They tried to slip this one under the radar while the rest of us were debating the concept of the “rule of law,” which this administration* rapidly is turning into a not-very-convincing snuff film. The president* decided to let some half-assed arsonists off the hook. From The Washington Post:

The return to prison of Dwight Hammond Jr. and Steven Hammond helped spark the 41-day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in early 2016. In a statement, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said an “overzealous appeal” of the Hammonds’s original sentences during the Obama administration, which sent them back to prison, was “unjust.” “The Hammonds are devoted family men, respected contributors to their local community, and have widespread support from their neighbors, local law enforcement, and farmers and ranchers across the West,” Sanders said, adding: “Justice is overdue.”

The Post goes on to explain that there was considerable local support behind granting the Hammonds clemency, including an editorial in the Oregonian.

AP

However, at the time the Hammonds were committing their crimes, they were a lot more than innocent ranchers who let a fire “leak over” onto public lands, as White House spokesliar Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Tuesday. The reason I know this is because The Washington Post told me so two years ago.

The trouble with the Hammonds and fire began in 2001. That year, the government showed, Steven Hammond went hunting, killing deer on land under control of the Bureau of Land Management. What to do to erase evidence of this game violation? Break out the matches. “Jurors were told that Steven Hammond handed out ‘Strike Anywhere’ matches with instructions that they be lit and dropped on the ground because they were going to ‘light up the whole country on fire,'” a Justice Department account of the trial read. “One witness testified that he barely escaped the eight to ten foot high flames caused by the arson.” The result: More than 100 acres of public land were destroyed. But, the government said, Steven Hammond was ready with an explanation. Sure, he had started the fire, he said. But he never meant to burn any land his family didn’t own.

AP

The re-sentencing of the Hammonds prompted the 2016 standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife refuge, in which the deadbeat seditionists of the Bundy clan were involved, and after which a number of the Bundys were arrested and acquitted. It’s entirely possible that the Hammonds were punished more harshly because the Bundy clan showed up to support them. (The arrival of the Bundys apparently was unpopular with the people who live in and around the Hammonds in Oregon.) And, if you want to argue that the anti-terrorism statute was unfairly applied here, consider that those five poor saps convicted in Miami back in 2009 each got an average of five years just for talking armed revolutionary smack to an FBI snitch.

Consider how the Hammonds would have been treated if their surname were Hamad and they lit a fire on federal land. And now consider how they got on the White House radar in the first place, since, as we know, the president* doesn’t know anything about anything. Somebody sympathetic not merely with their plight, but with the nutty cause that formed around them, has the president*’s ear. That is not comforting. In related news, the Hammonds walk free while a few thousand children are still in federal custody for the crime of stepping over a line on a map. That is unspeakable.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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