President Joe Biden’s controversial pardon of his son Hunter may give President-elect Donald Trump a blank check to issue his own round of pardons upon taking office.
Trump said as much in an interview aired Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press when he vowed to pardon a number of people convicted in connection to the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan.. 6, 2021, saying he’d look at each case individually.
“These people are living in hell,” he told NBC’s Kristen Welker, noting that some had been in jail for three years and promising pardons on Day 1 in office.
More than 1,500 individuals were charged in connection with the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol.
“Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years?” Trump said in a statement last week. “Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!”
Trump also promised on the campaign trail to set free many Jan. 6 protesters.
“I am inclined to pardon many of them. I can’t say for every single one because a couple of them, probably, they got out of control,” Trump said at CNN Town Hall in 2023.
“I would say it will be a large portion of them and it would be early on,” he added.
Many lawyers involved in protesting the 2020 election results have faced prosecution as well. However, defendants facing state charges can receive little help from Trump, barring an extraordinary action from the president-elect.
Trump could issue a blanket pardon for lawyers who worked with him broadly covering at least federal crimes for more than a decade, similar to Hunter’s pardon and the ones under consideration for other Biden officials.
“Christmas is coming, and as the old saying goes, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” Colin Reed, a Republican strategist, former campaign manager for U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., and co-founder of South and Hill Strategies, told The Center Square.
“After thumbing his nose at the idea that ‘no one is above the law,’ President Biden has undermined the entire Democratic Party’s messaging apparatus and robbed their ability to claim the moral high ground.
The Department of Justice has signaled that its own cases against Trump will be dropped, keeping with a longstanding policy preventing prosecution of sitting presidents.
It may be the season of grace because media reports indicate that Biden’s team is considering issuing many more pardons preemptively protecting Biden allies from prosecution by a Trump administration, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Democratic Sen. Blumenthal said on CNN this week that he would “strongly oppose” those kinds of blanket pardons.
“The way to stand up to a bully like Donald Trump is not to run and hide,” Blumenthal said. “It’s to confront him. And that’s what we ought to do if they misuse the Department of Justice. I was a prosecutor, U.S. attorney and then state attorney, and I believe that the way to confront Donald Trump is to put together a defense team and a defense fund.
“I’d be happy to join it,” he added. “And what we should do is support those people who are potentially in jeopardy but there is no way to offer this kind of immunity to anyone who may be a target of Donald Trump because they will go after whoever doesn’t have that kind of pardon, and there are plenty of targets who they can assail.”
Despite Trump’s pledges in the 2016 cycle to drain the swamp and prosecute Hillary Clinton, his DOJ never prosecuted political opponents.
“By issuing the pardon so early in the lame duck period rather than on his way out the door, President Biden also provided President Trump time to plan his next moves,” Reed told The Center Square. “The Hunter pardon and its implications will live on long after the Biden presidency has reached its final chapter.”
