As AutopenGate threatens to raise grave questions about the final days of the Joe Biden presidency, a last-second pardon issued to a pro-illegal alien activist seems to provide revealing clues about just who was running the White House.
“There are profound reasons to suspect that Biden’s staff and
political allies exploited his mental decline to issue purported
presidential orders without his knowing approval,” Missouri Attorney
General Andrew Bailey wrote in an explosive March 4 letter to Justice
Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz.
“Bailey’s primary concern … is that, shortly before leaving office, Biden granted a great many pardons or commutations for violent criminals,” Liberty Nation News’s Graham Noble noted.
Conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation has reported that the autopen was ubiquitous in Biden’s White House. “We gathered every document we could find with Biden’s signature over the course of his presidency,” Heritage’s Oversight Project stated. “All used the same autopen signature except for the announcement that the former president was dropping out of the race last year.”
Road Map to a Biden Pardon?
Ravi Ragbir is not a violent criminal. But his pardon in the final moments of the Biden administration is a window into something far larger than himself. Ragbir is wholly plugged into a big-money machine funding radical social causes that critics have long contended wielded inordinate sway over Democrat policymaking during the Barack Obama and Joe Biden presidencies.
He was going to be deported because of his criminal past. “Ragbir, a US green card holder who moved from Trinidad, faced legal troubles after a 2001 mortgage fraud conviction,” The Gothamist reported in January. “His role as executive director of the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City brought him national attention, especially following [President Donald] Trump’s election in 2016. In 2018, his detention during an Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-in at the Federal Building in Lower Manhattan led to street protests, with 18 of his supporters arrested outside. “
More on that street agitation theater below. As we will see, it was far from organic.
Ragbir co-founded the New Sanctuary Coalition in 2007, one year
after an immigration judge had ordered that he be deported. “Ragbir has
been seeking ever since to vacate his felony conviction,” leftist media
outlet Religion News Service reported in January days before the
surprising Biden pardon was issued.
This was a priority to someone, but whom?
“Pardoning Mr. Ragbir sends an important message about the constitutional legitimacy of his advocacy and the illegitimacy of targeting immigrants like him based on their criticism of government policy,” Ramya Krishnan, senior staff attorney at the Knight Institute, gushed after hearing of the pardon.
The institute was directly involved in defending Ragbir as he faced deportation.
“In 2018, the Knight Institute, Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP), and the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center filed an amicus brief in support of Mr. Ragbir, arguing that the US government’s retaliation against him and other immigrant-rights activists violated the First Amendment,” the organization stated.
Who are they?
The Knight First Amendment Institute “was established in 2016 by Columbia University and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation,” its website states. The Knight Foundation, which dates to 1940, is yet another lavishly endowed philanthropy founded in the first half of the last century by wealthy conservative businessmen that has been hijacked and repurposed to serve a leftist cultural agenda today. The Ford Foundation, created by Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford’s son Edsel in 1936, and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, started by the devoutly Catholic founder of the Hilton hotel chain in 1944, are two classic examples.
As of the end of 2023, the Knight Foundation had assets totaling more than $2 billion. Ragbir had some powerful allies in his corner during his uphill fight to remain in America.
Among other donors to the Knight Institute are numerous familiar names in the world of high-dollar progressive “philanthropy,” including Arnold Ventures, the Ford Foundation, dark money activist network the Media Democracy Fund, the Omidyar Group (left-wing eBay founder Pierre Omidyar), and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
The New Sanctuary Coalition does not list any financial statements on its website, but a search of the Ford Foundation’s grant history shows it has donated at least $350,000 to the organization since 2018.
Bankrolling Street Protests
It is crucial to note that there is nothing grassroots about Ragbir’s work on behalf of illegal aliens. It’s all made possible by the leftist big-money spider web. City Journal in 2019 published an investigative report on New York taxpayer funding for leftist activist organizations that shows how it works.
The article featured a group called Make the Road New York, which “receives about $9 million annually,” author Seth Barron wrote. Make the Road Action in turn financially supported other leftist groups.
“New York Communities for Change, the successor organization to the disgraced Acorn, also receives money from Make the Road,” Barron related. Make the Road founders Andrew Friedman and Oona Chatterjee “spun off a larger national organization, the Center for Popular Democracy, which receives millions of dollars in donations from the Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, organized labor, and the Rockefeller Foundation – and which operates from the same street address as Make the Road Action, with which it shares overlapping leadership,” Barron stated.
When ICE took Ragbir into custody to be deported in 2018, “New York’s social-justice protest complex swung into action,” the article continued. “Make the Road [and other leftist groups] issued immediate calls for action, and protesters, including elected officials, caused a melee on lower Broadway, blocking emergency vehicles.”
This is the power structure driving the Democratic Party today. Could this be the hand that controlled the White House auto signature pen for four full years? Perhaps a cognitively impaired Joe Biden had no say in the matter at all.
Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.
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