The White House. 24 minutes ago. Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called reporters to the Briefing Room a short time ago to announce that President Donald J. Trump had issued another celebrity-championed posthumous pardon. Today's recipient was Mary Surratt, executed on July 7, 1865, for her role in the conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln.
Sanders informed reporters that the fading former film great B. B. Blackridge, once known for his role as an enforcer in B movies based on comic book characters but of late a long time between films, had personally met with the president in the Oval Office to present the case for pardoning the first woman executed by the federal government. Blackridge laid out the case for pardoning Surratt, noting that witnesses against her were unreliable, that the trial took place in a military court rather than the civil one she was entitled to, and that the execution was carried out within a week of sentencing.
Trump announced the pardon in a tweet. "A truly great boarding-house operator," Trump wrote of Surratt, adding that "many thought her execution was simply a backlash of anger over the death of the president. She would never have been convicted in a federal court with a jury of her peers. And she was given insufficient time to appeal the erroneous sentence of death. Yes, she was a Confederate sympathizer, but so were half the people in the country."
"The government treated her badly," Trump concluded.
Descendants of Mrs. Surratt could not be reached for comment, but the leftist mainstream media immediately conjectured that this was simply a precedent for pardoning his fellow conspirators in the Russian interference in the 2016 election.
