Virginia Democrats and Loudoun County’s George Soros-backed prosecutor are lashing out at Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) over his Sunday pardon of Scott Smith, whose daughter was raped in school and who the prosecutor, Buta Biberaj, personally sought to put in jail.
Biberaj said Youngkin’s pardon “is an unprecedented and inappropriate intervention into an active legal case,” and said he was taking action “not for justice but for political gain.” Scott Surovell, the vice chairman of the Democrat Senate Caucus, said Youngkin’s pardon was an abandonment of “law and order” intended to “help his failing presidential ambitions.”
Smith was set to face his second trial this month for the crime of cursing at a leftist activist who said she didn’t believe his daughter was raped. Smith was arrested after a police officer grabbed him from behind as he was exchanging words with activist Jackie Schworm, leading to a televised tussle with police. But the resisting arrest charge was thrown out, meaning Smith was being prosecuted solely for an angry exchange of words.
Gov. Youngkin is once again using Loudoun County for his political gain. My full statement below. pic.twitter.com/fPYEksC93T
— Buta Biberaj (@ButaBiberaj) September 10, 2023
Despite Smith having committed no apparent crime, police apprehended him from behind, saying his body language suggested that it might escalate. They bloodied him and kneeled on his chest as he shouted, “I can’t breathe.”
Youngkin’s pardon stated that his office determined Smith committed no crime, and called into question the “integrity of the prosecution.”
State Delegate Candi Mundon King, a black Democrat representing Stafford and Prince William Counties, said on X: “Didn’t law enforcement make these charges… Guess he doesn’t ‘Back the blue’ as much as we thought.”
Biberaj ran on a platform lamenting “overincarceration” and has refused to prosecute many misdemeanors. Democrats, claiming to want to stop people from being arrested for minor crimes in schools, even passed a law that “Eliminates the requirement that school principals report to law enforcement certain enumerated acts that may constitute a misdemeanor offense.”
When it came to a parent whose lived experience posed a threat to Democrats’ effort to pass a transgender bathroom policy, however, Biberaj personally took Smith’s case and sought jail time. He was denied a jury because it was a misdemeanor, and he was convicted. A judge threw out the resisting arrest charge after Smith appealed, and threw Biberaj off the case for apparent conflict of interest.
But the government kept fighting Smith, forcing him to head towards a second trial for disorderly conduct. A judge was brought out of retirement from neighboring, deep-blue Fairfax County who ruled that under the “peculiar” language of Virginia’s disorderly conduct statute, Smith arguably committed disorderly conduct by cursing at Schworm because it could “incite” her to violence—even though that interpretation would seemingly mean the leftist activist was guilty of the same crime.
What kind of sick freak objects to pardoning a dad being charged for confronting the school board that covered up the anal rape of his daughter??? https://t.co/IRy5SYiz9r
— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) September 11, 2023
Judge Howe Brown, who was brought out of retirement from deep-blue Fairfax County to hear the case, suggested Smith might have deserved to be assaulted for calling the activist Schworm a “b—,” saying, “I think it incites her to violence. I think he was lucky he didn’t get slapped.”
Smith told The Daily Wire this week that Schworm had just spoken with his daughter, who was in line to speak into a megaphone, before making a beeline over to him to say she didn’t believe her story and that she would destroy his plumbing business by attacking it on social media.
“It’s obvious” that Schworm — a member of a Facebook group called “Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun” alongside Biberaj, and whose members plotted to destroy anyone who posed an obstacle to the transgender agenda in schools — intended to prevent the daughter from telling her story to the world, Smith said.
Her efforts were initially successful, with Smith’s arrest being used by the Department of Justice and media organizations to paint conservatives as a threat to school boards. The reason for his anger at the school board was unknown until The Daily Wire revealed it five months later, after the rapist attacked a second girl. The rapist was later convicted, but was not placed on the registered sex offender list because of an error by Biberaj.
Smith told The Daily Wire the pardon was necessary because there was no assurance of justice “anywhere in counties that are run by radical prosecutors.”