WASHINGTON — Former Justice Department lawyer Elizabeth Oyer has posted a video to YouTube blaming Missouri Republican Sens. Eric Schmitt and Josh Hawley for an onslaught of hate messages and death threats she has received.
“Hey everybody,” Oyer said in the video. “I started getting death threats after I testified against Todd Blanche last week.”
Blanche has been nominated to be attorney general by President Donald Trump, and Schmitt and Hawley sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which must make an initial vote on his nomination.
Oyer’s video shows images of several emails she received, many of which came from fake email addresses and contained messages such as, “Die in hell you pos,” “I hope you die tragically,” “Let’s hope somebody murders your family and gets clemency,” and other threatening messages containing obscenities.
“Two Republican senators with a political agenda rage-baited their followers into believing nasty and dangerous lies,” she states, referencing Hawley and Schmitt.
The committee’s July 16 hearing had five witnesses, including Oyer, who was the pardoning attorney for the Department of Justice for 13 years. In her written testimony to the committee, Oyer said she was fired by Blanche after she refused to restore firearm rights for actor and filmmaker Mel Gibson, a close friend of Trump.
The hearing was meant to consider the pending nomination of Blanche. Schmitt and Hawley, however, did not ask Oyer about Blanche. Instead, they drilled her about the recommendation she made to President Joe Biden to commute 40 people’s federal death sentences to life in prison without parole.
“You personally recommended commuting all 40 death sentence cases, an even broader action than Biden took,” Schmitt said in the hearing.
Biden commuted 37 of the death sentences.
Schmitt was unable to be immediately reached for comment, but a spokesperson commented on his behalf.
“(Liz Oyer’s) disgraceful clemency recommendations ignored the victims’ families’ concerns and were so extreme that even Joe Biden’s autopen handlers couldn’t stomach them,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Hawley confronted Oyer with photos of the parolees, many of whom committed violent acts of rape and murder. He showed photos of the victims and referenced them by name. In an interview with the Missourian, Hawley said that these were the real victims, not Oyer.
“The people who were murdered, and devastated and raped by the criminals that she recommended that President Biden give clemency to, those folks are the real victims here,” Hawley said. “I was proud to tell their stories.”
In her video, Oyer said that Hawley had misrepresented her by claiming that she had sympathy for the perpetrators of the crimes.
“That is dangerous misinformation, and Josh Hawley knows it,” Oyer said in the video.
In response, Hawley said that he had read from memos that Oyer sent.
“She tried to weasel her way out of it, and say she hadn’t said this or that,” Hawley said. “We have the memos, and I put them in the record.”
This story originally appeared in the Columbia Missourian.