All the president’s preemptive pardons
Biden’s pardon of his son has many very unusual characteristics. It’s one thing for a president to pardon his son – which is already unusual. It’s another to do it like this (the clip is about two minutes long):
The word “unprecedented” comes to mind.
And now there’s apparently talk of many more pardons of this preemptive type before Joe leaves the presidency or the symbolic presidency or the sham presidency or whatever you want to call it:
President Joe Biden’s senior aides are conducting a vigorous internal debate over whether to issue preemptive pardons to a range of current and former public officials who could be targeted with President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House, according to senior Democrats familiar with the discussions.
Biden’s aides are deeply concerned about a range of current and former officials who could find themselves facing inquiries and even indictments, a sense of alarm which has only accelerated since Trump last weekend announced the appointment of Kash Patel to lead the FBI. Patel has publicly vowed to pursue Trump’s critics.
The White House officials, however, are carefully weighing the extraordinary step of handing out blanket pardons to those who’ve committed no crimes, both because it could suggest impropriety, only fueling Trump’s criticisms, and because those offered preemptive pardons may reject them.
The deliberations touch on pardoning those currently in office, elected and appointed, as well as former officials who’ve angered Trump and his loyalists.
Those who could face exposure include such members of Congress’ Jan. 6 Committee as Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Trump has previously said Cheney “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” Also mentioned by Biden’s aides for a pardon is Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became a lightning rod for criticism from the right during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The West Wing deliberations have been organized by White House counsel Ed Siskel but include a range of other aides, including chief of staff Jeff Zients. The president himself, who was intensely focused on his son’s pardon, has not been brought into the broader pardon discussions yet, according to people familiar with the deliberations.
“Extraordinary step” all right. Hey, why not just issue pardons to any Democrat or NeverTrumper the DOJ might want to indict during Trump’s presidency? That should do the trick.
And it’s pretty rich that Biden, the so-called president who is the person with the power to issue federal pardons, “has not been brought into the broader pardon discussions yet.”
What a travesty.
But let’s go back in time to a moment in history when there was a great deal of discussion in the news about the issue or a president giving out preemptive pardons. That time was almost exactly four years ago, in the lame-duck period of Trump’s first administration. For example, we have this at NPR:
President Trump is being urged to use his remaining time in office to grant preemptive pardons to people close to him, including family members and maybe even himself. …
President-elect Joe Biden has said he’d let professionals within the Justice Department assess whether a case is merited against Trump, and that decision — which would be unprecedented — is one of the toughest facing the department in the new administration.
We all know now how the DOJ and Biden ended up deciding about that, and what the results were. Hubris, meet nemesis.
More:
In an email, Crouch, author of The Presidential Pardon Power, says that “someone must have committed a federal offense, but as soon as that happens, the president can grant them clemency. He does not need to wait until the alleged offender is charged, stands trial, and so on.”
Crouch continues: “These pardons are not common, but they do happen occasionally.”
Accordingly, Trump could “pardon his children, his aides, his supporters, and so on for federal offenses and be on firm legal ground,” Crouch says. “The really unclear scenario would be if he attempted to pardon himself.”
We also know that Trump did none of this – no preemptive pardons. The pardons he issued were for specific offenses and as far as I know they were limited to crimes for which people were already convicted and in many cases had served time – in other words, they were very conventional pardons despite all the speculation.
This article was also written back in the last days of Trump’s first administration, and it deals with the issue of the pardon for unspecified crimes:
But another source of possible constitutional defect for a presidential self-pardon would arise if it were granted before any charges had been brought against him and without specifying the conduct being pardoned. The same constitutional objections could be raised about such a preemptive pardon granted to anyone else.
The case for the effectiveness of a preemptive non-specific pardon usually relies on the precedent set by President Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon for any federal crimes he might have committed during his presidency. But the constitutional validity of the Nixon pardon was never tested: special prosecutor Leon Jaworski was urged to do so at the time and was later vague in his Watergate memoir about why he decided not to.
With a handful of other exceptions, notably George H.W. Bush’s Iran-Contra pardons and Trump’s recent pardon of Michael Flynn, pardons historically have not been granted to preempt a prosecution for crimes that have not even been identified much less charged.
That indicates that the Hunter pardon could be tested in court, if the author is correct. It’s one thing to issue a preemptive pardon for a certain crime or a certain line of conduct that hasn’t yet been charged in the legal sense, as long as it is specified. It’s another to do what Biden has done, or what his aides are described as contemplating that he will do before he leaves office.
I’ve never been a fan of the whole “preemptive pardon” concept. It strikes me as just far too broad a power.
Executive pardons in general are a sketchy thing. But then again, given the shameless, odious weaponization of the Justice system we’ve witnessed by one administration against its political enemies, pardons may be the only recourse for such activity. I wish it weren’t so, but the Democrat party (or at least the leadership of it) has become completely corrupt, disdainful of normal citizens, and addicted to lawfare.
I’d like to believe that Biden and/or his puppeteers wouldn’t truly be brazen enough to premptively pardon the likes of Anthony Fauci, but I know better. They just don’t care.
While I think preemptive pardons are a terrible and legally suspect idea, I’m not at all sure that they will make much difference. I don’t really care that much if Hunter Biden, John Brennan, or Anthony Fauci etc. go to prison. Yes I would like to see them pay a penalty for their crimes but what I really want is for their crimes to be known and explained to people over and over again.
I want there to be real hearings and investigations where these people will no longer have the corrupt and complicit government agencies protecting them. There is plenty of evidence that there really was (to paraphrase Hillary Clinton) a vast left-wing conspiracy to undermine President Trump. Everybody involved in the conspiracy should be exposed. The guilty parties can choose to perjure themselves by denying their crimes or they can admit their guilt and accept their pardons from their corrupt “leader”.
It was my understanding that you cannot accept a pardon without acknowledging guilt of your crime. Hunter has acknowledged his guilt, and a jury has found him guilty. The pardon had to come now because Hunter was due to be sentenced next week.
If Hunter had been sentenced to prison, then there would be no way to keep him safe unless he was in solitary confinement with the Secret Service guarding him 24/7. A prison sentence would have been a) costly to the taxpayers, and b) far in excess of what the usual sentence is for such an offense. Addicts are usually sent to rehab, and lying on a gun form usually results in probation. If everyone who lied about addiction on a gun form was sentenced to prison, then hundreds of new prisons would have to be built.
BJ:
The objections weren’t to Hunter getting a pardon per se.
They are to the following:
(1) The huge scope of the pardon.
(2) The fact that it also serves to protect Biden himself, by enlarging the scope in terms of time and including any federal offense even those he has not been charged with or admitted any guilt concerning.
(3) The reason Biden gave – that Hunter had been the target of selective prosecution with a political motive – is ridiculous because (a) the prosecution actually tried to give him a sweetheart plea deal and a similarly broad immunity, but only the judge stopped it from happening (b) Hunter was actually guilty of actual crimes, at least, and no convoluted reasoning was necessary in order to find grounds on which to charge him (c) Biden’s DOJ selectively prosecuted Trump; and (d) Biden and the Democrats had denied the DOJ was selectively prosecuting anyone, especially Trump.
(4) Biden had repeatedly promised not to pardon Hunter and that was cited as evidence of his great respect for the rule of law.
It will be interesting to see the reaction of Biden’s family, who are evidently actual accessories to his crimes, when White House flunkies start putting themselves in line for pardons ahead of them.
Maybe Joe’s only begun doing damage to the Party?! Maybe Obama himself underestimated Joe’s ability to F’ things up! I do hope so!
Nixon was pardoned to spare the country a trial of a former president. When you look at how things turned out for Britain and France when they put their kings on trial, it’s understandable. Jaworski most likely recognized the trauma that putting a president on trial who had already had to resign would put the country through, so he didn’t want to discuss the constitutionality of the pardon. Constitutional or not, it made it possible to put Watergate behind us and avoid political trials. Now we’ve already put a former president on trial several times and on flimsy grounds. The country has certainly changed a lot.
After this Hunter Biden pardon, there’s talk that Biden should pardon everyone who Trump has a grievance with, like Adam Schiff or Liz Cheney. I don’t think it will happen. Biden is going to look after himself and his family, and promiscuous use of the pardoning power would put all Biden’s pardons in the spotlight. But the chatter itself is indicative of how crazy Biden’s administration and Biden’s America have become.
You know… towards the tail end of the campaign we wondered if Joe was trying to torpedo Kamala. With all this pardon business…makes me ask, Is that range of “targets” getting expanded?
I see speculation that Biden will also probably be pardoning a number of the people who persecuted/betrayed Trump–Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, and others–and among those mentioned is the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley who, according to reports, was in contact with his counterparts in the Chinese military, telling them that he would inform them if President Trump would be taking any military action against China, * and who also reportedly interfered with President Trump’s control over nuclear weapons.**
Speculation is that if Milley isn’t pardoned, Trump will call him back to duty, then charge him with Treason, and have him court martialed.
I sure hope such a court martial happens, because it would certainly send a message to everyone currently in the military.
* See https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/us-politics/white-house-defends-top-general-amid-treason-allegations/news-story/48003a6a0575264eef59266ac7996722
** See also https://americanmilitarynews.com/2021/09/report-gen-milley-held-top-secret-meeting-to-block-trumps-access-to-nukes-told-staff-to-disobey-all-but-his-orders/
P.S. The first linked article contains some statements on this subject by Kash Patel.
Interesting that joke Bidet and the demonkrats are considering preemptive pardons.
Of course, no pardons would be necessary if Millie et. al., had not engaged in criminal / illegal / improper activities.
It also confirms that the demonkrats did indeed engage in illicit / illegal activities against their political enemies.
Given that Trump has at most 4 years – probably just two – to straighten out the mess in DC, I don’t think he should spend time on going after these demonkrat miscreants. However, if he had a full 8 years to clean up DC as well as the full support of republican congressional members (one could only hope), I would have welcomed him pursuing to the maximum extent of the law, sleaze bags like Millie, Shifty, et. al. and seeing them rot in prison
Instead of challenging Biden’s preemptive pardons Trump should preemptively pardon all of his people on day 1. Then Trump should draft everyone Biden pardoned and drop them off in an active warzone in Ukraine sine they started that war.
A pre-emptive pardon sure seems like Obstruction of Justice. But I’m not a lawyer,
Some legal commentators, including Alan Dershowitz and Andrew McCarthy, point out that Hunter Biden’s immunity now opens him to being called to testify on those matters without recourse to the 5th Amendment, against self-incrimination.
There are ongoing investigations of Biden family influence peddling, thus Hunter might be forced to testify against other members of his family, including Joe “Big Guy” Biden.
The night of January 19th, before Trump’s inauguration, might be a busy one for the Big Guy. Pardons don’t write themselves.
As the number of suggested candidates for pardons by Biden continues to grow, what this list–expanding daily–actually illustrates is, the breadth and depth of the conspiracy against Trump.
If all of these people were to be pardoned, it seems like barely sentient Biden would be spending his remaining days in office just signing pardons.
Grant enough of these pardons as you head for the door, and the stench of corruption/the stain on the Democrat party will be well nigh indelible, and impossible to shake.
Seems to me like a RICO prosecution against all of these people could be appropriate.