After former Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby was convicted of various crimes recently, I was fairly shocked to learn that she was asking President Joe Biden for a preemptive pardon. I was convinced that the story had to be some sort of bad joke. But there are clearly a lot of influential people who aren’t laughing. We have now learned that Mosby’s call for a pardon has been taken up by the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, and perpetual race-baiting attorney Ben Crump. The question has been posed directly to KJP, so you know that the request is on Joe Biden’s radar, though the White House hasn’t offered any comment on it yet. Mosby’s sentencing is scheduled for next week, so the clock is ticking. And the usual suspects in the media are taking up her cause, describing this as a “fight for justice.” It’s enough to make a person nauseous. (Yahoo News)
The Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, attorney Ben Crump and others have joined in the fight for justice for the former Baltimore state’s attorney.
The Congressional Black Caucus sent a letter to the White House in support of a pardon for Marilyn Mosby, former state’s attorney in Baltimore. The White House and the Justice Department acknowledged receipt of the pardon application for Mosby, who faces 40 years in prison for receiving funds from her own retirement savings during the COVID-19 pandemic. During Wednesday’s White House press briefing, the Biden administration declined to comment on the pardon application process. The NAACP, along with groups like Win With Black Women, leaders like attorney Ben Crump, and political commentators Angela Rye and Bakari Sellers, are supporting Mosby in what they believe could be an excessive sentence.
A “fight for justice?” Give us a break. Notice how Yahoo News describes Mosby’s actions as “receiving funds from her own retirement savings” and warns that she “faces 40 years in prison.” This is a massive load of malarkey, as the target of her pardon request is wont to say. She was not convicted of “receiving” her own retirement savings. She was convicted of defrauding COVID relief funds at a time when neither she nor her husband ever missed a single day of work because of the pandemic. She was also convicted of perjury (twice) and only barely avoided prosecution over a pile of money that mysteriously went missing on her watch.
As for the sentencing, that 40-year prison term is a complete fantasy being cited to draw attention and sympathy. That’s the hypothetical maximum sentence but there is no chance she’ll get anywhere near that. Even the prosecutors are only asking the judge for twenty months and she probably won’t even get that much. If the judge did somehow nail her for forty years, even I would agree that it was grossly excessive for a first conviction on nonviolent criminal charges. At that point, I would support Biden commuting her sentence down to a couple of years, but not a full pardon.
I’ve been covering the misadventures of Marilyn Mosby and her husband here for many years. (Just click on the topic tag at the bottom of this article for a full list.) We have seen the trail of wreckage that she left in her wake as a result of her personal war on the Baltimore Police Department and the various bits of profitable corruption that seemed to pop up wherever she went. But even after her crimes finally caught up with her, as the prosecutors in this case said yesterday, she has never accepted a shred of responsibility and has shown zero respect for the court where she used to work. She wants to play the victim and claim that she is the target of political opportunists and (of course) racists.
This request should be a nonstarter, but I have a terrible feeling that it won’t be. Marilyn Mosby is a Black woman with influential leftist groups amplifying her complaints. Joe Biden is like a rat in a cage at this point and is desperately looking for ways to shore up his badly sagging support among his base, particularly with Black voters. I could easily see him throwing all respect for the law out the window and pardoning Mosby in the hopes that it would buy him a few more votes. Just for perspective, remember that they are trying to lock up Donald Trump for the rest of his life in New York over an alleged bookkeeping error, but they want to let a person who was legitimately convicted of serious crimes skate away as free as a bird. Welcome to your new banana republic, citizens.