The Biden Justice Department’s shameful pandering to bomb-throwing rioters

The foundational duty of government is to maintain public safety and order, without which neither liberty nor prosperity is possible. The dramatic story of the summer of 2020 was the outbreak of riots and protests following the murder of George Floyd. More than a dozen people were killed and a billion or more dollars in damages were caused, including the destruction of many businesses. This cried out for a vigorous response.

Instead, apparently viewing the cause as a righteous one, Democratic prosecutors at the federal, state, and local levels have been scandalously soft on the many crimes committed in the course of those riots and protests. Large numbers of offenders were let off scot-free by progressive prosecutors; even those whose crimes caused death have been given sentences no longer than ten years. In so doing, the progressive district attorneys and the Justice Department have imperiled public safety in our cities and undermined public confidence in the even-handed administration of law. It is unsurprising that urban crime and violence have spiked in many cities after the law failed to restore order or punish criminality.

The Biden administration has just added to this shameful spectacle by retroactively reducing the plea-bargained sentence in one of the most high-profile of those crimes, in which two white-shoe lawyers in Brooklyn threw a Molotov cocktail into a police car.