Republican senators turned Democrats' chief witness into a liability Thursday, grilling former Biden administration pardon attorney Elizabeth Oyer over her November 2024 memorandum recommending clemency for all 40 federal death row inmates, including the Charleston church killer, the Boston Marathon bomber, and the Tree of Life synagogue shooter.
The exchange, during the second day of Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings for acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, produced some of the sharpest moments of the session. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri bore down on a detail from Oyer's own 73-page memo: she had acknowledged that Dylann Roof was "not a compelling candidate for clemency", then recommended it anyway, citing his anxiety.
Democrats had called Oyer as their star witness to argue that Blanche's firing of her in March 2025 was politically motivated and that he was unfit to lead the Justice Department. Instead, Republicans used the hearing to expose what they described as a breathtaking failure of judgment, a senior DOJ official who wrote a sweeping clemency recommendation for mass murderers while devoting just three paragraphs of a 73-page document to the grievances of victims' families.
Hawley zeroed in on the two cases most likely to test any jury's patience: Roof, who murdered nine Black parishioners during a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.
On Roof, Hawley confronted Oyer directly:
"You said that actually Roof is not a compelling candidate for clemency, but you recommended it anyway. Why? Because he suffered from anxiety."
He then asked whether she had considered the families left behind:
"Did it ever occur to you that maybe the family of his victims might suffer a little bit of anxiety because he marched into their church and murdered them in cold blood, because he was an incredible racist and he wanted to get on TV?"
Hawley turned next to Bowers. A jury had recommended the death sentence. Oyer recommended overriding it.
"This guy killed people just because they're Jews. A jury recommended that he be sentenced to death, and you substituted your judgment for theirs, and now he's going to live. Are you proud of that?"
Oyer pushed back, telling the committee she took her role seriously. "Sir, what I am proud of is the fact that I took my job as pardon attorney extremely seriously," she said. She added that every inmate whose sentence was commuted would remain behind bars for life, most likely in maximum-security facilities.
Hawley was unmoved. "I think your judgment is astoundingly terrible," he told her. "I'm amazed that this side of the aisle has called you."
Sen. Eric Schmitt, also of Missouri, picked up where Hawley left off, but shifted the focus to a DOJ report examining Oyer's memorandum. That report found that her 73-page clemency recommendation dedicated only three paragraphs to the concerns of victims' families.
Three paragraphs. Out of seventy-three pages. For the families of people slaughtered in churches, synagogues, and homes.
Schmitt did not hold back:
"You have no credibility to talk about Todd Blanche. You have none. You've come here, you deny basic facts. You recommended the commutation of murderers. You gave no quarter at all or any time to the victims of these brutal murders. So, again, I can't believe you've been called here by the other side. But I'm glad we've had an opportunity to expose your hypocrisy."
Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley pressed a simpler question, one Oyer could not, or would not, answer. Did she contact any of the victims' families before recommending clemency? Grassley asked repeatedly. Oyer declined to say yes or no, invoking executive privilege surrounding presidential clemency deliberations.
"You can't even tell me if you contacted the victim's family? You can't say yes or no to that?" Grassley asked. The question hung in the hearing room. The Senate's confirmation calendar is already compressed as lawmakers race toward the August recess, and the exchange underscored how much political weight Democrats had placed on a witness now struggling to defend her own record.
Grassley also raised the case of Jorge Avila-Torrez, a federal death row inmate whose crimes were among the most disturbing on the list. Avila-Torrez was sentenced to death for multiple murders, including the stabbing deaths of two young girls in Illinois, the killing of Navy Petty Officer Amanda Snell, and the rape and murder of a University of Maryland graduate student.
Oyer recommended clemency for him, too. All 40 inmates received the same recommendation. No exceptions.
In December 2024, President Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 federal death row inmates. He rejected Oyer's recommendation for three: Roof, Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Bowers. Even Biden, who had embraced the broadest use of clemency power in modern presidential history, drew a line that his own pardon attorney would not.
Oyer did not come to Capitol Hill simply to absorb criticism. In her opening testimony, she accused the Trump Justice Department of institutional corruption, telling the committee: "At the end of the day, the priority of this DOJ is protecting powerful men, even when it comes at the expense of vulnerable women."
She cited Blanche's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files and the transfer of Ghislaine Maxwell to a lower-security prison as reasons the acting attorney general should not be confirmed. Blanche has previously faced Senate questioning on the Maxwell matter.
Oyer has also argued that her March 2025 firing was politically motivated, that she was terminated after advising against restoring gun rights for Mel Gibson, described as President Trump's special envoy to Hollywood. AP News reported that Oyer testified she was fired after refusing to recommend restoration of Gibson's gun rights following a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction. The Justice Department has denied that her firing was politically motivated.
Oyer also told a previous congressional hearing that armed deputy marshals were sent to her home the night before her testimony, delivering a letter warning her against testifying. "The letter was a warning to me about the risks of testifying here today," she said at the time. "But I am here because I will not be bullied into concealing the ongoing corruption and abuse of power at the Department of Justice."
Those are serious claims. But they were not the subject of Thursday's hearing. And they did not answer the questions Republicans were asking, about her judgment, about the victims, and about the three paragraphs.
Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey offered a starkly different assessment. He praised Oyer and condemned his Republican colleagues' questioning:
"I just want to start off by saying, Miss Oyer, I hold you in the highest esteem and respect, especially what you're doing now as a private citizen. You use a platform to educate people about the law. It is technical, but yet accessible. And the badgering you just endured, it should be completely unacceptable. You were asked to comment on things you didn't have before you. The treatment here, to me, is just outrageous. And I apologize on behalf of the United States Senate."
Booker's intervention captured the partisan divide cleanly. Democrats see Oyer as a whistleblower targeted for speaking truth to power. Republicans see a bureaucrat who recommended mercy for mass murderers and could not explain why her 73-page memo barely mentioned the people they left behind.
Jennifer Bos, the mother of Megan Bos, was present in the hearing room. Fox News reported that she dried tears while speaking during the second day of the hearing. The article did not specify which case connected her daughter to the proceedings, but her presence served as a reminder of the human cost that Oyer's memo treated as a footnote.
The confirmation fight over Todd Blanche has already drawn opposition from multiple angles, including from within the Republican caucus. But Thursday's hearing shifted the spotlight from the nominee to the witness Democrats chose to make their case against him, and that witness left the stand with her credibility in worse shape than when she arrived.
The most damaging moment was not any single exchange. It was the accumulation. Oyer wrote a 73-page memo recommending clemency for every federal death row inmate. She acknowledged in her own document that Roof was not a compelling candidate. She recommended it anyway. A DOJ report found she gave three paragraphs, three, to victims' families. And when Grassley asked the simplest question of the day, did you call the families?, she would not say.
Executive privilege is a legitimate legal shield. But invoking it to avoid answering whether you picked up the phone before recommending mercy for a man who murdered nine people in a church is not a legal argument. It is a political one. And it tells the families everything they need to know about where they ranked in the calculation.
Democrats brought Oyer to Capitol Hill to undermine Todd Blanche. What they got was a confirmation hearing that exposed their own witness, a pardon attorney who recommended leniency for the worst criminals in the federal system and could not explain, under oath, whether she ever consulted the people those criminals destroyed.
When you write seventy-three pages about why killers deserve mercy and can't spare more than three paragraphs for the dead, you've told the country exactly whose side you were on.
