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Pete Hegseth a Home Run for SecDef: Take it from someone who knows him — and his heroic intercession for a wrongly convicted American soldier — personally
American Thinker ^ | 12/16/2024 | Don Brown

Posted on 12/16/2024 7:37:55 AM PST by SeekAndFind

It was a moment I’ll never forget: Friday afternoon, November 15, 2019. After spending Veterans’ Day week in snowy, freezing Leavenworth, Kansas, I returned to Charlotte for a court appearance that morning in neighboring York County. I was talking to a friend on my cell phone, driving eastbound on Pineville-Matthews Road, when my phone beeped with an incoming call.

The screen flashed: The White House.

I pulled off the road into a Panera Bread parking lot and answered the call. It was the president’s military attaché.

“Mr. Brown, I’m here with the president. The president wants to know if he has permission to call your client.”

For me, this was one of those surrealistic, Forest Gump–like moments beyond description — where a country boy from Plymouth, N.C. gets a call from the Oval Office. Something seemed out of place about it all. But that call marked the first of five that I would receive from the White House that afternoon.

Our client, Army 1st lieutenant Clint Lorance, was a former 82nd Airborne paratrooper, railroaded by Obama’s Pentagon under suicidal rules of engagement. On July 2, 2012, Clint’s platoon faced a motorcycle speeding toward them in a restricted area in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. With VBIED (Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Device) attacks against Americans becoming more frequent, four Afghan National Army soldiers accompanying the platoon fired first at the motorcycle. Clint’s men opened fire. Two of the three riders were dead. DNA evidence later linked two of the riders to Taliban bomb-makers, yet no bodies were recovered, and no ballistics matched American bullets.

Despite this, Obama’s rule of engagement dictated, “Don’t fire unless fired upon.” The Pentagon made an example of Clint, who never pulled the trigger. Positioned far back in the line, Clint couldn’t see the riders.

(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; Government; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: clintlorance; defense; dod; hegseth; military; petehegseth
Yet Obama’s Pentagon charged him with “murder” and coerced his men to testify against him under threat of prosecution for murder themselves. In August 2013, a military court convicted Clint, suppressing evidence and ignoring the lack of ballistic proof that American bullets had killed the riders. They sentenced Clint to 20 years in prison, stripped him of his uniform, and carted him off in an armed van to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth.

The Obama administration had an American scalp to hand to the Karzai government in Kabul and sent a chilling message to American soldiers: obey our suicidal rules of engagement, make them shoot at you first before you take a shot, or we will prosecute you, too.

I got involved as a former Navy JAG officer after writing a book on the shoot-down of Extortion 17, where 30 Americans, including SEAL Team Six members, died. I met Pete Hegseth in 2017, when he led Concerned Veterans for America. Five years had passed since Clint’s conviction, but Pete had never forgotten Clint’s story.

1 posted on 12/16/2024 7:37:55 AM PST by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind

BTTT


2 posted on 12/16/2024 7:43:43 AM PST by nopardons
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To: SeekAndFind

Its good that they pardoned him but its not enough.

Investigate who was responsible for railroading him. Who withheld evidence. Go after them. Break their careers. Court Martial them and expel them from the military. Make THEM serve as a warning to others.


3 posted on 12/16/2024 7:50:48 AM PST by FLT-bird
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To: SeekAndFind

“Without Pete Hegseth, Clint would still be imprisoned at Leavenworth today. Instead, Clint graduated from law school, passed the bar exam, and is dedicating his life to defending others wronged by the military justice system.”

Incredible inspiring story.

I hope something great is in store for Daniel Penny who was also railroaded.


4 posted on 12/16/2024 7:53:20 AM PST by RummyChick
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To: FLT-bird

Make them spend their wealth on lawyers. Just like Alvin Bragg should be set up as an example.


5 posted on 12/16/2024 8:02:35 AM PST by Eli Kopter
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To: SeekAndFind

I am an attorney. I was a JAG officer in the Army. I love absolute truth. I despise falsehood.

Weaponizing the legal system is a crime.


6 posted on 12/16/2024 8:06:05 AM PST by yldstrk
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To: SeekAndFind

There are two things I got out of that article:

One, the level of stupidity in the ROE was politically constructed (as they most often are) but the scumbags in the Obama regime completely and shamefully railroaded Army 1st lieutenant Clint Lorance for wholly political considerations. Shameful.

Second, Pete Hegseth is a man of his word.

Both are useful things to know.

I don’t know what it is like now, but military prosecutions, at least by what we called the NIS back in the Seventies, were widely viewed as structures meant to minimize damage to the Naval Service in every way possible, and the welfare of the sailor being charged was considered by us as so unimportant to us as to simply make his fate completely inconsequential to preserving the image and reputation of the US Navy.

I don’t know how fair that conception was, but that was how everyone viewed it. We all thought that if you went to any kind of trial, you would not be treated fairly by the Navy, and were screwed from the outset.


7 posted on 12/16/2024 8:10:02 AM PST by rlmorel ("A people that elect corrupt politicians are not victims...but accomplices." George Orwell)
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To: AdmSmith; AnonymousConservative; Arthur Wildfire! March; Berosus; Bockscar; BraveMan; cardinal4; ...

8 posted on 12/16/2024 8:26:17 AM PST by SunkenCiv (Politics do not make strange bedfellows, and the enemy of your enemy may still be your enemy.)
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To: FLT-bird

Exactly what needs to be done.


9 posted on 12/16/2024 8:32:49 AM PST by curious7
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To: SeekAndFind

Army 1st lieutenant Clint Lorance was an Oklahoma boy. His mother was an attorney and Federal prosecutor.

Lots of Okies work for his release as best they could through contacting their Congressmen and Senators and anyone else that might work for justice in this instance.


10 posted on 12/16/2024 8:53:54 AM PST by oldplayer
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To: yldstrk

“I am an attorney. I was a JAG officer in the Army. I love absolute truth. I despise falsehood.

Weaponizing the legal system is a crime.”
____________________________________________________________

If you really despise falsehood, you know the Lieutenant is no hero. His own soldiers willingly testified against him for giving an illegal order to kill people who were neither armed nor posing a threat.


11 posted on 12/16/2024 1:35:38 PM PST by Bob Wills is still the king (Just a Texas Playboy at heart!)
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To: Bob Wills is still the king

Troll.


12 posted on 12/16/2024 2:47:41 PM PST by wgmalabama (For rent….)
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To: Bob Wills is still the king
the Lieutenant is no hero. His own soldiers willingly testified against him for giving an illegal order to kill people who were neither armed nor posing a threat.

I dispute your claim, based on the case of Derrick Miller, who was subjected to the same treatment by crooked officers who threatened and coerced witnesses into changing their testimony that originally had defended Miller. You can now see that our military is 'woke", but you don't believe it could have started under Obame? It did, such as those same ROIs that favored any muslim's taqiyya word for it over the word of an American soldier.

Derrick Miller, too, served ten years in Leavenworth based on the same rotten Obama ROIs, after saving his troops from an incoming attack by shooting a muslim recon spy who had lunged for his gun as Miller detained and interrogated him. After Miller's decade of imprisonment away from his children, Louie Gohmert, a former JAG officer and U.S. Representative, got Miller free -- but not yet pardoned. I very much hope Trump can pardon Derrick during the upcoming 47th term.

13 posted on 12/16/2024 4:14:53 PM PST by Albion Wilde (“Did you ever meet a woke person that’s happy? There’s no such thing.” —Donald J. Trump)
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