Trump, especially in his second term, seems to be especially distinctive in really not wanting to use advice from anybody else, but certainly not from career civil servants, especially in the Justice Department,' Hult said, noting that, for the first time in modern history, the president replaced the head of the DOJ's pardon office with a political appointee. Trump's selection of Martin, whose short-lived stint as the U.S. Attorney for D.C. ended after his nomination for the full-time job failed, put a vocal MAGA figure in the traditionally nonpolitical office. Martin has been a staunch defender of people connected with the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and fired dozens of prosecutors who pursued riot-related cases during his time as U.S. attorney. In response to a question about the nature of the pardon process and the perception of partisanship surrounding the system, a DOJ spokesperson said the office of the pardon attorney 'administers the executive process, reviews applications for executive clemency submitted to the Department of Justice, and makes recommendations to grant or deny those applications based on the Justice Manual,' adding that 'the Department is committed to timely and carefully reviewing all applications and making recommendations to the President and Pardon Czar that are consistent, unbiased, and uphold the rule of law.' A senior administration official, granted anonymity to speak freely about the pardons process, pushed back on claims that the administration was circumventing the traditional pardons process. The official maintained that the DOJ, Martin and pardon czar Alice Marie Johnson — who herself was the recipient of a 2020 pardon from Trump before he selected her for the role in his second term — review each pardon case individually before making their recommendations to the president. But not everyone is so eager to be spared. Pam Hemphill, who earned the online moniker 'MAGA Granny' for her role in the Capitol riot, was one of the Jan. 6 rioters pardoned by the president on his first day in office. But Hemphill, who has since apologized for the part she played in that day's violence and has spoken out against the president, rejected Trump's pardon, saying she doesn't want to play into Trump's hands. 'I cannot have this happen, because then I'm part of Trump's narrative that the DOJ is weaponized,' Hemphill said in an interview. According to Hemphill, Trump's lengthy list of pardons is part of his broader mission to build a narrative around the existence of the 'deep state' and argue that the DOJ was 'weaponized against him' under the Biden administration. But not all of those pardoned by Trump have obvious ties to the president. Two clemency recipients, Tanner Mansell and John Moore Jr., were pardoned of a 2022 theft conviction after freeing what they believed at the time to be illegally captured sharks from a line off the coast of Florida. Mansell said in an interview he's not sure why the president chose him as a pardon recipient. He said he has never promoted the president online — in fact the professional shark diver avoids publicly talking about politics in order to maintain a neutral business profile that doesn't alienate potential customers. According to Mansell, his legal team did not apply for a pardon. 'I'd love to ask him, like, 'Hey, did you do this because you like sharks?'' Mansell said of the president, adding that it's 'anybody's guess' what actually prompted Trump to pardon him. But whatever the reason, Mansell said he hoped the pardon wasn't 'politically driven.' 'I hope to believe that it wasn't just politically driven on his part,' he said. 'I hope to believe that, you know, he read Cato's article and he saw the injustice in the situation and did it because it was the right thing to do.'
