In a few weeks, President Trump plans to issue 250 pardons to mark America’s 250th birthday. Four names belong near the top of that list: John Miller, David Cari, Dennis Spaulding, and Jason Zullo, all former East Haven, Connecticut, police officers whom the Obama Justice Department turned into federal felons for simply doing their jobs.
To be clear, I have never had any discussion with these men, their families, or their agents. They are not my clients. No one has paid me a dime. I don’t do paid pardon work. Like my previous op-ed successfully calling for President Trump’s pardons of Washington, D.C., police officers Terence Sutton and Andrew Zabavsky, I am simply calling for a righting of wrongs by the woke and weaponized Obama and Biden Justice Departments.
Presidential pardons in these cases would not be an act of indulgence, but an act of presidential correction. These men were line officers, family men, and decorated public servants. They got entangled in a fake civil-rights charade after they uncovered a sprawling and dangerous fraud providing unlicensed illegal immigrants with fake license plates and tags.
Instead of prosecuting the fraud ring with equal zeal, the ideologues at the Obama Justice Department went after the cops who were simply doing their jobs. To score political points, they jailed cops, not criminals. It was wrong, and only President Trump can right it.
The Facts
The facts are simple. East Haven officers found that more than 1,000 vehicles operated with fraudulent out-of-state plates, many connected to a Pennsylvania scheme that sold plates to illegal immigrants for roughly $1,500 apiece.
When officers seized roughly 80 suspicious plates from a local bodega in 2010, an immigrant-rights activist and priest arrived with a video camera and interfered with the investigation. The activists, Ivy League lawyers, and the Obama Justice Department descended on East Haven, a sleepy town of 30,000 people neighboring the crime-ridden, dilapidated home of Yale University.
Investigations by the police department’s internal affairs division, the state of Connecticut, and the FBI followed. Each independently cleared the officers of racial bias charges. That was no matter to Obama’s DOJ, which wanted to make an example of officers it accused of targeting so-called “innocent” illegal immigrants as it pushed for mass amnesty in Congress.
Obama DOJ Pursues Charges of Racial Bias
Obama’s handpicked head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Tom Perez, treated the criminals like victims and the cops like criminals. Despite the FBI’s investigation failing to substantiate DOJ’s allegations of racial animus, Perez pursued the case anyway.
At one point, the FBI reportedly sent an undercover unit with “Hispanic-looking” agents driving around trying to provoke officers into pulling them over. Following all traffic laws and displaying legal tags, the agents were never stopped despite weeks of surveillance.
Perez wanted a federal consent decree over the police department to impose sanctuary-city policies. When the town resisted, the Obama Justice Department brought the hammer down. It singled out four officers for supposed civil-rights transgressions.
The officers’ offenses were minor; the convictions and sentences were not. Sgt. Miller poked an unruly, intoxicated suspect in the chest. The government and probation office sought probation; the court still sentenced him to four months in prison. Officer Zullo omitted from a report that his cruiser touched a suspect’s motorcycle during a chase. He served two years. Officer Cari, a decorated officer who had been wounded on duty, received 30 months for charges including making an arrest without probable cause and making a false arrest report. Officer Spaulding, who was convicted of the same charges and one count of excessive force, was sentenced to five years. The verdict came down only two days after his daughter was born. He missed the first years of her life while behind bars.
While the officers’ lives were upended, Perez’s political star kept rising. He became Obama’s secretary of labor, then chairman of the Democratic National Committee during President Trump’s first term. Then he became one of Biden’s top advisors on — you guessed it — the illegal immigration crisis he had been abetting from the White House.
Weaponized Prosecutions
Perez’s actions were a vindictive act of political weaponization against his ideological enemies and ruined the lives of four family men dedicated to protecting their community. No one is above the law, but so-called “progressive” and leftist radicals like Perez bent the law to fit their agenda, not justice.
President Trump knows all too well how partisan enemies have weaponized prosecutions for political ends. It must stop, and its victims must be vindicated. President Trump has the power, with the stroke of a pen, to rectify this gross miscarriage of justice and uphold the rule of law.
A pardon cannot undo all the harm wrought by this political persecution, but it can redeem these men in the eyes of the law, correct the record, and restore their good names. Even more, a pardon for the East Haven Four would be a fitting declaration on the 250th anniversary of our founding: that our nation holds law, order, liberty, and justice sacrosanct to this day.
