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Because the investigation against them was muffed thanks to the illegal activities of the Washington Post’s favorite Watergate answer man himself, Mark Felt — aka Deep Throat.

I don't believe Felt was DT, but Woodward's got his reputation invested in that myth, and his media colleagues will protect their hero.

The prosecution of Felt and Miller wasn't the reason the Weathermen skated, but the culmination of a decade of discrediting and dismanteling of our intel agencies, most notably through the efforts of the Democrat-controlled Congress, aided by the media and the Weather Underground itself.

The era began with a break-in of an FBI office in Media, PA, by a group calling itself the "Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI,” aka the Weather Underground, who demonstrated great skill in break-ins themselves, ironically. The files that were stolen were selectively leaked to news media and the left's obsession with what the FBI called "COINTELPRO" began.

The drama increased exponentially with Watergate, and a simultaneous series of COINTELPRO-related disclosures stemming from NBC correspondent Carl Stern's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 1972. The Justice Department had finally released particular documents to Stern in December 1973, and this disclosure eventually led to a hearing before the Civil Rights and Constitutional Rights Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974.(Stern later became Public Affairs Director for the Reno/Gorelick Justice Dept.)

"The "Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate," commonly referred to as the "Church Committee" for its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, joined the fray with further disclosures, and eventually became responsible for the hog-tying of both the CIA and FBI in its ability to investigate both domestic and international terrorism, through guidelines written in response to the committee's recommendations by Attorney General Edward Levi in 1976. (Gerald "Let the Healing Begin" Ford hand-picked Levi in an effort to reform the image of the DOJ after Watergate, and therefore further his chances of election to a full term in '76.)

Then along came Carter, and Felt and Miller were indicted in1978 by his Attorney General Griffin Bell on charges that they

"did unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree together and with each other to injure and oppress citizens of the United States who were relatives and acquaintances of the Weatherman fugitives, in the free exercise and enjoyments of certain rights and privileges secured to them by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America."

The main "relative" referred to in the indictment was Jennifer Dohrn, Bernardine's sister (now a member of the Columbia U. College of Nursing faculty), who, as WU spokesperson, was known to be helping WU fugitives. (Jennifer Dohrn sued Felt in 1978, and settled out of court.) The jury returned guilty verdicts on November 6, 1980. On December 3, 1980, Ayers and Dohrn surrendered to Illinois authorities on a plea bargain presumed to have been negotiated in advance. Due to "prosecutorial misconduct," charges against Ayers were dismissed, while Dohrn received probation and a fine for crimes committed during the "Days of Rage" in Chicago in '69. They dynamic duo were among the last, and the guiltiest, to surrender, but many of their group had already come out of hiding, beginning in the mid-70's, and all, including Wilkerson who escaped the townhouse explosion, were given relatively light sentences. Ayers and Dohrn had much more to conceal, so waited for the optimum moment to become "guilty as hell, free as a bird."

Reagan pardoned Felt and Miller on April 15, 1981. Felt sued and had his law license restored in 1982 and the same year Felt and Miller testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee's security and terrorism subcommittee that the restrictions placed on the FBI by Attorney General Edward H. Levi were threatening the country's safety. Under Reagan, some of the restrictions were rolled back, but not enough to prevent 9/11/01, as we've learned.

That's just a bare outline, but suffice it to say that by 1980, the public had been conditioned to believe the FBI were a bunch of law-breaking thugs (which may have been true in some, but certainly not all respects), while the Weathermen's excesses -- bombings, break-ins, theft, jail breaks, suspected murders, attempted murder, planned bombing of a military facility, etc. -- were all but forgotten. To attribute their pardons solely to Felt and Miller's actions misses the point entirely.