Earlier Wednesday, President Obama commuted sentences for 61 drug offenders.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest was later asked about it. “[A] number of the commutation recipients had gun possession charges on their record. Was that troubling to the president, in search of nonviolent offenders?”
Earnest replied, “The president and his team review individual cases individually. And, so they’re looking at these individual cases to determine how appropriate it is to offer them some clemency. What’s important about these cases is that many of them are low-level drug offenders. And many of them, had they been sentenced under the rules that are in place today, would have already served out their sentence. And that’s what made them particularly strong candidates to receive this kind of clemency from the commander in chief.”
He did not address the question about guns.
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