America was on fire in the summer of 2020 as Antifa and BLM set city after city on fire, including Seattle, Minneapolis, Portland, New York, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. Police stations were torched, and all manner of projectiles, from rocks to Molotov cocktails, were hurled, injuring dozens of police officers. Dozens were killed. Damages were estimated at more than $1.2 billion, the highest in history.
In January 2021, the Biden administration arrived. Armed with 35,000 FBI agents and support personnel and an annual budget of $10.8 billion, Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, had everything he needed to catch criminals.
But there has been no outrage from the Department of Justice. Instead, with isolated exceptions here and there, there has been silence. Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of crimes across the country have never been and likely never will be prosecuted. New York City has paid a $13 million settlement for arresting George Floyd protesters. Many other cities across the U.S. are negotiating similar settlements.
Perhaps that’s because the Biden Justice Department has other priorities: It is fixated on putting everyone who participated in the January 6 “riot” behind bars.
President Joe Biden watches Attorney General Merrick Garland speak in the East Room of the White House on May 17, 2023. (Adam Schultz/The White House via Flickr)
My son does not belong to any political organization. His only organizational involvement during the 2020 election was with a local church group that met daily to pray the Rosary for America. However, like tens of millions of other Americans, my son believed the 2020 Presidential election was stolen, and so on January 6th he went to Washington, DC, along with over 100,000 other patriots to voice his support for the man they believe won and deserved to be certified.
But then things got worse, and he was part of it. He broke two windows and entered the Capitol. Eventually, he was arrested and indicted. He pleaded guilty to those felonies and other collateral misconduct. But the Biden Justice Department slammed him because he didn’t plead guilty to the felony charge of obstruction of justice (a charge that is now being tossed out by the Supreme Court, as unconstitutional as it’s ever been).
Without obstruction charges, the January 6th “insurrection” narrative would disappear. The vast majority of protesters would be no more guilty than the hundreds of Hamas sympathizers who stormed the Capitol last October, or the Code Pink protesters who regularly disrupt congressional hearings, or Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), who set off a fire alarm (and lied) to block a House vote. All of those offenders were charged with misdemeanors and paid meaningless fines.
If justice were evenly distributed, my son would have been found guilty as well and would have received additional penalties for breaking two windows, possibly probation and/or restitution, but this was Joe Biden’s Department of Justice and we knew that would not be enough.
Two and a half years after he was charged, the verdict came on the eve of his trial: Suddenly, the Department of Justice found that he had assaulted a police officer, i.e., “lunged at a police officer.” The footage presented as evidence was so grainy and shot from a long distance that the judge himself admitted it was impossible to conclusively determine whether his son had even assaulted a police officer. Touched The officer. The judge later made it very clear that he wanted it to be understood that my son had never assaulted this officer or any other officer that day. But the layman knows that “assault” does not necessarily mean attack. It can also mean “to obstruct” or “to get in the way.” And because my son was pushed from behind by the now riotous crowd and advanced on the officer, he was found guilty.
However, that day, my son came into contact with the police.
Prosecutors obtained and viewed other video footage from that day. One clip showed the son bringing water to an officer suffering from tear gas. A second clip showed the son successfully ordering a threatening mob to sheathe their baseball bats after ignoring similar requests from the endangered officer. The son was also seen helping another fallen officer to his feet.
This meant nothing to the “Justice” Department. They wanted a felony conviction, and once they got it, this out-of-control federal agency started asking for much, much more. As the sentencing date approached, they added another charge: aggravated terrorism. The Biden Administration was asking the court to consider my son, whose most serious charge so far was a traffic violation, on a par with Osama Bin Laden. The Administration argued that the applicable sentence range was 22-27 years in prison.
The judge didn’t buy it and refused to extend the sentence. Instead, he sentenced my son to 45 months. But midway through the sentence, this judge proclaimed that he had seen what everyone else had missed: in a footnote buried in the report, the prosecutors had hidden $847 for the cost of replacing one broken window pane. That amount made the crime a misdemeanor instead of a felony. The prosecutors knew this from the beginning, yet they maliciously went ahead and charged him with a felony.
L. Brent Bozell III, founder and president of the Media Research Center, speaks during a panel discussion at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC on April 14, 2016. (Chris Connor/Getty Images)
Why did they go to such extreme lengths against my son, fabricating a crime and declaring him a terrorist?
This was not a principled prosecutorial pursuit of justice. There is no place for dissenters in Biden’s America. This was a political prosecution using the full force of the federal government because my son, Leo Brent Bozell IV, bears his father’s name, his father is influential, and he will support President Trump in 2024. The ends justify the means, and they will stop at nothing.
A criminal investigation into this corrupt Department of Justice has long since been abandoned, and those who corrupted it know their days are numbered under the new Trump Administration.
L. Brent Bozell III is founder and chairman of the Media Research Center.
