Posted on Tuesday, January 21, 2025
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by Outside Contributor
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52 Comments
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The pardon power is one of the more sweeping powers granted to the president by the Constitution, and on Monday, two presidents demonstrated why it remains among the most controversial.
We will deal with President Trump’s January 6 pardons in a separate editorial. As for Joe Biden’s last-minute pardons, they did not reek any less for being utterly predictable.
The former president set the works in motion last month with the shameful pardon of his son. Hunter Biden had been the point man in the decades-long Biden family business of selling access to his father and his political influence to agents of corrupt and anti-American foreign regimes, including the Chinese Communist Party. He had been found guilty on federal firearms charges (by a jury) and tax charges (on a guilty plea), and was facing the likelihood of a significant prison sentence. This was only after the Biden Justice Department labored mightily to make the criminal investigations of the younger Biden disappear.
Although the former president and his White House staff indignantly insisted that Hunter would not be pardoned, Hunter’s litigation strategy — admit nothing, resist normal plea negotiations — made sense only if he knew all along he was going to be pardoned. And, of course, he was, right before sentencing proceedings that would have branded him a convicted felon were set to commence.
Still, while the pardon solved Hunter’s criminal-liability problem, it created a separate vulnerability: The immunity from prosecution extinguished Hunter’s Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. As a result, Hunter could be forced to testify against other participants if an enterprising prosecutor in the incoming Trump Justice Department decided to probe the Biden family scheme — which a House investigation found generated an astonishing $27 million, transferred through intermediaries into bank accounts of various Biden family members.
This is why our own Andy McCarthy has so consistently warned that the logic of Hunter’s pardon dictated that there would be additional corrupt pardons — the kind a president makes only when walking out the Oval Office door for the last time, no longer concerned about appearances and political accountability.
Sure enough, in the last minutes before heading off to Donald Trump’s inauguration, Biden pardoned his siblings: brothers Jim (Hunter’s chief partner in the family biz) and Francis, and sister Valerie, along with Jim’s and Valerie’s spouses. Without a hint of irony, the former president, whose Justice Department hounded Trump for four years, claimed he was acting to protect his kin from partisan weaponization of the Justice Department.
Realizing how the Hunter pardon tainted his legacy, Biden transparently attempted to minimize its significance with a mountain of clemency grants. These included disgraceful commutations of 37 death row inmates (while leaving in place the three capital cases brought and defended by the Obama and Biden administrations), and thousands of sentencing reductions that are another abuse of the pardon power.
And then there are the preemptive pardons of public officials. Biden granted clemency to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who drove controversial Covid policy and potentially obfuscated the pandemic’s origin; retired Army General Mark Milley, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who crossed swords with Trump following the Capitol riot; and the members and staff of the House January 6 Committee, which was deeply hostile to Trump and issued a scathing report recommending that he be charged with felonies (which the Biden DOJ special counsel proceeded to do).
There was no need for such pardons. No matter what one thinks of these officials, their actions in carrying out their official duties are immune from prosecution. But knowing he was going to pardon other family members just as he pardoned Hunter, Biden must have calculated that granting clemency to public officials would help pretty up his other self-serving pardons.
History will not be kind to Joe Biden — not to his family’s monetization of the power of his offices of public trust, and not to his historic abuse of the pardon power.
Reprinted with permission from the National Review.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
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