Trump's Situational Outrage & The Real Doug Jones

Addie Mae Collins, Carol McNair, Carole Robertson & Cynthia Wesley: 
killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963

By 10:27am this morning, Donald Trump had already sent out a message via Twitter condemning the horrific terrorist attack that killed at least 235 Muslims who were worshipping at the Al Rawda mosque in the Northeastern Egyptian town of Bir al-Abed during Friday prayers.

He made no Twitter comment about 43-year-old Kevin Neal's shooting spree in Tehama County, California last week that left five dead and ten wounded.

45's preachy situational outrage was also illustrated in the comments he made to reporters on Wednesday as he prepared to leave the White House for Thanksgiving Vacation - when he all but endorsed Republican Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore by flagrantly lying about Democratic Alabama senatorial candidate Doug Jones being "soft on crime". 

As Joan Walsh shrewdly observed in an article in The Nation on Wednesday, Doug Jones was the U.S. Attorney for Alabama who successfully tried and convicted two of the white supremacist terrorists responsible for the heinous bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama back on Sunday September 15, 1963.

The bombing killed four girls (pictured above), 11-year-old Carole Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, and injured 22 - including Collins' 12-year-old sister Sarah who lost an eye when 21 shards of glass were embedded into her face during the explosion.

The aftermath of the 16th Street Church bombing

The four girls were in the basement of the church putting on their choir robes preparing for Sunday service when the 15 sticks of dynamite (triggered by a timing device that had been placed under the steps of the church early that morning) were detonated at 10:22am.

An FBI investigation concluded two years after the bombing found that KKK members Thomas Edwin Blanton, Jr., Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss and Bobby Frank Cherry were all responsible for the bombing.

An FBI informant named Gary Rowe was suspected but never charged.

All four men were members members of a violent KKK faction known informally as the Cahaba Boys - a group associated with other local violent factions associated, and linked with, the KKK (including the Robert. E. Lee Klavern *) that had actively bombed homes and churches as part of a terrorist campaign to intimidate desegregation and voting rights efforts in rural areas of Alabama since the 1950's. 

[* It is of interest to note that some of the militant offshoots of KKK organizations (known as "klokans") in Alabama named themselves after Confederate heroes like Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest in an effort to link the re-emerging white supremacist movement of the early 20th century with the historical legacy of the Confederacy.

As Vox reported back in August, that was around the same time that groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy were actively promoting a nation-wide campaign to try and systematically re-write the history of the Confederacy in school textbooks and place Confederate statues and monuments in towns and cities - even in states that didn't even exist during the Civil War - to reinforce the ideology of white supremacy by creating a mythology that supported and justified it.]

Robert "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss

Even though the FBI gathered thousands of documents and hours of undercover recordings of suspects and witnesses over the course of their two-year investigation into the bombing of the 16th Street Church, Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered the investigation closed in 1968 and all evidence gathered by federal agents sealed.

In a reflection of the deep-seated racial bias embedded within the U.S. justice system, it wasn't until November of 1977,  a remarkable fourteen years after the bombing, that former U.S. Attorney William Baxley was able to successfully convict Robert "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss of the murder of Carol Denise McNair.

Chambliss admitted to having purchased a case of dynamite from a local area store two weeks before the bombings took place under the pretext of needing to clear a field.

Baxley had been a young law student when the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in 1963, and he actively fought to reopen the case starting in 1971 after becoming a federal prosecutor.

Now to circle back to Joan Walsh's observation in her article in The Nation, when Donald Trump simplistically dismissed current Democratic senate candidate Doug Jones as "soft on crime" last Wednesday, was he aware that Jones was the man who successfully indicted and convicted Thomas Edwin Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry  in 2001?

Jones' efforts were aided by the fact that in 1995, the FBI finally unsealed reams of evidence it had gathered about the bombings in the 1960's.

As Kevin Sack reported in a May 4, 2001 New York Times article, after William Baxley wrote an op-ed in the New York Times accusing the FBI of having intentionally covered up evidence in the 70's that could have aided in his prosecution of the four men, a spokesman for the FBI, Craig Dahle, claimed that the reason the Bureau kept the evidence under lock and key could have been due to
"a combination of possible factors, including changes in personnel and filing systems, the bureau's unwillingness to expose confidential informers, and lingering distrust between federal agents and Alabama law enforcement that dated from the days of Jim Crow." 

Evidence that Doug Jones, then the U.S. Attorney for Alabama, and his office used to indict and convict Bobby Frank Cherry in 2002 months after Cherry's lawyer unsuccessfully tried to argue that he was not mentally competent to stand trial.

The other suspect, Herman Frank Cash died in 1994 before the FBI unsealed the evidence that may well have led to his conviction.

Doug Jones speaks at a dedication of a memorial
for the 16th Street Baptist Church bombings in 2011 

Both Blanton and Cherry were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison for their roles in a crime shocked the nation and world.

An act that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called "one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity."

Given the FBI's suspicious concealing of critical evidence, and the years that had passed between the time of the bombings, Doug Jones' successful indictments and prosecution of Blanton and Cherry to time, patience, guts, prosecutorial skill and a genuine desire to see justice done in what is arguably one of the most heinous crimes in American history.

So how can Trump call Doug Jones "soft on crime"?

Now I don't believe Trump is totally brain-dead, he was 17-years-old when the bombings took place in 1963, so there's no way he doesn't at least understand the horrific nature of what happened.

Given his grandfather's involvement in the KKK in New York and his father's efforts to prevent black people from moving into apartments owned by the Trump Organization, what Trump thinks about those bombings is another story.

Even if he doesn't know Doug Jones' role in bringing two of the killers to justice, at least one of Trump's advisors has made it clear that part of Jones' appeal as a candidate for the senate is his involvement in the case.

Republican senate candidate Roy Moore 

So Trump's decision to back Roy Moore, who is arguably guilty of having committed multiple crimes for having engaged in inappropriate sexual contact with girls as young as 14 and 16 when he was a 32-year-old district attorney, on the grounds that (in part) Doug Jones is "soft on crime" really doesn't hold water.

To paraphrase a recent comment made by a guest on NPR, Trump supporters have a right to vote for him.

But if Trump supporters who live in Alabama are going to compromise their ethics and morals simply to support a candidate who is going to back Trump's divisive ideology and legislative goals - it's a truly troubling sign for modern American politics.

Regardless, Trump has a lot of cojones lecturing anyone about being soft on crime given the slew of his own campaign officials (including Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn) who already have been shown to have broken laws - to say nothing of the fact that he granted a presidential pardon to former Maricopa County sheriff  Joe Arpaio who was found guilty of multiple crimes in a court of law.

Given that the former head of the Office of Government Ethics, Walter Shaub, filed a complaint against Kellyanne Conway for violating the Hatch Act when she used her non-elected position as a "senior White House counselor" to publicly advocate for Roy Moore, and that the president is the person who would have to hold her accountable, we'll see if his talk about being "soft on crime" is just that - talk.

Seems more likely that it's just another example of 45's selective and situational outrage.