President Biden Pardons SS Agent Abraham Bolden

 Biden pardons former Secret Service agent and 2 others

 President Kennedy appointed Secret Service Agent Abraham Bolden to the White House Detail 

President Joe Biden has granted the first three pardons of his term

By AAMER MADHANI and DON BABWIN Associated Press

April 26, 2022, 2:35 PM ET

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/wireStory/biden-pardons-secret-service-agent-84311666

WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden has granted the first three pardons of his term, providing clemency to a Kennedy-era Secret Service agent convicted of federal bribery charges that he tried to sell a copy of an agency file and to two people who were convicted on drug-related charges but went on to become pillars in their communities.

The Democratic president also commuted the sentences of 75 others for nonviolent, drug-related convictions. The White House announced the clemencies Tuesday as it launched a series of job training and reentry programs for those in prison or recently released.

Many of those who received commutations have been serving their sentences on home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Several were serving lengthy sentences and would have received lesser terms had they been convicted today for the same offenses as a result of the 2018 bipartisan sentencing reform ushered into law by the Trump administration.

“America is a nation of laws and second chances, redemption, and rehabilitation,” Biden said in a statement announcing the clemencies. “Elected officials on both sides of the aisle, faith leaders, civil rights advocates, and law enforcement leaders agree that our criminal justice system can and should reflect these core values that enable safer and stronger communities.”

Those granted pardons are:

— Abraham Bolden Sr., 86, the first Black Secret Service agent to serve on a presidential detail. In 1964, Bolden, who served on President John F. Kennedy's detail, faced federal bribery charges that he attempted to sell a copy of a Secret Service file. His first trial ended in a hung jury.

Following his conviction in a second trial, key witnesses admitted lying at the prosecutor's request, according to the White House. Bolden, of Chicago, was denied a retrial and served three years, nine months in federal prison. Bolden has maintained his innocence and wrote a book in which he argued he was targeted for speaking out against racist and unprofessional behavior in the Secret Service.

Bolden in an interview said he believed Biden “sympathized” with him and "saw a need to honor due process in my case.” The pardon came nearly 61 years after he joined the Kennedy detail. He said he asked off of the detail after enduring racial slurs from fellow agents and small nooses were left around his workplace.

“I met President Kennedy on April 28, 1961 and on April 25 I got word of the presidential pardon," said Bolden, who first petitioned the White House for a pardon during the Nixon administration. "That’s pretty close.”

— Betty Jo Bogans, 51, was convicted in 1998 of possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine in Texas after attempting to transport drugs for her boyfriend and his accomplice. Bogans, a single mother with no prior record, received a seven-year sentence. In the years since her release from prison, Bogans has held consistent employment, even while undergoing cancer treatment, and has raised a son.

— Dexter Jackson , 52, of Athens, Georgia, was convicted in 2002 for using his pool hall to facilitate the trafficking of marijuana. Jackson pleaded guilty and acknowledged he allowed his business to be used by marijuana dealers.

After Jackson was released from prison, he converted his business into a cellphone repair service that employs local high school students through a program that provides young adults with work experience. Jackson has built and renovated homes in his community, which has a shortage of affordable housing.

Civil rights and criminal justice reform groups have pushed the White House to commute sentences and work harder to reduce disparities in the criminal justice system. Biden’s grants of clemency also come as the administration has faced congressional scrutiny over misconduct and the treatment of inmates in the beleaguered federal Bureau of Prisons, which is responsible for inmates serving sentences of home confinement.

Biden, as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, helped shepherd through the 1994 crime bill that many criminal justice experts say contributed to harsh sentences and mass incarceration of Black people.

During his 2020 White House run, Biden vowed to reduce the number of people incarcerated in the U.S. and called for nonviolent drug offenders to be diverted to drug courts and treatment.

He also has pushed for better training for law enforcement and called for criminal justice system changes to address disparities that have led to minorities and the poor making up a disproportionate share of the nation's incarcerated population.

Inimai Chettiar, federal director of the criminal justice reform advocacy group Justice Action Network, called Biden's first pardons and commutations “just modest steps” and urged Biden “to meet the urgency of the moment.”

“President Biden ran on a promise to help end mass incarceration, and he has broad public support for that promise,” Chettiar added.

Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump, granted 144 pardons and clemency to 238 during his four years in office.

Some criminal justice advocates are pressing for Biden to act with more haste, calling on the president to establish a permanent clemency review board. More than 18,000 clemency petitions are pending, according to the Justice Department. A White House official said that the administration continues to review clemency petitions.

Trump sought the advice of prison reform advocate Alice Johnson, a Black woman whose life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense he commuted in 2018. He was also lobbied by celebrity Kim Kardashian as well as advisers inside the White House, including daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, as he weighed applications for clemency.

The Republican used his pardon authority to help several political friends and allies, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Republican operative Roger Stone and Charles Kushner, the father-in-law of Ivanka Trump.

Among Trump's final acts as president was pardoning his former chief strategist Steve Bannon and Al Pirro, the husband of Fox News host and Trump ally Jeanine Pirro.

Prosecutors alleged that Bannon, who had yet to stand trial when he was pardoned, had duped thousands of donors who believed their money would be used to fulfill Trump’s chief campaign promise to build a wall along the southern border. Instead, Bannon allegedly diverted more than $1 million, paying a salary to one campaign official and personal expenses for himself. Pirro was convicted in 2000 on tax charges.

With the slate of pardons and commutations announced Tuesday, Biden has issued more grants of clemency than any of the previous five presidents at this point in their terms, according to the White House.

In addition to the grants of clemency, Biden announced several new initiatives that are meant to help formerly incarcerated people gain employment — an issue that his administration is driving home as key to lowering crime rates and preventing recidivism.

The Labor Department is directing $140 million toward programs that offer job training, pre-apprenticeship programs, digital literacy training and pre-release and post-release career counseling and more for youth and incarcerated adults.

The $1 trillion infrastructure bill passed by Congress last year includes a trio of grant programs that the administration says promote hiring of formerly incarcerated individuals. And the Labor and Justice Departments announced on Tuesday a collaborative plan to provide $145 million over the next year on job skills training as well as individualized employment and reentry plans for people serving time in the Bureau of Prisons.

Biden said the new initiatives are vital to helping the more than 600,000 people released from prison each year get on stable ground.

"Helping those who served their time return to their families and become contributing members of their communities is one of the most effective ways to reduce recidivism and decrease crime," Biden said.

———

Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board members confirmed, finally.

 Newly Formed Board To Review Civil Rights –Era Cold Cases Faces Time Crunch

Emmett Till - one of those murdered whose case will be reviewed and opened. 

https://www.courthousenews.com/newly-formed-board-to-review-civil-rights-era-cold-cases-faces-time-crunch/

 [ BK NOTES: This is the law that New Jersey high school teacher Stu Wexler and his civics class drew up and got Congress to enact, an amazing achievement for anyone let alone a school class. But like the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) - created by the JFK Act on which this law was based, the review board is only a temporary institution that must be extended, or made permanent. As one CIA official told the ARRB, you will be gone in a year or so, while the CIA will continue. ]

(CN) — Years after legislation creating it was signed into law, the Senate has finally confirmed members to a board whose task is to help compile and release records surrounding the racially motivated crimes that have lain unsolved since the Civil Rights era.

For decades, investigators, journalists and victims’ families have long sought answers surrounding bombings and shootings committed during the struggle for civil rights whose perpetrators were never caught or who skated through the justice system.

They’ve waited on record requests filed through the Freedom of Information Act. They’ve tried to piece together what happened by poring over the all-caps, teletype dispatches that pinged between FBI offices that, when initially released, were run through with blocks of redactions.

In 2019, President Donald Trump signed into law a bipartisan piece of legislation originally drafted by a group of high schoolers that treats records of these cold cases that happened between 1940 to 1979 like the records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which were compiled at the National Archives and made available to the public.

In mid-February, the Senate confirmed four individuals to the Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board: a former journalist who won the Pulitzer-prize in history, a law professor who was the first Black female judge in Massachusetts, an instruction archivist and a history professor at University of California, Los Angeles.

Their task? To determine just what records fall under the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act of 2018 and whether a document’s release should be delayed.

But before that work begins in earnest, the members must be sworn in and there’s paperwork to do, staff to hire. 

“That will take some time,” said William Bosanko, chief operating officer for the National Archives and Records Administration.

But time is not on the board’s side.

As the administration in Washington changed hands, the board remained unfilled. The clock is ticking, as the law says the review board’s work will end four years after the law first passed, although the board could vote to extend that time for a year further.

“Absent congressional intervention and a change in the law, the board doesn’t really have a fighting chance. They’re going to need more time in order to deal with these very important and very weighty issues around these cold cases,” Bosanko said.

Those weighty issues include the act’s scope. A couple years ago, the federal government compiled and reviewed 161 unsolved homicides carried out during the struggle for civil rights. The cases included the 1955 murder of Emmett Till and the Mississippi Burning case involving the deaths of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney.

But Bosanko said the Cold Case Records Collection Act was written to encompass more than those cases and could include, say, violations to the Fair Housing Act.

There’s also the sheer volume of records, where Department of Justice documents stored at the National Archives that could fall under the act is not measured in the thousands of pages, but in the thousands of cubic feet.

Bosanko said the National Archives has already identified some of the low hanging fruit, some of the most notable Civil Rights-era cold cases, cases that the administration suspects may be of interest to the board and whose records they could quickly get in front of the group.

The archives, however, is stymied when it comes to crafting and issuing guidance to other federal agencies because it does not yet know what the board will determine is the scope of the act.

In the meantime, some departments have been at work. For instance, in a footnote of a report, the Criminal Section of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division said between July 2019 to September 2020 it spent nearly 1,800 hours working on issues surrounding cold cases, including compliance with the records collection act.

In June 2021, the White House announced nominations to the five-member board. The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held a confirmation hearing for four nominees in mid-January.

Introducing the nominees during the remote hearing conducted over teleconferencing software, former Senator Doug Jones said he couldn’t think of a better group for the committee to consider.

The former prosecutor who helped try two of the Klansmen responsible for the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, said the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Act was one of his signature pieces of legislation.

“There have been a handful of people over the last 20 or 30 years … that have taken a real interest in these cold civil rights cases,” Jones said in a later interview, and two of those individuals were former journalist Hank Klibanoff and law professor Margaret Burnham.

Klibanoff, a professor at Emory University, is director of Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at the university and Burnham, a law professor at Northeastern University School of Law founded the school’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project.

“They were just naturals to me because of their interest. And they see this in a bigger picture,” Jones added, saying the two educators see the importance a complete record for truth and reconciliation for the communities affected by the old violence.

During the hearing, Burnham said the nomination to the board was the highlight of her career working for civil rights. In 1977, Burnham became the first Black woman to sit on the bench in Massachusetts. She sat on Boston’s municipal court, “Serving ordinary working people in their disputes that arise in their lives,” she said.  

After a career as a civil rights attorney and a law professor, Burnham said in an interview the nomination to the review board brought her full circle back to public service.

Burnham began looking into Civil Rights-era cold cases after President George W. Bush signed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act in 2007, legislation that directed the federal government to take another look at many of the cold cases from that time.

She said she realized the act wouldn’t reach every case of racial violence that ended up with a death. Working with students, she began investigating, relying on legal expertise to navigate the FOIA system to obtain documents from the government.

Burnham said she wanted to learn how the law failed, and how federal prosecutors at the time managed professional ethics.

“I was interested in what federal prosecutors in these local areas did,” Burnham said. “They had to thread a needle between satisfying the local power structures with whom they were quite connected and upon whom they were sometimes dependent, while at the same time, meeting the new interests that were emanating from Washington to these cases.”

Klibanoff said in his prepared statement to the committee that the board’s task was not to solve crimes, but to make government records more readily available.

“I have seen with my own eyes and felt in my own heart the extraordinary good that can come when families of those who were killed sit down with a couple of hundred pages of government records and unlock decades of mysteries, myths and misunderstandings,” Klibanoff wrote in his written testimony to the committee.

Gabrielle Dudley, an instruction archivist at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library told the committee she understood how there was a balance between the release of records while protecting individuals’ privacy.

When Dudley was in high school, growing up in the Birmingham area, some of klansmen responsible for the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing faced prosecution. As an intern at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, she collected oral histories from individuals, some of whom would mention the people they knew who were murdered, she said in an interview.

“You would call and they would just, it was almost like they were just ready to tell these stories,” Dudley said.

As the board is preparing to begin its work, lawmakers are trying to give it more time. In February, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, introduced a bill that would buy the board three more years, extending the time it meets from 2024 to 2027.

At the end of March, the Civil Rights Cold Case Investigations Support Act of 2022 passed the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

A spokesman for Cruz said in a statement that the senator was pleased to work on this bill and he hoped the extension would allow victims and their families to find justice.

Stuart Wexler, the history teacher at Hightown High School in New Jersey whose students originally drafted the bill that became the cold case records act, said the most pressing issue surrounding the act and the release of the cold case records is the extension being considered by Congress.

“That’s obviously the number one priority because the board is not going to have time to do its work,” Wexler said.

As a high-schooler, Wexler was fascinated by the JFK assassination and he followed the early meetings of the board formed to review those assassination records in the 90s. That review board, in its hunt for records, accepted letters from the public offering tips and called witnesses, Wexler said.

For the board reviewing the JFK assassination records, “a big issue for them was trying to find autopsy materials and to authenticate what autopsy materials they had,” Wexler said. “So they call a bunch of people like the photographer involved with the autopsy, the autopsy doctors.”

According to the legislation, The Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board has the ability to issue subpoenas for records and its members receive security clearances.

Meanwhile, National Archives COO Bosanko said he hopes that the records once released will allow people more accessibility to the records. No longer will people have to plan a trip to the National Archives’ facility at say, College Park, Maryland.

Once the project is complete, with records of old cold cases posted online, he hopes that, for instance, a rural schoolteacher could drive home lessons surrounding the struggle for civil rights by examining events that happened in that locale.

“For me, being the most open and transparent we can as a nation with our history,” Bosanko said, “and then making it discoverable and usable, that’s what this act is about.”

xxxxxxxx

HSCA Evidence of Conspiracy

 HSCA  Evidence of Conspiracy

In an email correspondence among some of the top researchers in the country, W. Tracy Parnell  replied to  Brian Bender’s fine article on the December 2021 NARA release of records under the JFK Act, that is linked here:

[    https://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2021/12/bryan-bender-on-new-released-records.html      ]

Bender used to be a staff reporter for the Boston Globe and covered the Kennedy family and wrote a number of important articles on the assassination, rare for a mainstream media journalist.

Parnell, one of the numerous die hard lone nutters who still tries to contend the President was killed by a deranged loner for no apparent reason, posts a blog that attempts to debunk every conspiracy theory that comes down the pike, and is finishing a book length report on what he perceives as the David Atlee Phillips – Antonio Veciana – Maurice Bishop “Hoax” that I will eventually get to.

[ http://wtracyparnell.blogspot.com/ ]     

Parnell tried to contest Bennder’s mentioning the fact that the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) conclusion that there was probably a conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy, saying the only evidence of conspiracy that the HSCA came up with was the acoustical study, that has since been debunked.

That of course is a Lone Nut factoid that is often stated and repeated, when the true fact is the HSCA came up with dozens if not hundreds of conspiracy leads that they asked the Justice Department to pursue, but have since been left to independent researchers to try to resolve.

And the acoustical echo analysis, though often disputed, has never been debunked because the only way to prove or disprove a scientific study is to repeat it, and the HSCA acoustical echo analysis has never been duplicated. The scientific team that conducted the study consisting primarily of major defense contractors and scientists stick by their guns, as demonstrated by Dr. Barger’s conversations with Josiah Thompson and published as an appendix to Thompson’s recently published book – Last Second in Dallas  (University Press of Kansas 2021).

I think that the idea the acoustics study was the only evidence of conspiracy developed by the HSCA stems from one of the congressmen who sat on the Committee, as the acoustical study results were not revealed to anyone until the very last public hearing of the Committee. The committee was shortly thereafter disbanded because it was only a temporary committee and not a permanent one. As usual, not all of the committee members attended every meeting, and few of them kept up with the investigations conducted primarily by the staff lawyers and investigators.

As for evidence of conspiracy other than the acoustical study, it was developed by HSCA investigators in the field and reported to the Chief counsels, both of whom believed there was a conspiracy to kill the president. First chief counsel Richard Sprague thought the CIA had its hand in what happened at Dealey Plaza, while the second Chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey wrote a book about how the Mafia was responsible.

Since then however Blakey has changed his tune. With the revelations that former CIA officer and agency liaison to the committee George Joannides was previously the case officer for the DRE anti-Castro  Cubans,  some of whom got into a scuffle in New Orleans with the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and that Joannides was called out of retirement by the CIA to serve as their liaison to the Committee, Blakey has decided the CIA were involved, at least in the cover-up of the truth. Blakey now says that if he knew then what he knows now, Joannides would have been questioned under oath as a suspect rather than being the middleman between the Committee and the CIA.

The first Chief Counsel, Richard Sprague, Esq., was a former Philadelphia District Attorney who successfully prosecuted Tony Boyle for the conspiracy murder of United Mine Workers boss Jock Yablonski. Sprague wanted to conduct a real homicide investigation, and hired New York City assistant DA Robert Tannenbaum, who prosecuted many big city homicides and was named to head the JFK team of investigators. Sprague also hired former Philadelphia reporter Gaeton Fonzi on the basis of a recommendation by Senator Richard Schweiker (Rep. Pa.), as Fonzi had previously worked as an investigator for the Schweiker-(Gary) Hart sub-committee of the Church Intelligence Committee on the JFK Assassination.

Schweiker himself leaned towards CIA involvement in the assassination as he said “there’s fingerprints of Intelligence” all over the assassination story.

As a member of the Church Intelligence Committee, and half of the Schweiker-Hart subcommittee on the assassination of President Kennedy, Schweiker would be disapointed today to learn that many of the Church committee’s records, especially key interviews with subjects have been erased or are outright missing.

Bob Tannenbaum wrote a series of popular detective fiction, one of which recounts his experiences working for the HSCA, especially his displeasure of Sprague being fired for trying to conduct a real homicide investigation. Tannenbaum went on to become mayor of Beverly Hills, California, but has always maintained his interest in the assassination, making a presentation on Oswald’s innocence before the CAPA-South Texas Law School Mock Trial in Houston in 2017.

Sprague had also hired another big city detective Jack Moriarity, who investigated what the HSCA called “TheWise allegation,” named after former Dallas TV reporter and Mayor Wes Wise, who first learned about JD Tippit’s good friend Carl Mather and his car being seen near the site of Tippit’s murder, with the accused assassin behind the wheel.  While the FBI was reluctant to investigate this lead, and for good reasons, Jack Moriarity was the only official to visit Collins Radio and learn what Carl Mather’s job was there. It turns out that Mather’s job at Collins was to install and monitor the radios in the Executive fleet that was used by Vice President LBJ.

The more we learn about Collins Radio the more questions are posed, and lead to even more questions of a conspiratorial bent. As the November 1, 1963 edition of the New York Times revealed in a front page article, Collins Rado leased the CIA raider shop The Rex, that deposited anti-Castro Cuban JMWAVE trained assassins in Cuba with high powered rifles who were caught and confessed to being trained by the CIA to kill Cuban leaders.

Art Collins, the founder of the Cedar Rapids, Iowa  radio company, was the only person capable of receiving the radio broadcasts of artic explorer Navy Admiral Richard Byrd, cousin of the owner of the Dallas oil man D. H. Byrd, who owned the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) at the time of the assassination. He then got major military contracts and became good, personal friends with Air Force General Curtis LeMay, a HAM radio buff who arranged for all of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) nuclear bombers to be outfitted with Collins sideband radios, as well as the Executive Air Fleet, including Air Force One, all of which used Collins’ “Liberty” station in Cedar Rapids as a relay center for all of their radio communications, including those on the day of the assassination.

My file on Collins Radio grew to such an extent that I delivered a report at a COPA conference and wrote an article on The Collins Radio Connections  -  [   https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-collins-radio-connections-to.html   ]

David Montague, one of the HSCA investigators and now a university professor, addressed the 2021 CAPA conference in regards to the JFK Act and still withheld records. He too is an avid conspiracy believer whose work for the HSCA came up with numerous leads of conspiracy, most notably that the wife of a federal judge flew on a Military Air Transport (MAT) flight from McGuire AFB in New Jersey to France, sitting alongside a Marine in full dress uniform with the name Oswald, who said his name was Lee Harvey Oswald, from New Orleans, who was on an important mission that made him very nervous.  And it took place at precisely the same time Oswald was supposed to be on a tramp steamer defectng to USSR.

[    https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2014/06/oswald-takes-macs-flight-to-defect.html    /    https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2014/07/flight-from-mcguire.html   ]

The Fonzi – Church Committee – Veciana – Marurice Bishop – that Parnell has delved into in depth and we will get into later, after I read Parnell’s book on the subject.

Fonzi also interviewed Mitch Werbell – a tape recorded session the tape  of which – as discovered by Malcolm Blunt, has been erased, but we still have Fonzi’s notes, which mention Werbell’s acknowledgement that the Pan Am Bank of Miami was used by the CIA. Of course we already knew that from the HSCA report that Jack Ruby, on his return home from Havana, did a favor for his friend Lewis McWillie and deposited a suitcase full of cash in the Pan Am bank for McWillie’s casino bosses, Fox brothers.

And a point that I don’t expect Parnell to address in his mythical interpretation of Antonio Veciana’s story, is how David Atlee Phillips, as Maurce Bishop, took Veciana to an office in the Pan Am Bank building in Miami in order to sign a security oath and begin his lessons in psychological warfare.

Then there’s Robert McKeown, who delivered arms to Fidel Castro in the mountains and testified before the HSCA that he was paid in cash bundled in Pan Am Bank wrappers.  So there’s certainly something shady going on at the Pan Am Bank of Miami, that the HSCA discovered but nobody has bothered to investigate.  

[ https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmckeown.htm   /   https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/04/happenstance-coincidence-enemy-action.html      ]

After retiring to his Texas ranch McKeown was visited by a victorious Fidel Castro who offered him a position in the new Cuban government, which McKeown declined. But Castro’s visit sparked two other visitors, Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald, bot h of whom wanted McKeown’s assistance in regards to weapons and Cuba.

After Sprague was fired, G. Robert Blakey, the head of the Cornell University Law School Institute on Organized Crime was brought on. Blakey had written the RICO statute that was being used by prosecutors to attack organized crime, and should have been used in the Kennedy assassination but wasn’t. Blakey brought along some of his Cornell law school students, including Ed Lopez and Dan Hardaway, who he sent over to the CIA to review what records they had on the assassination. They also went to Mexico and wrote the long censored Lopez Report, that details many of the conspiracy leads that Parnell won’t even recognize. Both Lopez and Hardaway, to this day, are dedicated and proud conspiracy theorists.

In any case, Parnell’s statement that the HSCA did not come up with any evidence of conspiracy is belittled by the HSCA work of both chief counsels Richard Sprague and G. Robert Blakey, and those they hired to conduct the investigation – Tannenbaum, Moriarity, Montague, Fonzi, Lopez and Hardway, most of whom are still living and stand by their conspiratorial beliefs.

Comments welcome: Billkelly3@gmail.com