Pardon are US
Now that Biden has pardoned his son, Hunter, there is a move underfoot to pardon all the potential targets of Trump's vindictive wrath. There are about 60 people who may benefit, including Jack Smith, Marrack Garland, Elizabeth Cheney. Nancy Palosi--you know, the usual suspects.
About the only one that cannot be pardoned by Biden, is Biden himself. No president has issued one for himself. It is said Ford had made a secret deal with Richard Nixon to pardon him after he resigned. I do not think that has ever been proven.
Up till now, a pardon issued by a president can never be revoked. The question is, though, will Trump try to revoke the pardons of his potential targets, should they be issued.
Turning this around a bit. Trump has said he will pardon all those who were involved in the January 6, 2021 insurrection, plus all his other conspirators in other alleged crimes.
I can see this spiraling out of control at the end of every administration. Biden does it now, Trump does it later, next President writes everything off at the end of his/her/their administration.
More information here: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/04/biden-white-house-pardons-00192610
Should the line be crossed. What say you?
About the only one that cannot be pardoned by Biden, is Biden himself. No president has issued one for himself. It is said Ford had made a secret deal with Richard Nixon to pardon him after he resigned. I do not think that has ever been proven.
Up till now, a pardon issued by a president can never be revoked. The question is, though, will Trump try to revoke the pardons of his potential targets, should they be issued.
Turning this around a bit. Trump has said he will pardon all those who were involved in the January 6, 2021 insurrection, plus all his other conspirators in other alleged crimes.
I can see this spiraling out of control at the end of every administration. Biden does it now, Trump does it later, next President writes everything off at the end of his/her/their administration.
More information here: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/04/biden-white-house-pardons-00192610
Should the line be crossed. What say you?
Comments
The whole "Trump does it later" ignores the fact that Donald Trump has already done it. He pardoned Roger Stone so Stone could be out of jail and helping organize January 6. He also pardoned Steve Bannon, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, and a whole bevy of his own alleged co-conspirators on his way out the door. If the idea is that Biden granting a bunch of pardons to people that Trump has explicitly said he intends abuse his power to persecute is going to set off some out of control spiral it seems like yet another example of something only being a problem when Democrats do it.
Has Donald Trump been president* before? Views apparently differ.
I don't care in the least that he's pardoned his son, and I'd be fine with pre-emptive pardons for anyone in Trump's sights. Dollars to doughnuts all those folks will endure investigations anyway.
I think it would be better for Biden to do nothing.
What I recall was that, in 2016, Trump was shouting "Lock her up!" against Clinton...only to immediately lose interest in even trying once he got elected--because he never really gave a damn about Clinton. He just wanted some issue with legs to get him elected.
Now, admittedly, we are dealing with a Trump who has been investigated and indicted and convicted, so maybe he will be more interested in pursuing vengeance. But it is possible that was just another schtick to get elected and that he is far more interested in getting his indictments dropped and convictions thrown out than in investigating anybody else.
Basically, Trump says he wants vengeance, and he wants to investigate and imprison his political foes...and because Trump says it, I automatically assume it is all a lie. I suppose it is possible that he was telling the truth for once, but I'd rather see that proven first than to assume (contrary to evidence) that he is capable of telling the truth.
Adam Schiff agrees with you, and doesn't want to be pardoned in advance: "I would urge the president not to do that. I think it would seem defensive and unnecessary."
No politician does everything they say they're going to do, but Trump did do plenty of the things he said he would the first time he was in office. Here's a scorecard on key promises. He kept some of them: nominated someone for SCOTUS from his list; renegotiated NAFTA; raised tariffs; moved the US embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; pulled the US out of the Paris climate agreement.
I'm sure Biden doesn't give a flying f--- about what anyone might think of his pardoning his son or anyone else, or of any pre-emptive pardons he might issue. Why should he? Especially when you consider who you-know-who has promised to pardon as soon as he has the power to do so.
Biden should do everything in his power to thwart the spiteful, vindictive plans of you-know-who. If Adam Schiff doesn't want to accept a pardon, that's his business.
Dr Fauci is also a target apparently but that also looks like an issue for a Washington court.
A couple of things here. First, the FBI director serves a statutory 10 year term and theoretically should only be fired for cause. This was put into place to help promote the FBI's theoretical political neutrality after the abused of the Hoover years. (J. Edgar, not Herbert.) Christopher Wray, the current FBI director, is not due to leave his position until 2027. Of course Wray is only in his current job because Trump fired James Comey and installed Wray. I would hope that Trump's eventual nominee for Attorney General gets grilled extensively on the independence of the FBI and whether Wray has done anything to merit dismissal.
Anyway, one of the paths Biden could take in issuing a bunch of pardons that would short circuit good faith claims of partisanship (though I'm not sure any such claims would be made in good faith) would be to simply pardon everyone on Kash Patel's extensive enemies list except for Biden himself. There are a lot of Republicans on that list, many of them Trump appointees who locked horns with Patel during the previous Trump administration*.
Which line?
Did Republicans cross any lines in their prosecution of Hunter Biden?
This doesn't even get the song right.
My son is not a criminal.
Do I think he attracted more attention because he's the president's son than he would have attracted had he been some random scuzzy corrupt corporate nonentity? Yes. Do I care about that? Not all that much.
Do I care about President Biden pardoning him? I can't say I'm all that surprised. I think it's wrong, although I can sympathize.
You shouldn't use your political power to benefit your family.
That said, I think the case is a little different if you reasonably believe that your political power may make your family a target for your political enemies.
Trump pardoned his son-in-law’s father (Charles Kushner).
So what line exactly did Biden cross that eliminated the line?
And what line exactly did Biden cross that was a bigger deal than Ford’s pardon of Nixon?
If Hunter was being fitted up for crimes he didn't commit then pardoning him would be fair enough. The thing is that Hunter seems to have actually committed crimes, and is being allowed to get away with them.
People use power of all kinds to benefit their families all the time. It would be weird if they didn't.
Years ago I went to traffic school after getting a ticket for a moving violation, back when traffic school took a whole day in person. It was led by a police officer, who late in the afternoon talked about when someone would and would not get a ticket if pulled over by a traffic cop. He called on people, asking, "If a cop observed a clear moving violation and pulled the driver over and it turned out to be their mom/friend/cousin [different example for each person], would the cop give them a ticket?" Each person dutifully said yes. After going through this ritual question and answer four or five times, he laughed and poked fun at each of them, saying of course a cop wouldn't give a ticket to any of these people.
You seem to have misspelled "honest".
Politicians, police officers and the like are entrusted with powers in order to serve the public good - not so they can be corrupt nepotistic scuzzballs.
Re: his federal tax charges, he pleaded guilty. That's not getting away with them, that's accepting responsibility for them. Punishment is an altogether different issue.
Do family members of public servants relinquish any aspect of their citizenship when someone related to them is elected to office?
Does the manner in which a person's wrongdoing is prosecuted matter?
We have always held distinctions between the person and the office of the President. Your claim is that the person -- the father -- Joe Biden, pardoned his son. I submit the POTUS pardoned a son.
As I noted elsewhere the Hunter Biden prosecution was pretty clearly a politically motivated abuse of prosecutorial discretion. You can find the details at the link in my other post, but the tl;dr version is that Hunter was convicted of crimes that are almost never prosecuted and also never carry a prison sentence for first time offenders without the kind of extenuating circumstances that don’t exist in this case.
The first charge was tax evasion. In cases like this, where the accused is a first time offender who has already paid his back taxes and late penalties and fines before the trial starts a prosecution is almost never brought. It certainly doesn’t result in a custodial sentence. Should the U.S. be tougher on tax evaders? Probably. Should that toughness begin and end with Hunter Biden? Definitely not.
The other offense is lying about being a drug addict on an application to buy a firearm. This is usually a sentence enhancer, only prosecuted when the addict uses the gun he bought in another, separate crime. I’ve never heard of it being prosecuted as a stand-alone offense. (The GOP finally found a white man they don’t think should own a gun.)
So given all this and given that one of the purposes of the presidential pardon power is to correct miscarriages of justice, I’d say this is an example of using the pardon power for its intended purpose. It was the right thing to do regardless of whether the person involved was the president’s son.
The relevant question is whether a pardon would be appropriate if the facts were the same except that the person being pardoned didn’t have the surname “Biden.” For the reasons @Crœsos has laid out, it seems clear to me that a pardon would be appropriate for anyone else in a similar position.
The thing that bothers me about this kind of pardon is the concept of a pardon for all crimes known and unknown over a period of time. It seems problematic from a rule-of-law perspective, whether the beneficiary was Nixon or Hunter Biden. That said I have no idea what the US courts have said about this as a matter of constitutional interpretation.
I’m also a little doubtful that pardoning dozens of people in this way as some have suggested is actually going to have the practical effect of insulating them from persecution if Trump really does decide to repurpose the FBI and Justice department as a tool for persecuting his enemies. If the validity of this kind of pardon is at all arguable then I think we can assume that the Trump administration would operate on the basis that they are invalid until and unless the Supreme Court tells him otherwise. And looking at the question in the abstract (as opposed to the weird upside down world we’re now going to be living in) I’m not 100% sure it’s a good thing if the Supreme Court does tell him otherwise.
How many police officers are honest?
Turns out my mom's ex-husband became a state police officer. He once pulled us over because my father was speeding. When he came to the window of the car and saw Mom sitting on the passenger side, he turned around radioed for another patrol car to assist. The ex-husband did not give a ticket, but the other patrolman did.
Accepting some kind of office where the public entrusts you with power includes an implicit (and often explicit) promise to exercise that power fairly and equitably in service of the public good.
Special privilege (quite literally) for your relatives is the opposite of that.
Again, the relevant question is whether a pardon would be appropriate if the facts were the same except that the person being pardoned didn’t have the surname “Biden.” And again, for the reasons @Crœsos has laid out, it seems clear to me that a pardon would be appropriate for anyone else in a similar position.
So what you seem to be arguing is that because Hunter Biden happens to be the president’s son, it’s inappropriate to give him a pardon that would be appropriate for anyone else in a similar position. And that despite the fact that if he weren’t the president’s son, he wouldn’t be in a position to be pardoned to start with; the case never would have gone as far as trial, conviction and a prison sentence if his last name wasn’t Biden.
Most of them but I don't have any stats.
Well, I'm a white man, so almost certainly.
But if you mean "because I am specifically me, as opposed to being some other generic white man with my skills and background", then I don't think so.
I can’t think of anything more significant than that though.
I don't think so. But I had a summer holiday job when I was a student which was excellently paid for minimum effort. After a couple of weeks I starting asking around as to the point of the job. I was told it had been created for someone's daughter, who had decided she wanted to do something else with her summer. The person then had a choice between admitting it wasn't actually a job, or doubling down and employing a random student. I had done a one week genuine work experience there, and was contacted and offered work for the summer.
The press release describes this clemency grant as "the most ever in a single day". My guess is that this is the most ever in a single day for specific, named individuals. Carter's grant of clemency to all Vietnam-era draft evaders probably affected more people, but they were listed as a class rather than specifically by name.
Interesting development on some of the "attention" Hunter Biden attracted by being Joe Biden's son.
Given the willingness of various factions within federal law enforcement to credulously accept false evidence against Hunter Biden from any grifter with an agenda, a blanket pardon seems prudent.
Made a lot of sense to me.