You may recall the story of the two young New York lawyers — Urooj Rahman and Colinford Mattis — who were involved in a firebomb attack on an NYPD van during the BLM rioting in New York City on May 30, 2020. What was unusual about the case was that rather than be chastised for their actions, they seemed to get favorable coverage from left-wing media because of their elite connections.
The accused enjoy widespread support and sympathy from New York’s legal and media elites. Rahman is represented by one of the city’s best defense attorneys, and a former Obama administration official guaranteed her bail in the amount of $250,000. Both have been the subject of favorable profiles in New York magazine and NPR, among other venues.
Yahoo News even ran a false story claiming they faced “45 years for vandalism.”
Rahman was sentenced on Friday.
The two had both originally pled guilty back in 2020 and faced a possible ten-year sentence, with a terrorism enhancement. But then the Biden DOJ intervened.
In mid-May, the same career DOJ prosecutors who argued for that 10-year sentence were back in court withdrawing their plea deal and entering a new one that allowed the defendants to cop to the lesser charge of conspiracy. It tosses out the terrorism enhancement entirely.
Under the new charge, then they only faced a maximum of five years. In the case of Urooj Rahman, the Biden DOJ was only recommending an 18-24 month term, based on the “history and personal characteristics” of the defendant. Even then, the ultimate sentence that she was given on Friday was only 15 months, with two years of supervised release.
“History and personal characteristics.”
Not only were they involved in the firebomb attack, but a witness also said that Rahman was trying to distribute other devices to people. She gave an interview on the day of the attack saying the “only way they hear us is through violence.” It wouldn’t ever stop unless we “f**king take it all down.”
“I hope they burn everything down,” Rahman told Mattis in a message hours before protests formed. “Need to burn all the police stations down… probably all the courts too.”
When Rahman joined protesters that night, she wrote to Mattis: “Throwing bottles and tear gas … lit some fires but were put out … fireworks goin and Molotovs rollin.”
“Go burn down 1PP” Mattis responded. “Bring it to their [sic] neck.”
She even “announced with a smiley face emoji that her rock had struck a police officer,” according to prosecutors.
Her attorneys claimed that she should get a lighter sentence because of her “commitment to social justice” and she said she had “unprocessed trauma” from being a Muslim after 9/11.
Those are the people for whom the Biden DOJ intervened.
James Trusty, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s criminal division, told the Washington Free Beacon that Rahman received “extraordinarily unusual treatment by the DOJ.”
“I have a hard time thinking general deterrence is well served by swapping in a soft plea agreement to justify light treatment for someone who bombed a police car,” Trusty said. “This same Department of Justice would likely take quite a different stance if this had been a defendant throwing Molotov cocktails in Washington, D.C., on January 6.”
The problem is what Trusty said is so true. If the two had committed their crime on Jan. 6, they would be locked up and the key would be thrown away. We’ve seen the radically different way that this case and some of the other leftist rioting has been handled compared to the Jan. 6 cases. That’s the problem with the “justice” that we’re seeing right now. It’s one of the many problems that the Biden team has destroyed: the objectivity of our rule of law.
