President Donald Trump continues to impress with his latest round of pardons, announcing that he would issue a pardon to former Connecticut Gov. John Rowland, years after Gov. Rowland served two separate prison sentences for politically-motivated non crimes.
Gov. Rowland sent me a letter humbly requesting to advocate for his Presidential pardon, and I was honored to do so. In the years after his railroading, Gov. Rowland has worked closely with the Prison Fellowship to reach wayward souls and bring them closer to Christ. Even as his career and his voice were taken from him, he remained a loyal Christian. What he endured might cause certain men to break, but Gov. Rowland remained steadfast, a testament to his leadership prowess.
Gov. Rowland was targeted because he was a successful Republican executive in a blue state. He won three terms in Connecticut and had the state on the trajectory to becoming red while serving as Governor from 1995 to 2004. This resulted in the Democrat-led legislature leading the charge to impeach Roland on trumped up charges, which were later pursued by federal attorney Nora Dannehy, who would go on to leave the DOJ in protest of Donald Trump during his first administration.
After a lengthy and financially draining lawfare battle, Gov. Rowland pleaded guilty to the charge of “depriving the public of honest service,” a procedural crime of no real merit. The deep state and the Democrats thought they had their scalp, but Gov. Rowland quickly reinvented himself as a popular conservative talk radio host, gaining an even bigger following to hold Democrats accountable. Gov. Roland was effective as a grassroots organizer for Republicans and on the verge of a political comeback. This is when the system struck again to take Gov. Rowland out of commission once more.
Ambitious federal prosecutors went on a fishing expedition, using threats and harassment to engineer another case against Gov. Rowland. They built their case against Gov. Rowland and in doing so violated the Brady Act by withholding key evidence from the defense in the court of law. As a result, Gov. Rowland was convicted of charges related to unlawfully providing campaign services, sentenced to prison time and robbed of his influential radio show. The prosecutors in the second railroading of Gov. Rowland would go on to run for higher office, bragging about how they threw their political opposition behind bars on the campaign trail.
One of the prosecutors of Gov. Rowland was the infamous Chris Mattei. Mattei was one of the main lawyers who engineered the lawfare proceedings against Alex Jones, suing him for billions for non-existent defamation in a kangaroo court. He is also the subversive influence who is representing the FBI agents who led the Jan. 6 probe systematically violating the rights of thousands of Trump supporters free of charge. Mattei filed a lawsuit attempting to prevent the identities of those FBI agents from being known by the Trump administration and then held accountable for their unconstitutional behavior.
In an age where graft is widespread, corruption is normalized and political insiders are openly above the law, these charges against Gov. Rowland were nothing more than a farce. Similar to what happened with Richard Nixon, the political establishment saw in Gov. Roland a man of the people who could not be controlled by the elites. They had to engineer a way to remove Gov. Rowland from office and were unfortunately successful in their efforts. And after Gov. Rowland refused to go away and continued to organize for conservatives in Connecticut, they concocted additional charges to silence his voice.
Americans are no longer naive enough to believe that when the FBI or DOJ targets somebody, it automatically means that individual is guilty. The rise of Trump has obliterated our nation’s innocence. The country has learned that these deep state bureaucrats are as much of a danger to the fundamental rights of its citizens as any terrorist or foreign adversary. They are an insidious fifth column, operating in secret to wield power unbeknownst to the people, destroying lives with no accountability in the process. Trump’s power of the pardon is the mechanism that returns the lost order to a rogue and vicious federal government.
Although Rowland already served his time, his pardon clears his name and cuts at the heart of the lawfare system abused by the deep state for decades. As Trump’s pardon attorney Ed Martin said, our ethos must be “no MAGA left behind.” Every person who felt the brunt of federal overreach because of their outspoken conservative, patriotic or MAGA beliefs must be freed, or if they have already served their time, be pardoned and have their reputation vindicated. The pardons delegitimize the deep state and ought to be coming fast and furious for the rest of the Trump presidency.
