Posted on 10/02/2012 5:44:05 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Whether or not Barack Obama wins re-election in November, Joe Connor is afraid the president may release his father’s killer from prison.
Puerto Rican separatist leader Oscar Lopez Rivera’s group, the Armed Forces of Puerto Rican National Liberation (FALN), killed Joe’s dad Frank Connor 37 years ago during a deadly bombing spree that stretched from the 1970s to the early ’80s. The terrorist group bombed New York City’s historic Fraunces Tavern on Jan. 25, 1975, killing 33-year-old Frank Connor.
Connor, the co-author of “The New Founders: What Would George Washington Think of The United States of America if He Were Alive Today?” told The Daily Caller he suspects Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder will try to release Lopez Rivera from prison long before his 70-year sentence is up. He has heard form “some FBI agents,” he said, that Obama had a relationship with the convict’s brother, Chicago-based community organizer José Lopez.
Holder, he added, “was the mastermind behind the release of the 16 back in 1999,” when President Bill Clinton commuted the sentence of 16 FALN convicts. Both houses of Congress issues stinging resolutions condemning the action. The House vote was 311-41, and the Senate vote was 95-2.
When attorney general nominee Holder faced a 2009 confirmation fight in Congress, the Los Angeles Times reported that he had “instructed his staff at Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney to effectively replace the department’s original report recommending against any commutations, which had been sent to the White House in 1996, with one that favored clemency for at least half the prisoners.”
Ultimately, 14 of the 16 offered clemency accepted the offer. One of the two who didn’t was Lopez Rivera. The other was already on his way to parole.
Lopez Rivera’s sister Zenaida Lopez said at the time that her brother rejected Clinton’s clemency offer because he thought he would be in “prison outside prison.”
Under Article 2, Obama has the power to do so.
From report at LINK in Post #1:
“......Tom and Joe Connor, two brothers who were little boys when their 33-year-old father, Frank, was killed in the Fraunces Tavern attack, were dumbstruck to learn that White House staffers referred to the FALN militants as “political prisoners” and were planning a meeting with their children to humanize their plight.
Members of Congress viewed the clemencies as a dangerous abuse of presidential power that could not go unchallenged. Resolutions condemning the president’s action were passed with a vote of 95-2 in the Senate, 311-41 in the House. It was the most they could do; the president’s pardon power, conferred by the Constitution, is absolute. The House launched an investigation, subpoenaing records from the White House and Justice in an effort to determine whether proper procedure had been followed. President Clinton promptly invoked executive privilege, putting Justice Department lawyers in the impossible position of admitting that they had sent the White House a recommendation on the issue, but barred from disclosing what it was.
Twenty-four hours before a scheduled Senate committee hearing, the DOJ withheld the FBI’s written statement about the history of the FALN and an assessment of its current terrorist capability. “They pulled the plug on us,” said an unnamed FBI official in a news report, referring to the Justice Department decision to prevent FBI testimony.....”
Obama will release his comrade if he gets a second term. Another reason to stop him.
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