Pawlenty wiped a serial child molester’s record clean in 2008

[Harry Hope]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/05/23/tim-pawlenty-wiped-a-serial-child-molesters-record-clean-in-2008/

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

Tim Pawlenty wiped a serial child molester’s record clean in 2008

By Kase Wickman

Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty formally announced his campaign
seeking the GOP nomination for the presidency Monday morning, but by
midday, his political past had already caught up to him.

Reporting by Minneapolis City Pages' Nick Pinto brought to attention a
pardon then-Gov. Pawlenty granted to a sex offender in October 2008,
which is sure to haunt the candidate throughout his campaign:

the man Pawlenty pardoned was later arrested again for molesting his
daughter more than 250 times in an eight-year span, including six
years prior to his pardon.

Jeremy Giefer served 45 days in prison in 1994 after being convicted
of statutory rape.

However, because he married the then-14-year-old girl and stuck around
to father the child they conceived together, he begged the state for
an extraordinary pardon, which would no longer require Giefer to
report himself as a sex offender.

The board — which includes the Minnesota attorney general, the chief
justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, and the governor (Pawlenty, at
the time) — voted unanimously to pardon Giefer.

The damning details came in November 2010, when Giefer was again
arrested on counts of sex with an underage girl — this time with the
daughter he had conceived with Susan before his first rape charge.

According to the complaint his daughter, identified in court documents
as C.G., filed, Griefer would often make her have sex with him or
perform oral sex on him as a favor before he would give her permission
to do things, and that he put her on birth control when she was 15
years old so that she wouldn't get pregnant when he raped her without
a condom.

The abuse started when she was 9 years old.

......................................................................................................

Pawlenty's fledgling presidential campaign has already seen drama,
when Benjamin Foster, a campaign consultant for Pawlenty, was arrested
for trespassing and public intoxication when he vomited in an Iowa
voter's yard and woke up the family's teenage daughter by banging on
the back door.

Another campaign staffer, campaign manager Nick Ayers, brings a boozy
whiff of controversy as well:

It's widely known that he was arrested for drunk driving in 2006.

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Harry