Oyer Liz Pardon
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AN 7 26
WASHINGTON — Former Justice Department lawyer Elizabeth Oyer has posted a video to YouTube blaming Missouri Republican Sens. Eric Schmitt and Josh Hawley for an onslaught of hate messages and death threats she has received.
“Hey everybody,” Oyer said in the video. “I started getting death threats after I testified against Todd Blanche last week.”
Blanche has been nominated to be attorney general by President Donald Trump, and Schmitt and Hawley sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which must make an initial vote on his nomination.
Oyer’s video shows images of several emails she received, many of which came from fake email addresses and contained messages such as, “Die in hell you pos,” “I hope you die tragically,” “Let’s hope somebody murders your family and gets clemency,” and other threatening messages containing obscenities.
“Two Republican senators with a political agenda rage-baited their followers into believing nasty and dangerous lies,” she states, referencing Hawley and Schmitt.
The committee’s July 16 hearing had five witnesses, including Oyer, who was the pardoning attorney for the Department of Justice for 13 years. In her written testimony to the committee, Oyer said she was fired by Blanche after she refused to restore firearm rights for actor and filmmaker Mel Gibson, a close friend of Trump.
The hearing was meant to consider the pending nomination of Blanche. Schmitt and Hawley, however, did not ask Oyer about Blanche. Instead, they drilled her about the recommendation she made to President Joe Biden to commute 40 people’s federal death sentences to life in prison without parole.
“You personally recommended commuting all 40 death sentence cases, an even broader action than Biden took,” Schmitt said in the hearing.
Biden commuted 37 of the death sentences.
Schmitt was unable to be immediately reached for comment, but a spokesperson commented on his behalf.
“(Liz Oyer’s) disgraceful clemency recommendations ignored the victims’ families’ concerns and were so extreme that even Joe Biden’s autopen handlers couldn’t stomach them,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Hawley confronted Oyer with photos of the parolees, many of whom committed violent acts of rape and murder. He showed photos of the victims and referenced them by name. In an interview with the Missourian, Hawley said that these were the real victims, not Oyer.
“The people who were murdered, and devastated and raped by the criminals that she recommended that President Biden give clemency to, those folks are the real victims here,” Hawley said. “I was proud to tell their stories.”
In her video, Oyer said that Hawley had misrepresented her by claiming that she had sympathy for the perpetrators of the crimes.
“That is dangerous misinformation, and Josh Hawley knows it,” Oyer said in the video.
In response, Hawley said that he had read from memos that Oyer sent.
“She tried to weasel her way out of it, and say she hadn’t said this or that,” Hawley said. “We have the memos, and I put them in the record.”
This story originally appeared in the Columbia Missourian.
AN 1 26
Liz Oyer, a former Justice Department pardon attorney, told Jim Acosta that the DOJ is participating in a massive cover-up over the shooting of a Minneapolis woman in Minnesota.
Among the revelations reported this week, Renee Nicole Good, who was shot by an ICE agent, still had a pulse when first responders arrived on scene. ICE denied a doctor access to Good who wanted to render her aid.
Oyer said that it may mean that there are other ICE officers who could be culpable in Good's death.
Both she and Acosta agreed that an investigation into the entire situation was warranted. However, the deputy attorney general already decided that there would not be an investigation into the shooting.
"I don't think I'm exaggerating, Jim, when I say that DOJ is effectively participating in a cover-up of any potential crime that may have occurred," said Oyer. "Now, it wouldn't be proper for the deputy attorney general to jump to the conclusion that this officer should be prosecuted. But it would be absolutely expected that the deputy attorney general would be calling for a thorough investigation, so that the Justice Department could determine whether a prosecution is warranted."
She added that the fact that that isn't happening in this case is alarming.
"The fact that prosecutors in the civil rights division have been told that they cannot go to the scene and participate in an investigation — it is really — I cannot overstate how absolutely how shocking and wrong that is to the degree that DOJ is really complicit," she said. "The leadership of DOJ is complicit in covering up what happened during this incident."
Acosta added he wouldn't be surprised if this matter went all the way up to Attorney General Pam Bondi if not Donald Trump himself.
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President Donald Trump recently issued dozens of preemptive pardons for far-right attorneys and activists who assisted in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. One expert is cautioning that the pardons are less about actual clemency and more about sending a specific message.
In the memo, Trump pardoned attorney John Eastman (who wrote the "Eastman Memo" outlining the plan to have then-Vice President Mike Pence invalidate the 2020 electoral vote certification), former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (also Trump's former personal attorney before losing his law license last year), lawyer Kenneth Chesebro (who hatched the "fake electors" plot), and attorney Sidney Powell (who was one of Trump's co-defendants in his Georgia election interference case). Trump's memo also named former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former Department of Justice (DOJ) official Jeffrey Clark, Trump advisor Boris Epshteyn, and attorneys Christina Bobb, Jenna Ellis, and Ray Smith.
In a Monday article, Politico's Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein reported that the pardons do little of substance, as those who were named in the announcement have mostly been ensnared in state-level investigations (which presidents have no power over). However, Liz Oyer — who was the DOJ's pardon attorney in former President Joe Biden's administration – said that the memo should be understood as Trump blessing future efforts to overturn unfavorable election results.
"Trump is sending a message to his supporters that if you commit a crime in the name of Donald Trump, I’ve got your back," she said.
Oyer further warned that the memo was so vaguely written that current DOJ pardon attorney Ed Martin (who presided over the dismissal of multiple January 6 defendants) could use it as justification to have the administration grant additional pardons of election deniers in the future.
"That’s just not how pardon paperwork is written," Oyer said.
While former DOJ special counsel Jack Smith dismissed his criminal cases against Trump after he was reelected, the state-level cases against the various election deniers named are ongoing. Last year, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) indicted 18 members of Trump's legal team – including Bobb, Eastman, Ellis, Epshteyn, Giuliani, Meadows, and other Republican officials — for their efforts "to prevent the lawful transfer of the presidency to keep Unindicted Coconspirator 1 in office against the will of Arizona’s voters." Investigators in Nevada and Wisconsin are also prosecuting their own cases against people tied to Trump's post-2020 election efforts. All of the ongoing cases are currently bogged down in litigation.