While the January 6th attacks on the Capitol sent the country spinning, this is really not the first time this has happened. There have been previous acts of aggression and violence at the Capitollll, all perpetrated by leftist activists.
Democratic presidents have commuted the sentences of most of the individuals arrested and charged in relation to those attacks.
-1954 shooting of members of the House of Representatives by terrorists supporting the cause of Puerto Rican separation from the United States
– a 1971 bombing by the domestic terrorist group the Weather Underground
– Another one 12 years later, by a group of Weathermen who identified themselves as the Armed Resistance Unit.
The March 1954 shooting included three men and one woman—Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irving Flores Rodriguez, Andres Figueroa Cordero, and Lolita Lebron. They entered the House of Representatives’ visitors gallery, and proceeded to observe lawmakers debate the subject of migrant workers from Mexico.
Lebron shouted “Viva Puerto Rico Libre”, and unfurled a Puerto Rican flag and then all four took out semiautomatic pistols and fired on the members of Congress below.
The attack did not succeed in killing any of the congressmen, but did wound five. Twenty-three years later, President Jimmy Carter commuted the sentence of Figueroa Cordero, who had cancer, and two years after that, he also commuted the sentences of the other three.
The 1971 bombing of the Capitol by the Weather Underground went by without arrests. The bombing did cause $350,000 in damage.
The Weathermen said they were protesting the invasion of Laos by U.S.-supported South Vietnam.
The Weather Underground was formed in 1969 by a handful of wealthy or middle-class white students—including Bill Ayers, who after emerging from hiding transformed into a professor in Chicago and went on become Barack Obama’s political mentor there.
The Weathermen were at it again a dozen years later in 1983, setting off another bomb that “tore through the second floor of the Capitol’s north wing,” according to the U.S. Senate history site.
A group calling itself the Armed Resistance Unit called in a warning to the Senate switchboard, but lives were spared only because debate had ceased earlier than expected.
There was $1 million in damage. The reason perpetrators gave was U.S. military involvement in Lebanon and Grenada. In 1988, the FBI arrested and charged seven men and women for the execution of the blast.
In 1988, the FBI arrested and charged seven men and women for execution of the blast. They were Marilyn Jean Buck, Linda Evans, Susan Rosenberg, Timothy Blunk, Alan Berkman, Laura Whitehorn, and Elizabeth Ann Duke. All were either members of the Weather Underground or had some link to it. Some were also closely associated with the May 19th Communist Organization.
Some of them pleaded deals and were eventually charged for other crimes. Some others were paroled, and one of them, Duke, is still on the lam with a heavy FBI reward out for her.
Two of them were serving long sentences in 2001: Evans, a 38-year sentence, and Rosenberg, a 58-year term, not for the Capitol bombing, but for a New Jersey weapons case. Then, in his last day in office—with only two hours left—President Bill Clinton pardoned both.
Rosenberg is now the vice chairman of the board of Thousand Currents, the deep-pocketed funder of hard-left causes, which until last July was the fiscal sponsor of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the main BLM organization.
In a 1989 interview she did from prison, Rosenberg said, “One of the things that’s clear is that the government is trying to get us to reassess, to apologize, to get us to say we won’t ever do anything again, and, for all of us, certainly for myself, I’m not going to say that to the greatest terrorist state in the world.”
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Thanks for getting this history out!