A Republican Congressman suggested on Tuesday that Attorney General Eric Holder permitted a federal judge to read Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights because the Obama cabinet official is biased towards terrorism. Since law enforcement officials captured Tsarnaev holed up in a boat on April 19th, conservatives have questioned why a federal judge Mirandized the suspect 16 hours after he was captured and have criticized the Justice Department for not stepping in and stopping the process.
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) — who has spent the weeks following the bombing arguing that Obama’s “political correctness” prevented the FBI from stopping the attacks — appeared on the Glenn Beck radio show to argue that Holder’s history of defending terrorists allowed the judge to Mirandize Tsarnaev:
Listen:
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) — who has spent the weeks following the bombing arguing that Obama’s “political correctness” prevented the FBI from stopping the attacks — appeared on the Glenn Beck radio show to argue that Holder’s history of defending terrorists allowed the judge to Mirandize Tsarnaev:
GOHMERT: Think about it, when your attorney general spent more of his legal career helping terrorists than defending the country, then you know we all have certain biases and lean certain ways.
Listen:
Gohmert then went on to reiterate his belief that the Obama administration is guided by the Muslim Brotherhood. “[The administration] know who’s in there advising them,” Gohmert said, “either they lie under oath or they do know the extent of Muslim Brotherhood infiltration into our government.”
This suggestion that the Obama Administration is somehow soft on terrorism is hard to square with the administration’s policies, especially since they’ve been widely criticized for erring too far in the opposite direction. Among other things, the FBI under Obama and Holder implemented a controversial interpretation of suspected terrorists’ Miranda rights that they invoked to delay Mirandizing Tsarnaev. The head of the ACLU labeled this interpretation of Miranda “un-American.”
Moreover, the actual version of events seems to contradict Gohmert’s narrative, however. According to the Wall Street Journal, Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler advised Tsarnaev of his Miranda rights, “even though investigators apparently still wanted to question him further under a public-safety exception.” Republicans have argued that Holder should have pushed back against Bowler’s decision.
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