Uh, Trump obviously is being allowed to be above the law and over half the nation voted to clear his way…
What’s the thought? Let those obviously lying have it their way while they get away with whatever they want up to and including attempting to overthrow the government ???
A pundit who personifies the ridiculousness of the handwringing.
Democrats with half a brain should denounce this Biden move and call for a constitutional amendment placing checks on the pardon power which has been abused, over and over and over again by presidents of both parties. https://t.co/EbNnWiKrUQ
Not commenting on Biden's decision but I once posted that I wasn't a fan of the whole Presidential pardon thing. Even the timing of it, as a President leaves office. I think we could live without it. I recall there was disagreement with my sentiment.
NEW: White House press briefings have been suspended for several days.
I guess Karine Jean-Pierre is off the hook for the time being, avoiding questions about why she lied so many times about Biden not pardoning his son. pic.twitter.com/tr1zNTvmOz
The interesting thing about this pardon is that it covers a long period of time starting in 2014 (the year of the Ukraine coup). Biden is not just pardoning Hunter, he is pardoning himself.
The interesting thing about this pardon is that it covers a long period of time starting in 2014 (the year of the Ukraine coup). Biden is not just pardoning Hunter, he is pardoning himself.
Why? Did Biden also make a "perfect phone call" threatening to withhold arms?
I was surprised to learn Biden only used the pardon 26 times in his term.
Trump: 144 over one term.
Obama: 212 over two terms.
This makes Trump the Pardoner-in-Chief before even being sworn in for his second term.
Biden most certainly isn't done yet.
Sure. However, he can only pardon those found guilty of something. The Senate should get Jack Smith a judgeship though. The guy was just doing his job, but Trump is a vindictive man child.
The interesting thing about this pardon is that it covers a long period of time starting in 2014 (the year of the Ukraine coup). Biden is not just pardoning Hunter, he is pardoning himself.
Nan, have you even listened to this? These morons are couching their charges in phrases like "things Biden has perhaps done and perhaps not." I guess they heard about what happened to Murdoch and InfoWars. F them and all interviewers who are making charges and backing off: I'm only asking the question.
I wouldn't sit on any sofas in the White House if you know what I mean.
It was for 10 years because of statute of limitations issues knowing that TFG would direct the entirety of the DOJ to harass his kid. Don’t blame him a bit
It was for 10 years because of statute of limitations issues knowing that TFG would direct the entirety of the DOJ to harass his kid. Don’t blame him a bit
The interesting thing about this pardon is that it covers a long period of time starting in 2014 (the year of the Ukraine coup). Biden is not just pardoning Hunter, he is pardoning himself.
Nan, have you even listened to this? These morons are couching their charges in phrases like "things Biden has perhaps done and perhaps not." I guess they heard about what happened to Murdoch and InfoWars. F them and all interviewers who are making charges and backing off: I'm only asking the question.
I wouldn't sit on any sofas in the White House if you know what I mean.
Of course I listened and I thought it was an interesting discussion. They are careful about what they say because that's what good news analysts do.
What they discussed:
Talked about the pardon in terms of legal and history.
How the coup in Ukraine is related to this. Biden was Obama's point man in Ukraine.
Hunter got employment with Burisma after the coup. They did speculate about Hunter being an "energy expert" which is just one of Hunter's many talents (along with being and artist, a Realtor, a chemist, etc. the guy is a Renaissance man.
Reviewed an article in Politico, titled "We Haven't seen a Pardon as Sweeping as Hunter Biden's in Generations." This relates to how Hunter has only been arrested and charged with two offences and this indicates many more unresearched.
Mentioned Jonathon Turley and others (listed) about Hunter's activities referred to "The Big Guy" which was Joe.
Joe pardons Hunter, but really pardon's himself, about things which have lots of evidence but have not been brought yet.
Talked about actions taken by the Democrats and how that might effect legal activities in the future.
Hunter on boards and Joe in office provided protection against oligarchs in Ukraine. What will happen now?
There will be internal political struggles of the oligarchs in Ukraine.
How does this pardon relate to the war in Ukraine? Biden has given the long-range missile strikes and is trying to give billions more to Ukraine. What does this say? They want continued silence.
They are closing the books on Ukraine. They doing pay-offs on a failed project that they are walking away from.
Talk about negotiations is not going to go anywhere--this is going to be a fall of Saigon situation.
The truth will eventually come out but it might be many years - up to 300!
Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.
I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.
“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.
Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as FBI director. Last year, when it appeared that Hunter Biden was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve his legal troubles, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later collapsed.)
“As a former federal public defender and national security prosecutor, this case has singularly done more damage to the institution of justice than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Patel said at the time.
Trump will not be able to undo the pardon when he takes office. And its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department will not be able to reopen the long-running criminal probe of the president’s son, according to Samuel Morison, a lawyer focused on clemency who spent 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
Like Love, Morison said the only comparably broad pardon he could think of was the one that went to Nixon.
“It is an extraordinarily broad grant,” he said.
While the sweeping nature of the Hunter Biden pardon is almost without peer in modern American history, in another respect it does mimic a recent precedent started by Trump himself.
In Trump’s first term, he sometimes justified pardons of his political allies by saying they were the victims of unfair prosecution — a posture that broke norms. Past presidents, Morison said, had not generally claimed that pardon recipients were victims of miscarriages of justice; instead, they tended to emphasize that pardon recipients had accepted responsibility for their actions.
“It is to maintain trust in the criminal justice system,” Morison added.
But Trump deviated from that norm — and on Sunday, Joe Biden followed. He justified the pardon by saying his son had been unfairly “singled out.”
“I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice,” the president said in a statement that accompanied the pardon.
Trump, for his part, is expected to harness the pardon power aggressively when he returns to office. Most notably, he has promised to pardon many of the people convicted for their roles in the attack on the Capitol of Jan. 6, 2021. In criticizing the Hunter Biden pardon on Sunday night, Trump again invoked Jan. 6 defendants, calling them “hostages.”
Morison said Trump will likely cite the Hunter Biden pardon when defending his own pardoning decisions.
“It justifies what Trump wants to do,” he said. “Now, he was going to do it anyway. But it gives him some political cover. I think some January 6 pardons are probably coming — at least some, maybe all.”
Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.
I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.
“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.
Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as FBI director. Last year, when it appeared that Hunter Biden was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve his legal troubles, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later collapsed.)
“As a former federal public defender and national security prosecutor, this case has singularly done more damage to the institution of justice than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Patel said at the time.
Trump will not be able to undo the pardon when he takes office. And its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department will not be able to reopen the long-running criminal probe of the president’s son, according to Samuel Morison, a lawyer focused on clemency who spent 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
Like Love, Morison said the only comparably broad pardon he could think of was the one that went to Nixon.
“It is an extraordinarily broad grant,” he said.
While the sweeping nature of the Hunter Biden pardon is almost without peer in modern American history, in another respect it does mimic a recent precedent started by Trump himself.
In Trump’s first term, he sometimes justified pardons of his political allies by saying they were the victims of unfair prosecution — a posture that broke norms. Past presidents, Morison said, had not generally claimed that pardon recipients were victims of miscarriages of justice; instead, they tended to emphasize that pardon recipients had accepted responsibility for their actions.
“It is to maintain trust in the criminal justice system,” Morison added.
But Trump deviated from that norm — and on Sunday, Joe Biden followed. He justified the pardon by saying his son had been unfairly “singled out.”
“I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice,” the president said in a statement that accompanied the pardon.
Trump, for his part, is expected to harness the pardon power aggressively when he returns to office. Most notably, he has promised to pardon many of the people convicted for their roles in the attack on the Capitol of Jan. 6, 2021. In criticizing the Hunter Biden pardon on Sunday night, Trump again invoked Jan. 6 defendants, calling them “hostages.”
Morison said Trump will likely cite the Hunter Biden pardon when defending his own pardoning decisions.
“It justifies what Trump wants to do,” he said. “Now, he was going to do it anyway. But it gives him some political cover. I think some January 6 pardons are probably coming — at least some, maybe all.”
Here is the Politico article that was discussed in the Duran video. They have not seen a pardon like this since Richard Nixon's.
We haven’t seen a pardon as sweeping as Hunter Biden’s in generations
The “full and unconditional” pardon is aimed at protecting the president’s son from future prosecution by the Trump Justice Department.
Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.
I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.
“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.
Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as FBI director. Last year, when it appeared that Hunter Biden was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve his legal troubles, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later collapsed.)
“As a former federal public defender and national security prosecutor, this case has singularly done more damage to the institution of justice than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Patel said at the time.
Trump will not be able to undo the pardon when he takes office. And its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department will not be able to reopen the long-running criminal probe of the president’s son, according to Samuel Morison, a lawyer focused on clemency who spent 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
Like Love, Morison said the only comparably broad pardon he could think of was the one that went to Nixon.
“It is an extraordinarily broad grant,” he said.
While the sweeping nature of the Hunter Biden pardon is almost without peer in modern American history, in another respect it does mimic a recent precedent started by Trump himself.
In Trump’s first term, he sometimes justified pardons of his political allies by saying they were the victims of unfair prosecution — a posture that broke norms. Past presidents, Morison said, had not generally claimed that pardon recipients were victims of miscarriages of justice; instead, they tended to emphasize that pardon recipients had accepted responsibility for their actions.
“It is to maintain trust in the criminal justice system,” Morison added.
But Trump deviated from that norm — and on Sunday, Joe Biden followed. He justified the pardon by saying his son had been unfairly “singled out.”
“I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice,” the president said in a statement that accompanied the pardon.
Trump, for his part, is expected to harness the pardon power aggressively when he returns to office. Most notably, he has promised to pardon many of the people convicted for their roles in the attack on the Capitol of Jan. 6, 2021. In criticizing the Hunter Biden pardon on Sunday night, Trump again invoked Jan. 6 defendants, calling them “hostages.”
Morison said Trump will likely cite the Hunter Biden pardon when defending his own pardoning decisions.
“It justifies what Trump wants to do,” he said. “Now, he was going to do it anyway. But it gives him some political cover. I think some January 6 pardons are probably coming — at least some, maybe all.”
Click to Read More
Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s.
Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.
I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.
“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.
Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as FBI director. Last year, when it appeared that Hunter Biden was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve his legal troubles, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later collapsed.)
“As a former federal public defender and national security prosecutor, this case has singularly done more damage to the institution of justice than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Patel said at the time.
Trump will not be able to undo the pardon when he takes office. And its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department will not be able to reopen the long-running criminal probe of the president’s son, according to Samuel Morison, a lawyer focused on clemency who spent 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
Like Love, Morison said the only comparably broad pardon he could think of was the one that went to Nixon.
“It is an extraordinarily broad grant,” he said.
While the sweeping nature of the Hunter Biden pardon is almost without peer in modern American history, in another respect it does mimic a recent precedent started by Trump himself.
In Trump’s first term, he sometimes justified pardons of his political allies by saying they were the victims of unfair prosecution — a posture that broke norms. Past presidents, Morison said, had not generally claimed that pardon recipients were victims of miscarriages of justice; instead, they tended to emphasize that pardon recipients had accepted responsibility for their actions.
“It is to maintain trust in the criminal justice system,” Morison added.
But Trump deviated from that norm — and on Sunday, Joe Biden followed. He justified the pardon by saying his son had been unfairly “singled out.”
“I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice,” the president said in a statement that accompanied the pardon.
Trump, for his part, is expected to harness the pardon power aggressively when he returns to office. Most notably, he has promised to pardon many of the people convicted for their roles in the attack on the Capitol of Jan. 6, 2021. In criticizing the Hunter Biden pardon on Sunday night, Trump again invoked Jan. 6 defendants, calling them “hostages.”
Morison said Trump will likely cite the Hunter Biden pardon when defending his own pardoning decisions.
“It justifies what Trump wants to do,” he said. “Now, he was going to do it anyway. But it gives him some political cover. I think some January 6 pardons are probably coming — at least some, maybe all.”
I'm sorry, was Hunter Biden in elected office? Here's what I think. Republicans were waging A PROXY WAR against Biden who (don't you know?) STOLE THE ELECTION. Please.
Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.
I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.
“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.
Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as FBI director. Last year, when it appeared that Hunter Biden was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve his legal troubles, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later collapsed.)
“As a former federal public defender and national security prosecutor, this case has singularly done more damage to the institution of justice than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Patel said at the time.
Trump will not be able to undo the pardon when he takes office. And its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department will not be able to reopen the long-running criminal probe of the president’s son, according to Samuel Morison, a lawyer focused on clemency who spent 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
Like Love, Morison said the only comparably broad pardon he could think of was the one that went to Nixon.
“It is an extraordinarily broad grant,” he said.
While the sweeping nature of the Hunter Biden pardon is almost without peer in modern American history, in another respect it does mimic a recent precedent started by Trump himself.
In Trump’s first term, he sometimes justified pardons of his political allies by saying they were the victims of unfair prosecution — a posture that broke norms. Past presidents, Morison said, had not generally claimed that pardon recipients were victims of miscarriages of justice; instead, they tended to emphasize that pardon recipients had accepted responsibility for their actions.
“It is to maintain trust in the criminal justice system,” Morison added.
But Trump deviated from that norm — and on Sunday, Joe Biden followed. He justified the pardon by saying his son had been unfairly “singled out.”
“I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice,” the president said in a statement that accompanied the pardon.
Trump, for his part, is expected to harness the pardon power aggressively when he returns to office. Most notably, he has promised to pardon many of the people convicted for their roles in the attack on the Capitol of Jan. 6, 2021. In criticizing the Hunter Biden pardon on Sunday night, Trump again invoked Jan. 6 defendants, calling them “hostages.”
Morison said Trump will likely cite the Hunter Biden pardon when defending his own pardoning decisions.
“It justifies what Trump wants to do,” he said. “Now, he was going to do it anyway. But it gives him some political cover. I think some January 6 pardons are probably coming — at least some, maybe all.”
Here is the Politico article that was discussed in the Duran video. They have not seen a pardon like this since Richard Nixon's.
We haven’t seen a pardon as sweeping as Hunter Biden’s in generations
The “full and unconditional” pardon is aimed at protecting the president’s son from future prosecution by the Trump Justice Department.
Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.
I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.
“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.
Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as FBI director. Last year, when it appeared that Hunter Biden was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve his legal troubles, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later collapsed.)
“As a former federal public defender and national security prosecutor, this case has singularly done more damage to the institution of justice than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Patel said at the time.
Trump will not be able to undo the pardon when he takes office. And its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department will not be able to reopen the long-running criminal probe of the president’s son, according to Samuel Morison, a lawyer focused on clemency who spent 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
Like Love, Morison said the only comparably broad pardon he could think of was the one that went to Nixon.
“It is an extraordinarily broad grant,” he said.
While the sweeping nature of the Hunter Biden pardon is almost without peer in modern American history, in another respect it does mimic a recent precedent started by Trump himself.
In Trump’s first term, he sometimes justified pardons of his political allies by saying they were the victims of unfair prosecution — a posture that broke norms. Past presidents, Morison said, had not generally claimed that pardon recipients were victims of miscarriages of justice; instead, they tended to emphasize that pardon recipients had accepted responsibility for their actions.
“It is to maintain trust in the criminal justice system,” Morison added.
But Trump deviated from that norm — and on Sunday, Joe Biden followed. He justified the pardon by saying his son had been unfairly “singled out.”
“I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice,” the president said in a statement that accompanied the pardon.
Trump, for his part, is expected to harness the pardon power aggressively when he returns to office. Most notably, he has promised to pardon many of the people convicted for their roles in the attack on the Capitol of Jan. 6, 2021. In criticizing the Hunter Biden pardon on Sunday night, Trump again invoked Jan. 6 defendants, calling them “hostages.”
Morison said Trump will likely cite the Hunter Biden pardon when defending his own pardoning decisions.
“It justifies what Trump wants to do,” he said. “Now, he was going to do it anyway. But it gives him some political cover. I think some January 6 pardons are probably coming — at least some, maybe all.”
Click to Read More
Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s.
Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.
I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.
“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.
Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as FBI director. Last year, when it appeared that Hunter Biden was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve his legal troubles, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later collapsed.)
“As a former federal public defender and national security prosecutor, this case has singularly done more damage to the institution of justice than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Patel said at the time.
Trump will not be able to undo the pardon when he takes office. And its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department will not be able to reopen the long-running criminal probe of the president’s son, according to Samuel Morison, a lawyer focused on clemency who spent 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
Like Love, Morison said the only comparably broad pardon he could think of was the one that went to Nixon.
“It is an extraordinarily broad grant,” he said.
While the sweeping nature of the Hunter Biden pardon is almost without peer in modern American history, in another respect it does mimic a recent precedent started by Trump himself.
In Trump’s first term, he sometimes justified pardons of his political allies by saying they were the victims of unfair prosecution — a posture that broke norms. Past presidents, Morison said, had not generally claimed that pardon recipients were victims of miscarriages of justice; instead, they tended to emphasize that pardon recipients had accepted responsibility for their actions.
“It is to maintain trust in the criminal justice system,” Morison added.
But Trump deviated from that norm — and on Sunday, Joe Biden followed. He justified the pardon by saying his son had been unfairly “singled out.”
“I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice,” the president said in a statement that accompanied the pardon.
Trump, for his part, is expected to harness the pardon power aggressively when he returns to office. Most notably, he has promised to pardon many of the people convicted for their roles in the attack on the Capitol of Jan. 6, 2021. In criticizing the Hunter Biden pardon on Sunday night, Trump again invoked Jan. 6 defendants, calling them “hostages.”
Morison said Trump will likely cite the Hunter Biden pardon when defending his own pardoning decisions.
“It justifies what Trump wants to do,” he said. “Now, he was going to do it anyway. But it gives him some political cover. I think some January 6 pardons are probably coming — at least some, maybe all.”
I'm sorry, was Hunter Biden in elected office? Here's what I think. Republicans were waging A PROXY WAR against Biden who (don't you know?) STOLE THE ELECTION. Please.
I was surprised to see an article like this in Politico. Guess they know which side their bread is buttered on.
Biden Issues a ‘Full and Unconditional Pardon’ of His Son Hunter Biden
The pardon comes weeks before President Biden leaves office and transfers power to President-elect Donald J. Trump, who spent years attacking Hunter Biden over his legal and personal issues.