When Trump took office in 2017, I thought there was a reasonable chance that he would pardon Hillary Clinton. I thought this was just the sort of schoolyard trick Trump might play -- after all, what better way to tar someone as guilty when they have not even been indicted for anything**. Trump didn't do it.
But now Biden has. And to his own family. Wow.
In his last hours of office Biden issued pre-emptive pardons for numerous people who have not even been charged with any crime. Sort of blanket get out of jail free cards for any federal offense they might be accused of. The act feels unprecedented, though I remember that President Bush did something similar for Donald Rumsfeld. But it is certainly unprecedented in its scope. He pardoned
- General Milley (who called Trump "fascist to the core" and a "wannabe dictator")
- Much of his family, including all his siblings and their spouses. Republican Congressional investigators believe that Biden family members funneled foreign bribe money to Biden when he was Vice-President. Certainly their family has extraordinarily complex financial arrangements, sending money to each other through a variety of shell corporations
- The entire J6 committee, which is sort of weird as they already should have immunity through the speech and debate clause
- Anthony Fauci
The legal case most folks are looking at right now is Burdick vs United States which says that 1) a pardon can be rejected and 2) acceptance of a pardon carries "an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it," though it is disputed whether this latter is a binding precedent. Getting such an un-asked for blanket pardon certainly seems a mixed blessing. Think about John Owens, his brother-in-law. Did anyone have him on their radar before, because NOW they do.
I know some are p*ssed off that they cannot put Liz Cheney or Anthony Fauci in jail. Personally I am relieved. The Biden administration set some horrible precedents in prosecution of its enemies, perhaps some of the worst since Nixon. We are at a tipping point between dialing back on this sort of banana-republic-style political retribution or going into full-on Sicilian vendetta wars. I have had lots of people disagree with me on this, but I think we need to turn the other cheek here and find intermediate ways to enforce accountability. Trump's revocation of the security clearances of the folks who made up a Russian conspiracy to discredit the evidence of Hunter Biden's laptop seems like a reasonable approach.
But there is a silver lining to all this that I posted on X the morning the pardons were announced -- without the looming threat of prosecution, there is no room to plead the 5th. The most interesting person to get under oath to answer questions is going to be Fauci, of course. I worry that we have not found the boundaries of gain-of-function research and that dangerous research is still going on and being funded by government organizations (most recently I have seen rumors that the Department of Agriculture has been funding gain of function on diseases that affect livestock). There is so much this guy needs to be asked under oath -- Covid origins, suppression of opposing speech, the vaccine trials, coordination with the teachers unions on school recommendations, etc etc -- that the hearings could last weeks.
Biden's legacy, such that it is, could also be in some danger. No one is going to prosecute the guy, for the same reason that Hur did not, but there are sure a lot of suspicious financial transactions running back and forth through his family and a myriad of shell companies.
**Postscript: For those with a short memory, Clinton moved her email to a private server in an attempt avoid FOIA and in so doing probably allowed classified information to sit on a poorly secured computer in her house. I would have said that neither of these sorts of errors or crimes would reasonably ever be prosecuted (at least at that seniority), that is until I saw FBI agents descend on Mar-a-Lago looking for poorly secured classified documents. It should be noted that despite the fears of many folks on the Left, Trump did not prosecute Clinton.