When President Biden gave his son Hunter a nearly 11-year blanket of immunity from possible federal prosecution, it set a terrible precedent.
At the time, we thought the danger was this pardon would clear the way for greater abuse of the power in the future by other presidents.
But, according to reports, the future may be here sooner than imagined. Biden is reportedly also thinking about issuing preemptive pardons to a number of other officials and allies during his final weeks in office.
The excuse for this is Donald Trump’s threat to use the U.S. Justice Department and its investigatory arm, the FBI, to see revenge on his opponents. His nominees for attorney general, Pam Bondi, and for FBI director, Kash Patel, have signaled they are on board with politically targeted prosecutions if they are confirmed. Patel, in fact, is chomping at the bit to get started.
The potential targets include U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, Mississippi’s lone Democratic member of Congress, who co-chaired the special House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol and found Trump heavily responsible for inciting it.
Thompson and others on that committee, including the co-chair, Republican Liz Cheney, did their job. Any attempt to prosecute them for it would be an outrageous abuse of power and, if Congress has any guts, result in the impeachment of those involved in trying to carry it out.
More likely, Trump is bluffing. Even if he is not, what Biden is contemplating — widespread preemptive pardons — would create its own havoc. It would pervert the main purpose of the pardon system — to grant mercy to those who have been convicted of crimes — to one that shields both the wronged and the wrongdoers alike.
One can foresee, if preemptive pardons become the norm, that administrations could be filled with cronyism and corruption that are absolved as the parting act by every departing president to come.
Those who argue in favor of Biden issuing more preemptive pardons say that this practice has already been used before him. They, however, can only point to one time: when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon 50 years ago for any crimes he might have committed while in office, not just those involved in Nixon’s efforts to cover up the Watergate burglary.
Nixon’s situation was different, though. He had agreed to leave office under threat of impeachment, and his government involvement was over. Ford decided correctly that the nation needed to move on from the Watergate scandal and start mending the deep divisions that Nixon’s time in the White House had created.
None of the officials for whom Biden is reportedly considering pardons rises to the level of a rogue president forced out of office. Most have not even been investigated, much less charged. To issue blanket pardons for them is an overreaction. It also could backfire politically should it later turn out that any of them have broken the law in ways that have nothing to do with Trump’s spurious accusations.
Biden has already tarnished his legacy by giving his son such a sweeping pardon, after promising repeatedly that he would do no such thing. If he multiplies that mistake with more preemptive pardons, he will leave office having further damaged the public’s trust in its government.
