In less than two months, Joe Biden will hand off the keys to the White House to Donald Trump. But before he does, he’ll have a choice to make: Should he use his pardon power to protect the various Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans, and others his successor considers “enemies” and has vowed to go after?
“This is no hypothetical threat,” Pennsylvania Democrat Brendan Boyle said in a statement Wednesday, urging Biden to “issue a blanket pardon for anyone unjustly targeted” by Trump, whose nominee for attorney general—Kash Patel—has already compiled a list of officials and critics he’s publicly promised to prosecute. “If we’re serious about stopping Trump’s authoritarian ambitions, we need to act decisively and use every tool at our disposal,” the Biden ally continued. “The time for cautious restraint is over. We must act with urgency to push back against these threats and prevent Trump from abusing power.”
As Politico’s Jonathan Martin reported Thursday, Biden and his senior aides are actively discussing the possibility of taking that extraordinary step, amid concerns that the incoming administration could target prominent critics like Liz Cheney, the former Republican lawmaker who helped lead the January 6 committee, and Senator-elect Adam Schiff, a leader in Trump’s two House impeachments. Schiff, for his part, called on the president “not to do that”: “I think it would seem defensive and unnecessary,” the California Democrat told Martin. But, as Martin reported, some senior Democrats suspect potential recipients “may publicly oppose preemptive pardons, for reasons of innocence or precedence, while privately hoping the president offers legal protection.”
It’s unclear what the president will ultimately do, but he has already used his clemency power to protect his son, Hunter Biden: Not only did he pardon him for the tax and gun convictions for which he was about to be sentenced; he did so for any offenses Hunter “committed or may have committed or taken part in” over a ten year period, beginning in 2014. That move came with pushback, including from Democrats, due to Biden’s repeated promises not to intervene in his son’s case and his claim that the cases, brought by his own Justice Department, were infected by “raw politics.” (Trump, unsurprisingly, quickly sought to capitalize on that claim, insisting—in a motion to dismiss his own felony convictions—that he was a victim of the same “political theater” Biden decried.)
Preemptive pardons for the likes of Cheney, Schiff, and Anthony Fauci—another punching bag for Republicans who could be more formally targeted by the Trump administration—would raise their own concerns. Granting clemency to officials who have committed no crimes, other than the offense of contradicting or opposing Trump, would be immediately put forth by MAGA Republicans as proof of wrongdoing on the part of the recipients and of the illegitimacy of the institutions they represent. Trump’s allies already pounced on the Hunter Biden pardon as evidence of their wilder allegations about the elder Biden’s own culpability in his son’s. There’s no doubt they would again spin additional pardons as validation for Trump’s bogus claims that he has long been a victim of hoaxes, witch hunts, and “deep-state” political attacks.
