After arguably muted coverage of President Trump’s pardons Tuesday evening, ABC and NBC took to whining about former-Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (D) for showing “no remorse for his crimes” during a press conference outside his Chicago home on Wednesday. But while they were huffing about Blago’s attitude, none of them cared to mention how President Obama had commuted the sentence of unrepentant, Puerto Rican terrorist Oscar Lopez-Rivera shortly before Trump’s inauguration.
“Out of prison, thanks to President Trump, disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich emerged from his home in Chicago this morning. Celebrating his newfound freedom, with no remorse for his crimes,” ABC chief White House correspondent Jon Karl kicked off his World News Tonight report.
For NBC Nightly News’s part, White House correspondent Peter Alexander reported that Blagojevich had “no remorse for his crimes but praise for the President.” “The President granting clemency to Blagojevich, a poster child of the type of pay-to-play politics Mr. Trump said he would end,” he chided moments later.
But, as NewsBusters reported back in 2017, neither of these networks dared to report how Obama released an unrepentant, communist terrorist back into the public.
At the time, National Review’s Ronald Kolb made the case for why Lopez-Rivera, who was “convicted of seditious conspiracy and arms trafficking in connection with his leadership of the FALN, the notorious left-wing terrorist group that perpetrated more than 130 attacks on U.S. soil from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s,” shouldn’t have been released:
But Lopez-Rivera remains unrepentant about his crimes, and he’s hardly been a model prisoner: In one of two failed attempts to escape, he conspired with others inside and outside his prison to kill his way to freedom, attempting to procure grenades, rifles, plastic explosives, bulletproof vests, blasting caps, and armor-piercing bullets. After the FBI thwarted this plan, another 15 years was added to Lopez’s original 55-year sentence.
“He founded the group and trained those who carried out its attacks, and he has never shown remorse for the horror, death, and pain those attacks caused,” Kolb noted. Sound familiar?
To further slime the President, Alexander pushed a conspiracy theory that President Trump was interested in pardoning WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange:
Also tonight, lawyers for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange are claiming in court that a now-former Republican congressman, in 2017, offered Assange a pardon on behalf of the President, if Assange agreed to say Russia was not involved in leaking Democratic e-mails in the 2016 election. NBC news has not obtained the lawyer's full statement. Tonight, that former Republican congressman and the White House both disputing Assange’s lawyer's claims. The White House calling it “a complete fabrication and total lie.”
Yet, at the same time as their blackout of Lopez-Rivera’s release, NBC celebrated Obama’s commutation of Private Chelsea Manning, the soldier who was an associate of Assange and had leaked thousands of classified U.S. documents to him.
The transcript is below, click "expand" to read:
NBC Nightly News
February 19, 2020
7:05:14 p.m. Eastern(…)
PETER ALEXANDER: Back home in Chicago, after President Trump commuted his sentence.
ROD BLAGOJEVICH: I'm returning home today from a long exile, a freed political prisoner.
ALEXANDER: Disgraced former Illinois Governor Rob Blagojevich, no remorse for his crimes but praise for the President.
BLAGOJEVICH: President Trump is a man who is tough and outspoken, but he also has a kind heart. [Transition] I’m a Trumpocrat.
ALEXANDER: The President granting clemency to Blagojevich, a poster child of the type of pay-to-play politics Mr. Trump said he would end.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Drain the swamp. And that’s what we’re doing.
ALEXANDER: Today, tweeting, “Rod Blagojevich did not sell the Senate seat. True, but he was convicted of trying to profit off the seat Barack Obama vacated.
(…)
ALEXANDER: Also tonight, lawyers for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange are claiming in court that a now-former Republican congressman, in 2017, offered Assange a pardon on behalf of the President, if Assange agreed to say Russia was not involved in leaking Democratic e-mails in the 2016 election. NBC news has not obtained the lawyer's full statement.
Tonight, that former Republican congressman and the White House both disputing Assange’s lawyer's claims. The White House calling it “a complete fabrication and total lie.”
(…)
