TruthSquad2016, a super PAC formed by a Seattle widow to oppose Mike Huckabee’s run for the Republican presidential nomination, went live with its website today on Wednesday, featuring links to articles in the The Seattle Times about Kim Renninger, whose husband was shot to death by an ex-con who had his sentence reduced by Huckabee.
“The person who got this ball rolling was Huckabee,” said Renninger. “I don’t have any other way to hold him accountable or make change. I can’t sue him. This is the way to do it.”
We wrote last June about Renninger and her work to hold Huckabee accountable for the 2009 murder of four policemen in Parkland, Wash., including Sgt. Mark Renninger, by Maurice Clemmons.
Clemmons served time in Arkansas on a number of felony charges, including breaking into a state trooper’s home and stealing a gun and other property. Huckabee commuted Clemmons’ sentence on May 3, 2000, after Clemmons had served only 10 years in prison, because he believed the sentence — 108 years — was unfair and racially biased. (Jailed as a juvenile, Clemmons had been charged as an adult because of a pattern of violence.)
Clemmons was released in July that year and then returned to prison in July 2001 for a robbery in Ouachita County. Sentenced to 10 years, he was paroled in March 2004.
Jonathan Martin, who writes about Kim Renninger’s pursuit on the TruthSquad2016 website and who has written a book about the killings, called Clemmons a “poor candidate for mercy” and an “abysmal prison inmate” and adds:
Renninger acknowledges that Huckabee was just a link in a chain of poor decisions that led to the shootings on Nov. 29, 2009, in that coffee shop. But it galls her that this part of Huckabee’s record has been mostly skipped by the media so far in favor of his defense of reality-TV star Josh Duggar.