It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas … if, that is, you’re a Democrat.
Oh, sure, the lead-up to Thanksgiving was pretty lousy, what with losing the White House and both chambers of Congress. But now that outgoing President Joe Biden gave a blanket pardon to his son so expansive that it even exceeded the breadth of the one Gerald Ford gave to Richard Nixon, the folks at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. seem to be stealing a page from well-remunerated Kamala Harris ally Oprah Winfrey: You get a pardon! And you get a pardon! And you get a pardon! And you…
According to a report by Politico on Wednesday, the Biden administration “is discussing preemptive pardons for those in Trump’s crosshairs.” This includes, according to the report, “the extraordinary step of handing out blanket pardons to those who’ve committed no crimes.” (That Politico is willing to acknowledge, anyway.)
The reason, officially, is because Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, once made a comment about pursuing those on Capitol Hill who had made a sport out of pursing Trump, telling Steve Bannon on his podcast that, were he in charge of the Department of Justice, his DOJ “will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media … who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
“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,” Politico’s Jonathan Martin wrote.
This includes Sen.-elect Adam Schiff of California — who, as head of the House Intelligence Committee, peddled the Russiagate hoax despite knowing the Steele dossier that it was based off of was worse fiction than most Robert Ludlum novels — and former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of the two Republicans on the Democrats’ kangaroo Jan. 6 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,” Martin noted. (Martin neglected to note Fauci’s verbal prestidigitations regarding whether the National Institutes of Health funded gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in testimony given under oath — but details, details.)
While the discussions apparently have not involved the president yet, it’s arguable how many serious discussions still actually involve him, other than what ice cream flavor he wants — and considering that White House counsel Ed Siskel has organized the discussions about the pardons and chief of staff Jeff Zients is in on them, this is high-level stuff.
“That the conversations are taking place at all reflects the growing anxieties among high-level Democrats about just how far Trump’s reprisals could go once he reclaims power,” Martin wrote.
If Biden carries through with this, should the Constitution be amended to remove pardon/clemency from the president’s powers?
“The remarkable, 11-year breadth of Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter illustrated how worried the White House is about Trump officials seizing any potential openings for prosecution.”
However, he also noted that the Hunter pardon was already responsible for “infuriating many of his own party already angry at Biden for insisting on running for reelection as he neared 82” and that prior pardon extravaganzas had tainted several administrations — pardon sprees that pale in comparison to the scale of what’s being offered here.
“End-of-administration pardons are always politically fraught,” Martin wrote.
“But President George H.W. Bush’s intervention to spare former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Bill Clinton’s pardon of financier and donor Marc Rich seem quaint compared with what Biden officials are grappling with as Trump returns to the presidency with lieutenants plotting tribunals against adversaries.”
However, there are Democrats who really and truly believe that a Trump administration would be able to abuse its powers to harass and jail its opponents.
“If it’s clear by January 19 that [revenge] is his intention, then I would recommend to President Biden that he provide those preemptive pardons to people, because that’s really what our country is going to need next year,” said Massachusetts Sen. Edward Markey in an an interview last week.
“This is no hypothetical threat,” said Pennsylvania Democrat Rep. Brendan Boyle in a statement. “The time for cautious restraint is over. We must act with urgency to push back against these threats and prevent Trump from abusing his power.”
There are, of course, two tacit admissions by the fact that these preemptive pardons are being considered in the first place.
The first is, of course, that the power of the FBI can be abused. Where on earth would anyone get this idea? The abuses of the FBI over the past decade regarding Donald Trump, of course, beginning with Russiagate and which probably haven’t even ended yet.
The reason Kash Patel is being nominated as FBI director isn’t because he plans revenge on Trump’s enemies but because he’s promised the most thorough cleanup of one of the dirtiest parts of the Beltway swamp. The White House knew all along that their collaborators and associates were doing things that no court would stand for. And if Patel — or whoever ends up being confirmed — finds misdeeds along the way, no, they probably won’t play nice.
And that’s the second thing: Offering blanket pardons to members of your party doesn’t make them look particularly innocent. Hunter, after all, was very, very, very, very guilty of the crimes he committed — and he received an 11-year pardon so that he wouldn’t have to answer for potential crimes regarding his work for foreign entities that hadn’t even been seriously investigated yet.
Are we to believe that these pardons are being given to the likes of Schiff and Cheney and because they’re clean as whistles? We still have a Constitution, and a damned good one, which is why multiple efforts to stampede Trump and other Republicans off the ballot failed in court. What such pardons would do is ensure that everyone who received one looks dirty.
Are they? We’ll never know, if the Biden administration has its way and precludes both investigations and subsequent justice from taking place.
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