Updated – President 2012: Tim Pawlenty Has Serial Child Molester Pardon Problems

Looks like it is back to Romney folks.

Jeremy Giefer served time in jail in 1994 for having sex with a 14-year-old girl. But you wouldn’t know it to look at the record of the man now charged with sexually molesting his daughter more than 250 times over the last eight years.

That’s because two years ago, Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Attorney General Lori Swanson, and then-Chief Justice Eric Magnuson unanimously voted to wipe Giefer’s record clean, granting him a pardon extraordinary.

Read it all…..

Next candidate.

And, there is more.

Pawlenty’s pardon problem involves Jeremy Geifer, who had been convicted in a statutory rape case involving a 14-year-old girl he later married. Geifer had been described by everyone in his life as a model of reform, which eventually led to a 2008 pardon by a three-person board led by Pawlenty.

But late last year, Geifer was accused of sexually assaulting another underage girl more than 250 times. Pawlenty moved swiftly, asking for a probe into whether Geifer lied on his pardon application and pushing to close down a day care run by his wife.

While finishing his term as Minnesota’s governor last year, Pawlenty said he never would have made that decision had such information been known at the time. And he pointed out that Geifer had finished his prison stint well before the pardon was granted – a mitigating factor that could lessen any of his rivals’ blows.

Yet there is also the case of Dru Sjodin, a college student who was murdered in 2003, early in Pawlenty’s administration, by a repeat sex offender who had only recently been released from prison. That case became national cable TV fodder, as the tragic search for the pretty blonde gripped viewers.

A Pawlenty aide referred to the governor’s book, “Courage to Stand,” in which he wrote that people played politics with the case and often had the facts wrong, and that Pawlenty was “horrified” by the man’s release.

The governor later proposed stiffer sentences for sex offenders, including doubling their jail time.

I can see Mitt Romney’s direct mail and television spots now against T-Paw, if he ever becomes an electoral threat.