In 1999 an adviser to President Clinton proposed pardons of imprisoned Puerto Rican terrorists. The pardons would be “fairly easy to accomplish and will have a positive impact among strategic communities in the U.S. (read, voters),” wrote Mayra Martinez-Fernandez, an adviser to the White House Working Group for Puerto Rico, according Debra Burlingame in The Wall Street Journal. Get that? Voters. Clinton, to be sure, issued the pardons.

In January of this year outgoing President Obama issued 200 commutations of sentences, including that of Oscar López Rivera, a member of Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (FALN), a Marxist-Leninist terrorist group who was released on May 7th 2017. The Daily News summarized FALN’s “accomplishments:

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/oscar-lopez-rivera-not-deserve-president-obama-pardon-article-1.2947628

“In 1974, the FALN began planting booby-trap bombs around New York. While most of these early explosions caused only property damage, the group’s clear intention was to kill and maim. In December 1974, an NYPD officer responding to a report of a dead body in an abandoned building on 110th St. was seriously injured by an FALN incendiary device.
In January 1975, a 10-pound dynamite bomb killed four people and injured dozens at Fraunces Tavern. The powerful blast was felt blocks away. In an eerie foreshadowing of 9/11, dust-covered victims staggered through downtown streets. The FALN quickly took responsibility for the deadly deed.
When a Chicago apartment serving as the FALN’s bomb-making factory was raided in November 1976, authorities learned the names of the group’s leadership. López Rivera and several associates became fugitives.
On Aug. 3, 1977, the FALN struck again in a coordinated attack in Midtown. An alert office worker at 342 Madison Ave., near 43rd St., noticed a suspicious package and evacuated the building. No one was hurt in the subsequent blast.
Workers at the Mobil Building at 150 East 42nd St. weren’t so lucky. An FALN bomb planted there killed 26-year-old Charles Steinberg. The building’s ground-floor windows blew out and several New Yorkers were critically injured by a shower of glass.”