Minnesota’s Biggest Paper Cheers Tim Walz For Pardoning Child Rapist, Says He Was Justified Because of Jan 6

A man who raped a 10-year-old child repeatedly is now back in his native Laos — no thanks to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who had pardoned the man who had a removal order due to his criminal history.

It took intervention from Secretary of State Marco Rubio to get the man’s legal status revoked after the pardon.

But the biggest paper in Minnesota, the Minnesota Star Tribune, is hailing Gov. Walz’s decision. Their reason to allow a child rapist to walk the streets of Minnesota when it could be deported? The events of Jan. 6, 2021, of course.

One does have to applaud the folks at the Star Tribune for ingenuity, if here unleashed in a manner that is profoundly sick. Tou Lue Vang, the man in question, told investigators he raped the girl in question because in his society, this was considered normal. In fact, he told police this was “a mistake,” but “a minor thing,” and he didn’t mean the victim’s age. Apparently, child rape was little more severe than a fender-bender in his mind.

The fact that he didn’t receive a removal order until earlier this year should have been an outrage in and of itself, but what happened next was why we’re still discussing this. In the intervening years, the convicted child rapist (who ended up just spending eight months in confinement at a county facility despite receiving a 12-year state prison sentence initially) has built a life in the United States, with children of his own.

This was effectively the reason behind the decision to pardon him, which received a 4-2 vote from the Minnesota Clemency Review Commission and a unanimous decision to pardon from Walz, Democrat state Attorney General Keith Ellison, and state Supreme Court Chief Justice Natalie Hudson, a Walz appointee.

“The victim supports this pardon. His [Vang’s] wife stayed and has forgiven. He also [has] immigration concerns. He has remorse and was discharged from probation,” said the head of the Minnesota Clemency Review Commission in her decision.

President Donald Trump’s administration was wholly unmoved, and Rubio terminated the sex abuser’s legal status and deported him.

“Under President Trump, criminal illegal aliens who rape children will be found, arrested, and removed — and Democrat politicians will not stand in the way,” a White House statement read.

Walz fumed after Vang’s removal.

“Did that make us any safer? Did that make the children that are left behind any more stable?” Walz said at a media briefing.

“Did it improve the idea that we can’t all be judged by our worst day? And I want to be very clear,” Walz added, “These are horrific crimes. They often are.”

The answer to all those rhetorical questions, by the way, is yes: We have one less child rapist in our country, that child rapist is not in the same country as his children are, and we often have to be judged by our worst actions, because it shows what we are capable of. (Walz seems to have left out the fact that he was being judged for his worst days, since this happened repeatedly.)

This lame-duck move to help a sex offender dodge expulsion from the country should have been universally unpopular, but it found at least one defender in the Minnesota Star Tribune newsroom. From their “Cheers and Jeers” section on Friday, attributed to Rochelle Olson but assumedly passing through the hands of some editor who still didn’t find this outrage distasteful