As President Biden leaves office, he's been exercising his presidential clemency powers.

Just this week, he commuted nearly 2,500 nonviolent drug offenders' sentences.

It was, he said, an important step toward writing historic wrongs.

He's also being asked to write what some people see as another historic wrong and exonerate Ethel Rosenberg.

She and her husband Julius were executed in 1953 after being convicted as Soviet spies in a

sensational atomic espionage case at the height of the Cold War Red Scare. While historians regard

Julius Rosenberg as a Soviet spy, his wife's role

has been debated for years, and a document declassified last year is seen as the strongest

evidence yet of her innocence. Robert Mirapal is the younger son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

He and his brother Michael have been working for decades to clear their

mother's name. Mr. Maripal, first of all, can you tell us about this document? What is it and what

does it say? Well, what's remarkable about this document is, first of all, who wrote it? That is

Meredith Gardner, who was the chief decryptor, considered to be the heroic spy catcher

who broke the Soviet codes, which led to the arrest of certain people.

Now, what he said in this memo about my mother was that she knew about her husband's work,

but due to ill health, did not engage in the work itself.

And earlier in the memo, he described her husband's work, that my father, Julius Rosenberg, as spying.

So what we have here is a definitive pronouncement by the chief decryptor at the time of my mother's arrest,

that she was not a spy. And what's remarkable about this document is it dovetails with earlier

work that Meredith Gardner did in decrypting what are called the Venona

transcriptions of Soviet spy cables in which it was noted that the KGB gave all of its agents

code names, but Ethel had no code name.

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