Normal
0
MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
The Hon. Donald J. Trump
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20500
Dear President Trump:
I see in the media you’ve been rather busy lately, but I hope you or someone in your office can take the time to read and act on this letter. I apologize for its length, but this is a very complex situation and requires some explanation.
I am writing to appeal to you for an act of executive clemency and commutation of sentence for federal prisoner William A. White #13888-084, now being held in the United States penitentiary in Marion, Illinois in a special unit for alleged “terrorists.”
The first thing that needs to be said is that Bill White is no more a terrorist than Big Bird, and everyone involved in his case is fully aware of the fact. Bill is a former political activist, true, but even in his wild and woolly youth he was always a mile wide and an inch deep. Bill has never hurt anyone in his life, and I am convinced after some years of association with him that he simply doesn’t have it in him to do so. He has undergone torture, false imprisonment, and the loss of everything he had in the world including his wife and daughter, because he was viciously and cynically persecuted out of the most contemptible of motives, for things his accusers knew perfectly well he did not do.
The second thing you need to understand about Bill White’s case is that it’s nothing but Net. He is one of the few people in this country who is in prison on foot of internet postings and e-mails alone, without the government ever having demonstrated any overt act of any kind in furtherance or intention involving the actual carrying out of any crime.
Bill White’s only offense involving an overt act occurred in 2012. Bill was released from prison on constitutional grounds by a federal judge (i.e. his alleged internet posts were ruled protected speech under the First Amendment.) Motivated so far as I can see only by vindictive malice, the government appealed. They found a sympathetic left-wing judicial activist to reverse the acquittal. When Bill understood that he had been betrayed and the FBI were coming to take him back to prison, he fled the country to Cancun, Mexico of all places. There he made repeated internet posts protesting his innocence until he was arrested outside an internet café. This of course led to a charge of parole violation. My understanding is that he has already cleared that charge with time served.
Shorn of all the quasi-legal ishkabibble, Bill White’s alleged crimes consist of A) being Bill White, and B) supposedly sending e-mails and making internet posts which “made people uncomfortable.” Not even the most wild-eyed and foam-lipped United States Attorney has ever claimed that Bill actually harmed anyone at all, or that he ever committed any kind of physical act beyond running off to Mexico in a panic five years ago.
Over the years Bill has repeatedly been offered deals by multifarious United States Attorneys and other Justice Department officials if he will only plead guilty to something, in other words admit that something happened, even if nobody knows quite what it was. Bill has repeatedly refused to let his persecutors off the hook and plead guilty to crimes that he and they are both aware he did not commit, which has fueled an animosity and vindictiveness on the part of the government that I have witnessed nowhere else in over 40 years of observing the inner workings of American society.
It gets worse. In the past nine years Bill has in fact painstakingly assembled a massive compendium of technical and forensic evidence which indicates that he did not in fact send the e-mails or make the internet posts which he is accused of originating. He has identified the actual sender in at least one case and believes he can demonstrate the identity of others if he is ever allowed meaningful access to the courts and full discovery is compelled from the prosecution. He has repeatedly presented this evidence of his actual innocence to the courts, both pro se and through counsel, and he is essentially being ignored and told to be quiet.
Okay, he’s not exactly the Count of Monte Cristo. He has his faults. Bill White is one of these people who sit down in front of a computer keyboard and get a visit from Mr. Hyde. Yeah, back about 15 years ago he could be silly and intemperate when he started tapping on that keyboard. I think somebody picked up on that, and that’s what they used to destroy Bill.
No, that’s not paranoia. Anyone examining this case is always stunned at the sheer disproportionate level of institutional violence with which the government responded to a non-existent threat on the part of an obscure radical poseur. As nearly as I can determine, this entire sorry mess grew out of the fact that in October 2008 Bill ran a proposed magazine cover on his web site which the then-campaigning Obama people didn’t like, and somebody in the Justice Department decided to curry favor with the incoming régime by making an example of an Obama-skeptic gadfly.
For that act of disrespect to The One, someone has decided Bill White must die in prison, especially now that it’s grown into such a grotesque abomination of torture, malfeasance and corruption that the Justice Department is anxious to bury it before somebody looks at it too closely. The hell of it is, the magazine cover to which they objected appeared only on the internet; White was arrested before the actual magazine itself could be printed and mailed. This whole thing seems to have grown out of somebody in the Democratic party throwing some kind of hysterical hissy fit over nothing. If the magazine had been published it would have been long forgotten by now.
An unsettling vibe of near-insanity on the part of government and federal law enforcement has always hovered over every aspect of this case. Bill White, the very idea of Bill White, seems to give them conniption fits. Like Alice, we are expected to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Over the past nine years, several United States Attorneys have created a bizarre structure of fantasy and fabrication regarding Bill White, which appears to be based on a Fox Television crime drama series entitled “The Following,” starring Kevin Bacon and the British actor James Purefoy. (I think it ran for three seasons.)
In this TV show, Purefoy is an evil and charismatic cult leader who has this huge “following” of weirdos who run around and murder people while wearing Edgar Allan Poe masks. This is how Bill White has been portrayed to the public and to successive juries. For example, the jury in one of his trials was anonymized for fear of Bill’s non-existent “followers.” The jurors were told that they had to be protected from crazed blood-lusting right-wing psychos acting on telepathic commands from Bill White sitting in his jail cell, beaming orders from his brain to his zombie-like “followers” to kill kill kill! Yes, Mr. President, it really did get that ridiculous.
I’m not making this up, you know. When you look over what has been done to this man for the past nine years, it is horrifying and heart-breaking. This is the kind of case that destroys people’s faith in America, with the law being abused to serve a political agenda and an almost incomprehensible personal hatred of one man on the part of people with power. A land where something like this can happen is not a place the Founding Fathers would recognize.
Mr. President, I am appealing to you for an act of common human decency. This man has done nothing, and the government of which you are now the head has brutalized and tortured him for nine years. Let him go. For nine years Bill has been the Department of Justice’s favorite chew toy. That’s long enough. Let him go.
Your predecessor in the office you now hold committed a terrible wrong in the case of Bill White, one of many. I am asking you to right that wrong. I know you probably will not read this letter personally, and I get that. You have a swamp to drain. But I am sending a copy to your new Attorney General, Mr. Sessions, and I hope that somehow this appeal will get through to someone with authority, or even with just a little curiosity.
What the United States government has done to Bill White is vile and unconscionable. It is sordid. It is squalid. What the United States government has done to Bill White brings every man and woman involved in into shame, disrepute, and contempt.
Please, Mr. Trump. As you battle to repair much greater wrongs these people have done to us all, take some time to look at this case and fix this one small wrong to one single man. Those little victories can mount up.
Yours sincerely,
Harold A. Covington
P. O. Box 2188
Bremerton, Washington 98310
Cc: The Hon. Jeff Sessions
Attorney General of the United States