JOE BIDEN’S PARDON FRENZY. With inaugural crowds gathering in Washington, D.C., the hours of Joe Biden‘s presidency are ticking down to noon Monday. Before that moment comes, though, Biden is expected to issue more pardons and commutations to go with the record number of clemencies, many of them controversial, that he has already granted.
Most notably, there was Biden’s breaking his promise not to pardon his son, Hunter. And then there were the commutations of the sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners, all killers and some of them multiple murderers, on federal death row. (The only three Biden showed no mercy were so politically unpalatable that Biden might have suffered politically for commuting their sentences.)
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On Friday, Biden commuted the sentences of nearly 2,500 drug offenders, which the New York Times called “the broadest commutation of individual sentences ever issued by an American president.” And that was on top of 1,500 commutations for various criminals in home confinement. And various others, including two Virginia men serving time for killing a police officer.
So Joe Biden is in the midst of a pardon frenzy. Maybe he is trying to compensate for a presidency that many observers have ranked somewhere between lackluster and catastrophic by trying to establish himself as the Pardon President. In any event, he is promising more. After his latest round, he said, “I am proud of my record on clemency and will continue to review additional commutations and pardons.”
For whom? There could be a lot. But the one that is drawing the most speculation is a possible pardon for James Biden, the president’s brother. James was involved in a lot of Hunter Biden’s shady foreign influence peddling, and was the subject of Republican investigations on Capitol Hill.
Seven months ago, in June 2024, three House committee chairmen — Rep. James Comer of the Oversight Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan of the Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Jason Smith of the Ways and Means Committee — sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department recommending that James Biden be charged with lying to Congress. Specifically, the chairmen said James Biden lied in an interview with congressional investigators in which Biden “stated unequivocally” that Joe Biden did not meet with a Hunter Biden business partner when Hunter and James Biden were pursuing a highly lucrative deal with a Chinese energy firm.
Of course, Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden appointee, took no action on the criminal referral. But that does not mean the Republican chairmen have forgotten the issue. Just in the last few days, Rep. Comer sent a letter to Pam Bondi, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be attorney general, requesting that she prosecute James Biden. “I write to encourage the Department of Justice under your leadership to hold James Biden accountable for lying to Congress to protect his brother, the soon-to-be-former President Biden,” Comer wrote. “No one should be above the law, regardless of his last name.”
It is hard to believe Joe Biden will let his presidency end without pardoning his brother. He has already taken the heat for pardoning his son, so why not a little more?
Part of the heat Biden took for pardoning his son was due to the incredibly broad nature of the pardon. The president granted “a full and unconditional pardon” to his son “for those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024, including but not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted (including any that have resulted in convictions) by Special Counsel David Weiss.”
Margaret Love, a former U.S. pardon attorney, called Biden’s move “unprecedented,” with the only comparison being to President Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. “It does not pardon specific offenses, but rather takes a rather broad time span and pardons anything, any crime, that may have been committed during that time span,” Love told USA Today.
Biden officials claimed the unusually sweeping pardon was made necessary by the threats Trump and Republicans have made to continue investigating the Biden family. “One of the reasons the president did the [Hunter Biden] pardon is because it didn’t seem like his political opponents would let go of it, didn’t seem like they would move on,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
Many Republicans, after four indictments and 90-plus felony charges directed at Donald Trump by two elected Democratic district attorneys plus the special Trump prosecutor appointed by the Biden Justice Department, might say — Imagine that! Prosecuting your political opponents! Who would do such a thing?
In any event, with the justifications given for the Hunter Biden pardon, and with the chairman of the House Oversight Committee asking the incoming attorney general to investigate James Biden, could there be any chance in the world that Joe Biden would not pardon his brother? All the same criticisms that were directed to the Hunter Biden pardon will apply to the James Biden pardon. But by that time, former President Joe Biden will be out the door.