(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Missouri’s two conservative senators both tore into former Biden administration attorney Elizabeth Oyer following after revealing that she advocated for some of the country’s most infamous death-row inmates to receive clemency.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., grilled Oyer over the fact that she had recommended Biden reduce or commute the sentences of all 40 death row inmates, including:
- Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at a black church in South Carolina
- Robert Bowers, who killed 11 in a mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue
- Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber who killed three victims (including an 8-year-old boy) and two police officers.
“You went on to recommend … that the president of the United States grant clemency to murderers, rapists, and the most horrible offenders — all of them — clear death row completely out,” Hawley said. “I’m amazed you’ve been called here today.”
Oyer was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in a hearing on clemency recommendations — a touchy subject after Biden issued broad blanket pardons to roughly 1,500 dangerous convicts.
The action, in his final month in office, was considered by far to be the largest act of clemency in modern U.S. history.
Ultimately, the administration pardoned all federal death-row inmates except for the three mass killers above.
But not for Oyer’s lack of trying.
In a memo advocating for Roof’s release, she said the then-30-year-old killer was “not a compelling candidate” but should be freed anyway because he “suffered from anxiety.”
Roof was 21 when he shot up the prayer meeting at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. In a manifesto, he acknowledged as his primary motive that he was hoping to trigger a race war.
Eric Schmitt, Hawley’s fellow Missouri senator (and previously his successor as the state’s attorney general), continued the grilling, providing the receipts in the form of a 73-page memo that quoted Oyer, saying she endorsed a “categorical” commutation as the “simplest and most efficient approach” for emptying out federal prisons without facing criticism or political fallout for any one particular pardon.
On November 4, 2024, in a 73-page memorandum, Liz Oyer recommended that all 40 federal death row inmates receive commutations. A clean sweep. pic.twitter.com/0JidA93CAo
— Senator Eric Schmitt (@SenEricSchmitt) July 16, 2026
In addition to his mass-clemency gambit, Biden also controversially issued a series of preemptive pardons to several of his own family members, as well as participants in House Democrats’ Jan. 6 show trial, seditious Gen. Mark Milley and disgraced former COVID czar Anthony Fauci.
However, Biden himself has acknowledged that he did not personally sign many of the pardons, delegating the decision-making and authorization to others who used his autopen.
Some, including President Donald Trump, have argued that his failure to personally review the orders, allowing others to usurp his executive power, may invalidate the pardons.
Ben Sellers is a freelance writer and former editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
