Democrats eager to jail Jan. 6 rioters once shielded radicals who bombed the U.S. Capitol in 1983

Attorney General Merrick Garland, who has boasted of arresting and convicting hundreds of people who rioted in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, signed off on dismissing the charges and quashing the arrest warrant for a woman accused of detonating a bomb near the Senate chamber in 1983.

Elizabeth A. Duke jumped bail nearly four decades ago and has never been captured and prosecuted for the Capitol bombing, nor has she faced charges in connection with the bombing of the Navy Yard and Fort McNair or a plot to bomb other federal buildings, among them the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House and the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Democrats helped Ms. Duke get her case tossed in 2009, and Mr. Garland later signed off on the move.

Democrats also helped free two other women, Susan Lisa Rosenberg and Linda Sue Evans. With Ms. Duke, they were left-wing terrorists associated with the Weather Underground and the May 19th Communist Organization. They were charged with involvement in bombing the Capitol and the other federal buildings.

Some of the people who worked to lessen their punishment are now pursuing one of the biggest federal prosecutions in history against the Jan. 6 rioters who pushed their way into the Capitol to protest the certification of Joseph R. Biden’s electoral win over President Trump.

Democrats also condemned Mr. Trump for vowing to pardon Jan. 6 rioters if he wins another White House term in November.

“In terms of the double standard, here’s an actual bombing of the Senate chamber,” said Paul Kamenar, counsel for the National Legal and Policy Center. “The Jan. 6 protest had some windows broken and things like that. But a bomb wasn’t set off.”

The bomb that prosecutors say the women helped detonate on Nov. 7, 1983, was planted a few feet from the Senate chamber and could have easily killed or injured senators and staff who planned to work late that evening debating spending bill amendments.

Senate leaders decided at the last minute that they no longer needed to work into the night because amendments had moved along at a pace that Senate Majority Leader Howard H. Baker Jr. called “little short of miraculous.”

Baker ordered the Senate to recess at 7:02 p.m., but a crowded reception near the Senate chamber was in full swing and didn’t end until around 9 p.m.

At 11 p.m., the bomb ripped apart the mahogany doors to Minority Leader Robert C. Byrd’s office and caused what government historians called a “potentially lethal hole” in a wall partition outside the Republican cloakroom, where lawmakers and staff would have been congregating if the Senate stayed in session as initially planned.

The blast showered the cloakroom with pulverized brick, plaster and glass and destroyed ornate mirrors, chandeliers and furniture. A historic portrait of Daniel Webster was blown to pieces.

The damage was estimated at $265,000 at the time, the equivalent of about $900,000 today. An anonymous caller said the bomb was detonated to protest U.S. military aggression in Lebanon and Grenada.

Five years later, in 1988, a grand jury indicted seven people in connection with the bombing. They included Ms. Rosenberg, Ms. Evans and Ms. Duke, a fugitive who skipped bail on separate explosives charges in Pennsylvania.

Ms. Rosenberg served 16 years of a 58-year term. Ms. Evans was freed after 16 years of her 40-year sentence. Ms. Rosenberg was never formally prosecuted for the bombing because she was already serving a lengthy prison sentence after being caught with 740 pounds of explosives, a submachine gun and other weapons that prosecutors said were intended for bombings and bank robberies to fund their cause.

Ms. Rosenberg and Ms. Evans had also been charged in a deadly Brinks truck robbery in New York, but Ms. Rosenberg was never prosecuted because of her lengthy ongoing prison sentence.

President Clinton granted the two women clemency in January 2001 on his last day in office and over the objections of prosecutors. Ms. Rosenberg’s commutation came at the urging of Rep. Jerrold Nadler, now the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.

In contrast with his help securing leniency for Ms. Rosenberg, Mr. Nadler has called for heavy punishment of the Jan. 6 protesters.

“It is critical that all of the perpetrators of this insurrectionist attack be identified, investigated, arrested, charged and subsequently prosecuted. The Department of Justice must dedicate every available resource to its offices across the country in order to ensure that all of these individuals are held accountable,” Mr. Nadler said in a letter to Mr. Garland three weeks after the Jan. 6 riot.

Mr. Nadler did not respond to a request for comment for this report.

Mr. Garland said the Jan. 6 case has become “one of the largest and most complex and resource-intensive investigations in our history.”

Under his direction, the Justice Department has spent millions of dollars tracking down those who set foot on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, charged more than 1,250 people and obtained more than 890 convictions in connection with the riot.

It’s not clear whether anyone in the Justice Department is trying to arrest Ms. Duke, now 83, over her alleged role in detonating a bomb near the Senate chamber four decades ago.

Although she was listed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, her indictment was quietly dismissed and her arrest warrant quashed in 2009 by a magistrate judge at the request of a federal prosecutor working under Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

A transcript shows the hearing lasted just a few minutes. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Beatrice did not offer a reason, at least on public record, for seeking the dismissal of the five-count indictment against Ms. Duke, who would have been in her 60s at the time.

Mr. Garland reviewed the dismissal of Ms. Duke’s case in 2014 when he was serving as chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

He tossed out a complaint by attorney Montgomery Blair Sibley that Magistrate Judge Deborah Robinson was never authorized to throw out the indictment. Magistrate judges can make recommendations for district court judges to dispose of cases but are not authorized to toss out indictments, he argued in his complaint to Mr. Garland.

Mr. Garland did not directly address the merits of his argument or the decision to throw out the indictment and arrest warrant for Ms. Duke.

Mr. Beatrice “never showed any good cause, he didn’t say any reason for it, and that was that,” Mr. Sibley said.

Judge Robinson, court records show, identified herself as a district court judge, not a magistrate, when she signed off on the order to throw out the indictment.

Although her indictment in the District of Columbia has been tossed out, Ms. Duke still faces charges from a 1985 arrest in Pennsylvania for unlawful storage and possession of firearms and explosives and for possessing counterfeit identification and Social Security cards.

An official at the Justice Department headquarters in Washington said the case was thrown out because of the charges in Pennsylvania.

“She remains a wanted fugitive,” said a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. “I’m not able to comment on investigative resources allotted to ongoing cases.”

Ms. Duke, Ms. Rosenberg and Ms. Evans were part of a radical political terrorist group that sought to use “armed propaganda” to force changes in federal policies.

The women and four others also were charged with bombing Fort McNair and the Navy Yard.

The group placed and detonated explosives at four locations in New York City, including the FBI’s Staten Island office, and plotted to bomb the Old Executive Office Building and the Naval Academy.

The group was caught with a cache of “rifles, shotguns, handguns, bulletproof vests, time-delay firing mechanisms into operable bombs,” Justice Department officials said in 1988 after the five-count indictment.

Ms. Rosenberg, Ms. Evans and Ms. Duke were also accused of involvement in the 1981 armed robbery of a Brinks truck that killed two police officers and a security guard.

Mr. Clinton commuted the sentences of Ms. Evans and Ms. Rosenberg without providing an explanation.

Dozens of the Jan. 6 defendants, meanwhile, remain in prison, and several face decades for their roles in the Capitol attack. The rioters violently pushed past police to gain entry into the building, injuring police and forcing terrified lawmakers in the House and Senate chambers to flee for safety. The melee caused about $2.7 million in damage to the building.

Police killed one protester, and several other deaths were connected to the riot, among them a stroke and four suicides by police officers.

The Justice Department aggressively prosecuted members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Officials said the two groups planned, incited and carried out the storming of the Capitol, vandalized the building and physically attacked police officers.

Mr. Garland has dedicated millions of dollars to tracking down Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other protesters who marched past barriers and onto the Capitol grounds that day or entered the building while police propped open the doors.

Pam Hemphill, a 70-year-old grandmother who has cancer, served 60 days in a federal prison in Dublin, California, for “unlawful” demonstrating in the Capitol and encouraging protesters to enter the building that day.

Rapper Antionne Brodnax was sentenced to five months in prison for walking into the Capitol on Jan. 6 and later taking a photo of himself smoking on a vehicle in front of the building. He used the photo as artwork for his album cover.

Another protester was sentenced to more than three years in prison for smoking marijuana in a senator’s office and later misbehaving in court.

A member of the Proud Boys received a five-year sentence for throwing a rock at the Capitol doors. Former Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, who was not at the Capitol on Jan. 6, was sentenced to 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy and other charges related to the riot.

More than two decades after her release from prison, Ms. Rosenberg is listed as an adjunct lecturer in women and gender studies at Hunter College in New York and describes herself as a human rights and prisoners rights advocate, communications consultant and public speaker. She denies involvement in the Capitol bombing and the Brinks robbery.

Ms. Evans has been an advocate for lesbian and female inmates’ rights.

On Nov. 9, 1983, two days after the explosion in the Capitol, senators resumed business and added an amendment to their spending bill to give the Justice Department $100,000 to track down the bombers.

Powered by up to seven sticks of dynamite, the bomb was hidden under a bench outside the chamber hours before the explosion and long before lawmakers, staff and visitors had left the area. The amateur explosive device sat unnoticed as a simple pocket watch timer ticked toward an 11 p.m. detonation.

’’It is indeed fortunate that the Senate was not in session last evening, as had been announced,” Senate Majority Leader Baker, Tennessee Republican, told The New York Times the day after the explosion. “Had we been in session at 11 o’clock, undoubtedly there would have been grave injury and perhaps loss of life.”

• Kerry Picket contributed to this report.