A pregnant woman was shot dead in a parking lot, and the incident has become a focal point for Republican Governor Joe Lombardo’s campaign. Lombardo’s campaign and allied PACs have been targeting Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford for sponsoring a pardon hearing application for Norman Smith. Smith was initially charged with murder with a deadly weapon in the death of Tineshea Adams in 2015. According to the Review-Journal’s coverage of the case, the scene involved what the police report described as ‘multiple people,’ and Smith’s attorney, assisted by surveillance video, argued during Smith’s trial that the gunshot that killed Adams was unintentional. Smith was ultimately convicted of voluntary manslaughter.
By the time he was convicted in 2018, Smith was already incarcerated for convictions connected to his participation with a half dozen other people in a spree of robberies and assaults earlier in 2015 (again according to the R-J). Now that Lombardo’s campaign and its organizational PACs and allies are focusing so much attention on the matter, Smith’s multiple sentences have helped create competing interpretations of which sentences were up for pardoning. KLAS took a good swing at trying to unpack the details: Ford’s office contends the pardon was about the robbery charges, not the manslaughter conviction. Smith’s attorney argued in the parole application that Smith had already served the minimum 8 years on the manslaughter sentence. The Department of Corrections disagrees.
There’s a lot going on, you see, and the matter isn’t as plain and simple as Lombardo’s campaign and its allies want voters to think. That said, Ford’s explanations have been opaque, which is not a preferred behavior from a politician but an exceedingly common one. Meanwhile, it would be nice – refreshing, even – to believe Lombardo and his campaign affiliates are sincerely upset by Ford signing an application for a state board to hear an argument for a pardon. Alas, the relish of their enthusiasm for the issue casts doubt on the genuineness of their disapprobation.
An ad by the Lombardo-supporting Better Nevada PAC, evidently an organization that is not shy about racist tropes, hammers Ford on the pardon issue by running pictures of Black men in scary poses and a voiceover of what sounds like a white suburban mom saying things like ‘gruesomely gunned down’ and ‘gang member’ and ‘siding with criminals.’
Familiarity with ads nationwide would be required to guess which Republican race-baiting campaign ad will win the 2026 election cycle’s Willie Horton sweepstakes, but the entry by the pro-Lombardo PAC must be a strong contender. And running ads like that is a lot easier than defending Trump’s economy. But might we all take a moment to process that what we have here is Joe Lombardo, a defender of and apologist for Donald Trump, urging people to be outraged over the prospect of a convicted criminal getting a pardon?
The star of Lombardo’s 2022 campaign for governor was the one he wore on his sheriff’s uniform in illegal campaign ads. Brave, strong, straight-shootin’ lawman of the West is Lombardo’s assiduously cultivated political brand. Trump indiscriminately pardoned 1,600 people who stormed the Capitol, including those who had been convicted of violent crimes against Lombardo’s fellow law enforcement professionals (more than 140 of whom were injured in the insurrection and five of whom would end up dead). Asked at the time about Trump’s pardons of the January 6 rioters, Lombardo failed to respond. Web searching reveals no evidence that the former sheriff has muttered a public peep about those reckless and disgusting pardons ever since. Nor is there a readily available trace of Lombardo commenting on any of Trump’s multiple pardons of violent drug traffickers.
