The REAL Story Behind the Biden Four Prosecution
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Who Are The Biden Four?
Four decorated United States military veterans:
Nicholas (Nick) Slatten (Sparta, TN) – served four years in the U.S. Army (Sergeant); deployed twice to Iraq
Dustin Heard (Maryville, TN) – served four years in U.S. Marine Corps (Corporal); deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Bahrain
Evan Liberty (Rochester, NH) – served four years in the U.S. Marine Corps (Sergeant); U.S. Embassy guard in Egypt and Guatemala
Paul Slough (Sanger, TX) – served four years in the U.S. Army and National Guard (Sergeant); deployed to Bosnia and Iraq
How Did Men Like This Wind Up In Prison?
Experienced veterans, who were no strangers to combat, made split-second decisions in an Iraqi war zone during an emergency. After being honorably discharged from their respective military branches, all four veterans deployed to Iraq, serving under Blackwater’s contract to protect State Department officials who came under attack. In September 2007, insurgents detonated a car bomb near the venue where a U.S. diplomat was conducting government business. The Blackwater emergency response team (call sign Raven 23) deployed to secure the diplomat’s safe return. After the team created a checkpoint in a traffic circle in Nisur Square, a white Kia drove toward their convoy and refused to stop. Raven 23 disabled the vehicle, but came under fire, which they returned, killing several Iraqis. A team vehicle was disabled by the incoming arms fire and had to be towed back to safety. A U.S. Army Captain and West Point graduate who responded immediately to the scene interviewed Iraqi witnesses who confirmed that the vehicle had driven toward the Raven 23 convoy like a car bomb. Real-time radio logs and photographs of the disabled vehicle confirm that the team came under small arms fire during the attack. There was evidence that people were throwing Iraqi Police uniforms over embankments around the Square, suggesting that insurgents disguised themselves as police and used the embankments as cover to shoot at the convoy.
How Did Self-Defense In A War-Zone Turn Into A Prosecution?
The United States government allowed the Iraqi Police to conduct a corrupt investigation. The FBI largely outsourced the investigation to the Iraqi Police, an organization infiltrated with anti-American insurgents. According to U.S. intelligence files, which were hidden from the defense for a decade, the man who led the Iraqi investigation, Col. Faris Karim, may have collaborated with Iranian terrorist organizations. The Iraqi Police collected almost all of the physical evidence, most of which disappeared. Advertisements on Iraqi television promised compensation for persons who identified themselves to be victims of the incident. The Iraqi Police identified the witnesses and claimed victims and coordinated their stories so that they would all claim that Raven 23 shot without provocation, contrary to what untainted Iraqi witnesses told the U.S. Army Captain at the scene. FBI investigators did not visit the site until several weeks after the incident.
Left-leaning media and politicians relied on the corrupt investigation to urge prosecution. The New York Times and the Washington Post (along with other left leaning outlets) injected politics into the incident by labeling the men as mercenaries and killers and using it as an indictment of Blackwater generally. Similarly, then-candidate Barack Obama made the incident a campaign issue, creating pressure on the Department of Justice to criminally charge the men here in the United States.
How Did A U.S. Court Not Immediately Dismiss Such A Case?
Actually, it did. The federal district court in Washington, D.C., originally dismissed all charges based on constitutional rights violations by federal prosecutors. The District Court dismissed the case for what it found to be “egregious” constitutional violations, including improper use of compelled statements and the intentional withholding of exculpatory evidence and testimony from the grand jury.
How Did The Case Keep Going?
Iraq, Hillary Clinton, and then-Vice President Joe Biden pushed further prosecution. Following heavy political pressure from Hillary Clinton and the Iraqi government, prosecutors appealed the case. Succumbing to that pressure, then-Vice President Joe Biden even inserted himself into the prosecution, announcing the government’s intention to appeal, and to seek “justice” as long as it took, effectively declaring four decorated veterans guilty before the first witness ever took the stand. Biden overstepped his role and jettisoned the presumption of innocence during a press conference in Iraq. And this is how the four veterans of Raven 23 became known as the “Biden Four.”
What Happened To The Biden Four Next?
Prosecutors threatened them with unconscionably long prison sentences. The government threatened the Biden Four with 30-year mandatory minimum sentences for using machine guns—even though they were required to carry machine guns by the State Department. The veterans refused to plead guilty, even in the face of 30-year prison sentences, because they believed the truth would set them free. Unfortunately, it did not.
A civilian jury in Washington, D.C. convicted three of them of manslaughter. The prosecution manufactured venue in Washington, D.C. by arranging for a cooperating witness to fly there so he could be “arrested” in their preferred venue. As a result, the prosecutors tried the men—who are from Tennessee, Texas, and New Hampshire—in the most liberal, anti-military jurisdiction in the country. A civilian jury with no combat experience convicted Paul Slough, Dustin Heard, and Evan Liberty of manslaughter. They ultimately received sentences of 12 to 15 years, after an appeals court threw out their 30-year mandatory minimum sentences as cruel and unusual punishment under the United States Constitution.
But Isn’t It The Biden FOUR? What Happened To Nick Slatten?
After a federal court dismissed manslaughter charges against Nick (for a second time), prosecutors charged Nick with the first-degree murder of a man he did not kill. Prosecutors charged Nick with manslaughter, but an appeals court dismissed the manslaughter case against Nick on statute of limitations grounds. The prosecutors vindictively pursued Nick even though they had acknowledged (in seeking to dismiss their own indictment against Nick) that the manslaughter charges against Nick were “weak” in comparison to the manslaughter charges against the other men (and thereafter allowed the statute of limitations to run). Why? After experiencing immense political pressure (like Joe Biden’s Iraqi press conference) and after being chastised by left-leaning press (including The New York Times), prosecutors charged Nick with first-degree murder of the white Kia driver when Nick refused to waive his statute of limitations defense.
And prosecutors did so without regard for the truth. There is overwhelming evidence that Nick did not kill the Kia driver. Here are just a few examples: One of Nick’s teammates (Paul Slough) admitted to shooting the driver in self-defense, the FBI’s former primary polygraph examiner concluded that Nick was truthful when he denied shooting the driver, the driver’s father refused to testify against Nick because the government told him that Nick’s teammate had killed his son, and every single eyewitness said Nick’s teammate was the shooter. The physical evidence (including ballistics and trajectory analysis) also corroborates that Nick’s teammate was the shooter and proves that the shot would have been impossible for Nick to make from his position in the convoy. And the evidence presented at trial accounts for the two shots Nick fired during the incident. Immediately after the incident, Nick told a teammate he had engaged an active shooter. After speaking with members of Raven 23, Department of State investigators went to the scene and recovered enemy shell casings in the precise location Nick had told his teammate he fired at an active shooter (which obviously was not the white Kia driver).
After Nick’s first conviction by a civilian jury was thrown out on appeal and after a second civilian jury hung, a third civilian jury convicted him of first-degree murder. Nick received a mandatory life sentence, without the possibility of parole
How Is This Even Possible?
Government prosecutors repeatedly engaged in egregious misconduct in their vindictive quest for convictions. It would have been hard enough for these veterans to win their cases before the government’s hand-selected D.C. civilian juries. But they stood no chance against a government that refused to play by the rules. Here are just some of the things government prosecutors did to wrongly convict these decorated veterans:
Hid evidence of insurgent provocation and attack. The prosecutors did not disclose the existence of photographs of AK-47 shell casings (from enemy weapons) found in the precise location from where the men reported taking fire until the middle of trial, leaving the defense no time to investigate.
Hid intelligence information. The government hid from the defense for 10 years the intelligence information showing that the head of the Iraqi investigation, Col. Karim, apparently had ties to terrorist organizations.
Sided with the corrupt Col. Karim over the U.S. Army Captain. The government accused U.S. Army Captain Decareau of lying about his interviews of Iraqi witnesses who told him that the white Kia had driven towards Raven 23’s convoy like a car bomb, although they had no good faith basis to make such an accusation. (Particularly as it is the U.S. government’s fault that the contemporaneous notes Captain Decareau took during his interviews and turned over to his superiors were destroyed.)
Hid exculpatory evidence and lied to the jury. In each of the trials, the prosecution presented the testimony of several key witnesses that conflicted with prior sworn statements that they had given. The government never disclosed these sworn statements to the defense. For example, the prosecutors falsely portrayed Nick as someone who shot without provocation and urged others to do the same. The prosecutors presented testimony from two cooperators (who were key witnesses against all four men) that Nick sparked a mass shooting by both Blackwater and the Army, without any provocation, the week before the Nisur Square incident. However, the government hid from Nick, his lawyers, the court, and the jury contemporaneous statements by the same witnesses that exonerated Nick. The witnesses told investigators under oath that the Army was engaged in a firefight before Nick fired any shots and that the Army identified armed enemy combatants at the scene. The government also hid from Nick, his lawyers, the court, and the jury government documents that included third-party accounts (from Army officials) proving that the narrative presented through these witnesses was entirely false.
Lied to the court. The prosecutors violated a court order by failing to instruct their most critical witness against Nick not to offer inflammatory speculation that had been excluded from Nick’s case. After their witness nonetheless gave the inflammatory and excluded testimony, the district court found that the prosecutors had lied to the court about the reasons for their transgression.
How Can I Help The Biden Four?
Sign and share the petition seeking presidential pardons. It’s difficult to believe that such a travesty of justice could occur in the United States—and even more difficult to believe that this could happen to decorated veterans who were protecting U.S. diplomats in a war zone. But the Biden Four and their families have been living this nightmare for over a decade, and in that time, they have suffered grave injustice at the hands of their own government. Politicians and the media twisted their actions to serve a political agenda, leaving them to be persecuted by vindictive prosecutors and second-guessed by D.C. civilian juries with no combat experience in show trials where prosecutors lied and cheated to achieve convictions, not justice. Their service to this country has been rewarded with years of imprisonment, and, in Nick’s case, life in prison. Please join us in urging President Trump to pardon the Biden Four to allow them to return home to their families where they belong.
Listen to the Explosive Podcast
In what they refer to in the credits of each episode as a “passion project,” Micheal Flaherty and Gina Keating are co-writers of a podcast entitled Raven 23: Presumption of Guilt that is taking a hard look at the Raven 23 case.
Here’s how they describe it:
How did four highly decorated American soldiers become prisoners of war in their own country? This series re-examines the US Department of Justice’s controversial prosecution following a controversial battle in Baghdad. Why did the DOJ hold multiple trials for over a decade? Was the DOJ seeking justice? Or playing politics?
Featuring interviews from all four men of Raven 23 and others who were actually there, plus facts from the record—many of which were kept from the juries and which the government would very much like to keep from the public—every episode reveals something you won’t hear anywhere else.
Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And, if you find the podcast informative, please consider leaving a 5-star review with a description of what you liked to help attract new listeners and combat negative reviews from people who clearly aren’t listening to the podcast but are tanking its ratings because of the topic without providing factual support for their complaints.
Read Key Media Supporting Pardons for the Biden Four & Exposing Prosecutorial Misconduct
Fox News: Rep. Duncan Hunter: President Trump, ‘The Biden Four’ deserve your attention
Fox News: Trump weighs pardons for service members accused of war crimes, as families await decision
The Lars Larsen Show: Jessica Slatten - Why should the President pardon your brother?
National Law Journal: Daily Dicta: Williams & Connolly Blasts Feds for Withholding Major Exculpatory Evidence (Again) In Blockbuster Case (FULL ARTICLE HERE)
One News Now: Pardoned officer seeks release of Raven 23 warriors, cites ‘political nonsense’
The Rochester Voice: Online petition kindles hope Evan Liberty can be brought home where he belongs
