Biden administration officials are reportedly mulling whether or not to grant blanket pardons to a laundry list of political allies, a move that, if enacted, would be a tacit admission that the Justice Department has been tainted by politics.
President Joe Biden already brought scrutiny to the prosecutorial process when he issued a blanket pardon for his son, Hunter Biden, that was accompanied by a statement excoriating the Justice Department for even pursuing the charges. Hunter Biden was convicted on tax evasion charges and a felony gun charge.
But the news that blanket pardons for people such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Rep. Liz Cheney, Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-CA), and who knows how many others may be coming down the pipeline is, more than anything, an admission that the prosecutorial process has been corrupted by politics.
Biden’s DOJ has launched numerous prosecutions against the Left’s political enemies. People who briefly walked into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and engaged in no violent behavior have been slapped with felony charges and years in prison, pro-life protesters who simply prayed outside abortion clinics have been subjected to malicious prosecutions seeking a decade or more of prison time, and of course, President-elect Donald Trump has faced two federal prosecutions from special counsel Jack Smith, who has made a career out of prosecuting Republican politicians on dubious charges.
With Trump set to return to office in a little more than a month, the Biden administration and its allies are now fearful that the lawfare campaign they unleashed on Republican politicians and conservatives will soon be turned on them. Trump’s decisions to nominate Pam Bondi for attorney general and Kash Patel for FBI director have only reinforced this fear.
By pardoning people who have never been criminally charged, Biden will turn presidential pardons for allies into a standard practice for every president who leaves office ahead of a president of the opposing party. Such an act would also deliver a message to voters in the Democratic Party that the outcomes of the federal court system are not to be trusted, while supporters of Trump and the Republican Party will be validated in their suspicions of the same.
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Crossing the Rubicon of prosecuting your political opponents has consequences, and hiding behind the legitimacy of the Justice Department to justify it is a hard leg to stand on when your chief political opponent is about to take control of that same agency.
If Biden pardons all of his allies because of the risk of prosecution from the Trump administration, he will openly admit that, under his watch, the Justice Department became a partisan weapon to be wielded against conservatives.