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The hysteria over Biden's pardons seems extra ridiculous now
Trump's abuse of the pardon power makes everything else look like child's play.
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Just 11 months ago, former President Joe Biden prepared to leave the White House by preemptively pardoning members of his family. Republicans were apoplectic.
Leading the charge was Rep. James Comer, who has never met a person with the last name Biden who he didn’t think needed to be investigated — and has never given a single thought to investigating anyone named Trump. Comer penned an op-ed for Fox News about the “Biden Crime Family,” claiming that the Bidens made “over $30 million by selling access to the former president.”
“President Biden will go down as the most corrupt president in US history,” Comer said at the time, boasting that an investigation he led at the House Oversight Committee “will be remembered as one of the most successful ever conducted by Congress.”
But the hysteria over the Biden pardons — hysteria that looks ridiculous in hindsight given the Trump administration’s weaponization of the DOJ — was almost immediately obliterated by Donald Trump’s immediate pardoning of 1,600 Americans who rioted and assaulted police officers at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election result.
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Weeks after his first round of J6 pardons, Trump let former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagoyevich, a Democrat, off the hook for various crimes, including trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat when Trump’s arch-enemy ran for president. Since then, Trump has issued commutations or pardons to corrupt Republican politicians in Arkansas, California, Ohio, Tennessee, New York, and Nevada, as well as dark web criminals, killer cops, aggressive abortion protesters, two swindling former business associates of Hunter Biden, a thieving Virginia sheriff, shady cryptocurrency barons who have lined his family’s bank accounts, Social Security and Medicare fraudsters, tax evaders, reality TV ripoff artists who campaigned for Trump, and a gun-toting rapper, among others.
In mid-October, Trump issued a commutation for George Santos, the former New York congressman who lied about virtually everything in his life before turning to a litany of crimes that included money laundering and receiving unemployment payments while making $120,000 a year.
After being pardoned, Santos posted a photo of himself at the Department of Justice, where he met with DOJ leadership, saying he was “happy to be working on reform.”
In announcing Santos’s pardon, Trump noted that Santos was a Republican. He didn’t even pretend to have a justification on the merits.
“At least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!” Trump posted on Truth Social.
Trump’s statement about Santos was instructive. Many presidential pardons have come with their fair share of controversy, just as many were issued to correct legitimate miscarriages of justice — or, as with Biden’s pardons of his family members, to protect people who faced the surety of politically-motivated prosecutions by incoming administrations.
But the Santos commutation was simply one among many pieces of evidence that Trump has perverted the pardon power far beyond the most questionable actions of any other modern president, emboldening a diverse cast of corrupt politicians, anti-democratic activists, and outright criminals in a new American age of corruption and authoritarianism.
This week, Trump pardoned 77 people who tried to overturn the 2020 election on his behalf, including Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, and others involved in fake electors schemes and even a breach of voting systems in Georgia.