Dennis Spaulding’s baby was two days old when Spaulding became a federal felon. He was later sentenced to five years in prison and missed the first years of his daughter’s life.
But Spaulding never sold drugs. He never stole a dime. He never seriously hurt anyone. He was a decorated and well-respected police officer.
President Obama’s Justice Department targeted him out of ideological animus.
Now President Trump, who plans to pardon 250 worthy individuals for America’s 250th birthday, should put Spaulding and his fellow East Haven Police Department officers – John Miller, David Cari, and Jason Zullo – at the top of that list.
They deserve to have their names cleared. And America’s police officers deserve a clear signal that the political persecution of cops is over.
Enforcing the law fairly and legally should not put an officer in the Justice Department’s crosshairs. But that is exactly what happened to the East Haven Four.
During the Obama administration, these four cops from East Haven, a sleepy Connecticut town of 30,000 people, were pulled into a national civil-rights crusade over illegal immigration.
East Haven officers had found that more than 1,000 vehicles were operating with fraudulent out-of-state plates. Many were connected to a Pennsylvania scheme that sold plates and tags to illegal immigrants and unlicensed drivers for roughly $1,500 apiece. After uncovering a sprawling and dangerous $2 million fraud, the officers made hundreds of arrests and pursued criminal cases – most of which resulted in convictions.
When officers seized roughly 80 suspicious plates from a local bodega in 2010, an immigrant-rights activist and priest arrived with a video camera and interfered with the police investigation. Soon activists, Ivy League lawyers, and the Obama Justice Department descended on the small town.
Investigations by the police department’s internal affairs division, the state of Connecticut, and the FBI followed. Each failed to substantiate the explosive claim that the officers were motivated by racial bias.
That did not matter to Obama’s DOJ, which was determined to make an example of officers accused of targeting innocent immigrants as the administration pushed for mass amnesty in Congress.
Tom Perez, Obama’s handpicked head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, treated the criminals like victims and the cops like criminals.
The FBI even sent an undercover unit with “Hispanic-looking” agents to drive around East Haven and see whether officers would stop them. The agents followed traffic laws and used legal tags. They were not stopped once, despite weeks of surveillance.
Yet even after the FBI could not substantiate DOJ’s allegations of racial animus, Perez pursued the case anyway.
Perez wanted a federal consent decree over the police department to impose Washington’s preferred policing policies. When the town resisted, the Justice Department brought the hammer down. It singled out four officers for supposed civil-rights transgressions.
The officers’ alleged offenses were minor. The convictions and sentences were not.
Sgt. Miller went to prison for poking an unruly and intoxicated suspect in the chest. Officer Zullo failed to report that his cruiser had touched a suspect’s motorcycle during a chase. No one was injured and there was no damage. He still got two years.
Cari, a decorated officer who had been wounded in the line of duty, received 30 months.
Spaulding, an eight-year police veteran, received the harshest sentence: five years. He served three. His apparent offense was not merely the conduct alleged by prosecutors, but his refusal to admit guilt after repeatedly being cleared of wrongdoing in other investigations.
While the officers’ lives were destroyed, Perez’s political star kept rising. He became Obama’s secretary of labor, then chairman of the Democratic National Committee during Trump’s first term. He later ran for governor of Maryland as a progressive. Most recently, Perez joined the Biden White House as an adviser on the border crisis it was facilitating.
Perez’s actions amounted to a vindictive act of political weaponization against ideological enemies. They ruined the lives of four family men who had dedicated themselves to protecting their community.
No one is above the law. But officials like Perez bent the law to fit their agenda, not justice.
Now President Trump has the power to rectify this miscarriage of justice and uphold the rule of law.
A pardon cannot undo all the harm caused by this political persecution. It cannot restore the years these men lost, the careers destroyed, or the childhood moments they missed.
But it can redeem them in the eyes of the law. It can correct the record. And it can restore the good names of good men who never should have been made federal felons in the first place.
Trump should pardon the East Haven Four – not as an act of mercy, but as an act of justice.
