Former President Joe Biden commuted the life sentence of American Indian activist and convicted double murderer Leonard Peltier just minutes before leaving the White House Monday. Peltier was in federal prison for murdering FBI Special Agents Jack R. Coler and Ronald A. Williams on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation nearly 50 years ago.
Peltier, who is now 80 and suffering poor health, said “It’s finally over. I’m going home,” according to an advocacy group. Peltier is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Tribe in North Dakota.
Biden mentioned Peltier’s commutation briefly in a written statement explaining his commutation of two other officials. “I am also commuting the life sentence imposed on Leonard Peltier so that he serves the remainder of his sentence in home confinement,” the statement reads.
The FBI has long stressed Peltier’s guilt and fought hard against any parole or commutation of his life sentence.
“Over the last 45 years, no fewer than 22 federal judges have evaluated the evidence and considered Peltier’s legal arguments. Each has reached the same conclusion: Peltier’s claims are meritless, and his convictions and sentence must stand,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a 2024 letter opposing Peltier’s parole request.”
Wray resigned from the FBI on Monday the same day Biden left office. Biden is not the first president to be asked to release Peltier.
In June 2017, then-President Barrack Obama denied a clemency request for Peltier from Amnesty International USA’s executive director Margaret Huang, who said in a letter that Peltier has always maintained his innocence.
“The families of the FBI agents who were killed during the 1975 confrontation between the FBI and American Indian Movement (AIM) members have a right to justice, but justice will not be served by Peltier’s continued imprisonment,” Huang said in a 2017 press release.
Peltier interview
Twenty-five years ago, I was a young hard-news reporter at the Argus Leader, the Gannett-owned newspaper in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
I was contacted by local and regional FBI officials about a month before the 25th anniversary of Peltier’s crimes. To be clear, they wanted a story about the murder of their two special agents about as bad as they wanted Peltier to remain in custody. The Argus Leader covered Indian Country very well, so the FBI believed we would be a good choice to tell their story.
Senior FBI agents gave me copies of Peltier’s files, which included autopsy photos of the slain special agents, Ronald A. Williams, (no relation) and Jack R. Coler.
“We have been bad in the past about getting our message out,” Chip Burrus, then the FBI’s assistant special agent in charge of Indian Country, told me.
About a week after meeting with FBI officials I interviewed Peltier at the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. The FBI officials, I recall, weren’t too very happy about the interview.
I spoke to Peltier in a break room. He was seated next to a humming soda machine, which made it somewhat difficult to hear his answers.
The first thing that struck me was that Peltier was incredibly experienced at giving interviews. A correctional officer later told me he averaged one or two per week. A Japanese film crew had recently spoken to him for an in-depth project.
The second thing that I realized was that Peltier knew guns, and he knew them very well.
On June 26, 1975, Peltier said he was in an American Indian Movement (AIM) encampment known as Tent City, in the woods about three miles southeast of Oglala, South Dakota.
Tensions were high, Peltier said. He and his cohorts expected an assault from the tribal government, which had a well-armed paramilitary unit known as the Guardians Of the Oglala Nation, or GOONs.
“We had heard rumors of a possible GOON assault,” Peltier said. “We were aware of other threats. Tensions were high. I then heard bullets zinging and hit the ground.”
Taking up a surplus British .303 Lee-Enfield rifle and a 30-30 carbine, Peltier claimed he began shooting toward the source of the incoming rounds.
“When we first started receiving gunfire, I fired that way, but I didn’t see anybody. I never shot those agents,” he told me. “I was never shooting specifically at them.”
Of course, the FBI investigation revealed a different set of events.
Special Agents Williams and Coler were looking for a robbery suspect. They followed a red and white Chevrolet Suburban into a shallow depression, radioed that it had stopped, and immediately reported coming under fire.
“If you don’t get here quickly, we’re dead men,” Williams yelled into the radio. It was his last transmission.
At least seven rifles from three positions formed a deadly crossfire. A total of 125 bullet holes were found in the car.
Both agents were overcome by their wounds, but alive. Peltier walked 200 yards to where the agents lay, executing them with shots to the head from his AR-15.
Peltier denied ever having used the AR-15, but forensic experts said the fatal shots were fired from that weapon. Investigators found one shell casing in the trunk of Coler’s car that extractor tests proved came from Peltier’s AR-15.
Agents recovered 114 spent shells of .223 ammunition from that area. They concluded that the shells came from the same AR-15.
Peltier told me he never approached the wounded agents: Mister X did.
“I know I’ve said in the past who he is. I said it out of anger. I don’t know who it is, either Mr. X, Y or Z,” he claimed.
Peltier said he left the area on foot. “After we crossed a creek, we knelt down with a pipe and prayed. I saw the shadow of an eagle, heard the wings flapping, and followed him out of there,” he claimed.
The FBI and ultimately a jury disagreed.
“Peltier was one of three individuals who walked up to the wounded and helpless agents,” Special Agent Burrus told me. “He had the weapon (the AR-15), he was ID’d at the scene. The facts clearly indicate he’s good for the crime.”
The rifle was found three months later, in an RV that had been intentionally burned. The FBI claimed it matched the weapon that killed the two special agents.
In February 1976, Peltier was cornered by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and arrested.
One former FBI special agent told me Peltier’s story was “full of inconsistencies. First, he said he was never there. Then he said he was there. Then he said he was at Tent City. Then the stuff about Mr. X.”
Peltier told me his story hasn’t changed.
“I might tell it a little different but look at it. My story hasn’t changed,” Peltier said, nearly 25 years ago.
Takeaways
Peltier is now incarcerated at the federal prison in Sumterville, Florida. It’s expected his home confinement program will begin next month.
Biden has pardoned and lightened the sentences of hundreds of other criminals accused of serious crimes, but the FBI has said nothing and has taken no action. Only Peltier’s release from prison got the FBI to act officially.
Perhaps if the FBI and several other federal law enforcement agencies had done what’s right for the past four years rather than what made Biden and the White House staffers happy, things would be different.
Bottom line: Neither Special Agents Williams nor Coler should have been murdered. They were both good young men, and their killer should still be in prison. Despite what the FBI has become today, Joe Biden should never have allowed their murderer, Leonard Peltier, to walk out of a prison’s front gate, a free man.
Story courtesy of SAF’s Investigative Journalism Project.
I really want to believe the FBI is telling us the truth. But in the last fifteen years, they, along with the ATF, have lost all credibility. Who to believe?
“Peltier walked 200 yards to where the agents lay, executing them with shots to the head from his AR-15.” – Based on whose testimony? Did they have a medium contact the deceased FBI agents via Ouiji board to ID their killer?
The testimony of forensic scientists based up on the collected evidence, read the article again.
Both agents were finished off by near contact shots to the head from an AR15 and the initial volley of fire that injured them was from 35 to 40 yards away. Peltier had an outstanding warrant for shooting a Milwaukee police officer with the same rifle the FBI agents were killed with. Nearly every shot into the agents car came from the same AR15. The car had 125 bullet holes in it and 115 of them were from a 223. The agents got off a total of 5 shots I believe.
Says who. The FBI?
Photographic evidence presented at trial says that. The crime scene was pretty easy to understand. There was only one small bore rifle used in all of the shooting. Yhe rest were 30 cals.
“Extractor test” – which requires the use of freshly unwrapped Ouija board and a bag of chicken bones. What a load of BS. “Extractor test” piled even higher than “firing pin test” or “rifling examination”. Nothing “scientific: about any of these. Just more FBI BS/snowjob.
No pelitier admitted to killing them..
honest injun.
If the guy is 80 and in poor health, he can’t be much of a threat anymore. That doesn’t speak to the issue of whether justice was served by this, but compared to others the Biden admin has either let out or illegally imported…
Only a drooling, senile Alzheimer’s nitwit would think that taking someone from a prison in Florida and sending him back home to a reservation outside of Tumbleweed Junction, North Dakota is doing the poor bastard any favors.
The fbi are criminals. Who cares.
Today all of them above about a gs13 level are but the brick agents are not. Back then the FBI was pretty above board especially the brick agents.
I don’t consent to paying for it. they are all criminals. anyone who supports victimless crimes is absolute scum
It’s amazing how many people supported the property value case against Trump, a case where the bank basically said Trump was a great customer. I would say those people are too far gone, but propaganda still works.
A tech billionaire who voted for the Puppet in 2020 said he only recently found out that Trump saying Nazis were very fine people was a lie. The Puppet was still pushing that 2017 lie seven years later with no media push back!
In 1975 Hoover would have been dead for only about 3 years. Hoover was not above board, and had a reputation for blackmailing people and using FBI agents for his own personal ends.
And today there are police officers and their leadership who are corrupt but the majority are not. the same can be said about the FBI under J Edgar Hoover. Only a small minority wede directed by him to do things that we believe are unethical today. Personally I think the FBI should be dissolved because they don’t really serve a purpose and they have contained political goons since their Inception.
If you’re a cop and never take a tarnished dime, but cover for those who do, you’re still crooked. They problem is that too many otherwise straight cops cover for the crooked ones.
Carry out illegal or immoral orders then you are guilty. There is no such thing as “just carrying out orders” exemption.
My mother was a simple woman. She would have said “two wrongs don’t make a right”.
If the FBI is dysfunctional to the point of being unsalvageable (which I think it is), then it should be ended. And the incompetent participants should have their incompetence (or evil, if it goes that far) put on full display in broad daylight, and in full view of the public.
Not revenge. Justice. And assurance that the same people who did this to us won’t have a chance to do it again.
The left ALWAYS takes care of the left, no matter the crime or the years. Peltier is a murderer, plain and simple.
What’s plain and simple is that Red Lives Matter
– oops, I mean A.I.M., would have certainly benefitted from Soros sponsorship, and Peltier would have walked away as a hero.
Just 50 years too early
The Puppet went out of his way there at the end to really virtue signal for minorities. He’s hoping it will help his garbage legacy.
Proof, again, that BiDUMB has no brain and that he holds no respect for American Citizens. He was only trying to make POTUS Trump’s job harder from the onset of his new administration.
Ann Coulter wrote about the FBI COINTELPRO program. How it was used to break up the Klu Klux Klan. As well as the Black Panther party for self-defense. She also demonstrated that Sen Joe Mccarthy was correct, about communist infiltration into the US government.
The FBI has chased and caught real criminals and spies.
FBI had many informants at the J6 protest. I wonder what they were doing???
The FBI now has lost its moral compass. I’d like to defund them. But like all police agencies. We will always have the police. The only question is in what form will that police take???
Government prosecutors, lawyers, and judges, are just as corrupt the cops.
But they don’t get the attention from libertarians liberals and leftists.
Thank God for the founders and the second amendment.
The second Amendment is nothing but words.
The pen is only mightier then the sword when its stuck deep in an eye socket.
This is exactly why Trump’s pardons are 100% legitimate. The rules of the game have changed. If the left isn’t going to play by the rules anymore then the suicidal for anyone else to play by them. Trump is truly unleashed now and I’m so glad to see it. Now the left can tremble at our pardons.
I’m also in favor of defunding the FBI. But like Chris above, I worry that this will not fix the problem, which is that we have people without souls serving in LEO roles. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the FBI, or whatever 3-letter agency ends up replacing it. And we probably always will have some. Or many.
And we have no idea how to prevent that.
We need to much more morality in police departments. That is something the h.o;mo”se:xu;als and at:h.ei;sts don’t want to talk about.
And morality has very little to do with sexual activities.
“And morality has very little to do with sexual activities.”
If a man has low morals in one area, he will have low morals in other areas.
George Armstrong Custer for President.
Biden’s Unforgivable Betrayal Of FBI Heroes.
h ttps://townhall.com/columnists/johnnantz/2025/01/25/bidens-unforgivable-betrayal-of-fbi-heroes-n2651122
Can’t shed a tear for a fed.
“We have been bad in the past about getting our message out,” So the FBI has a “messaging” problem? Restate of anyone that says “messaging” is that need to do a more convincing job of LYING