Senior aides in the White House are weighing whether to ask President Biden to issue preemptive pardons to a range of current and former officials who could be targeted with Donald Trump’s return to the White House Biden and his allies are concerned that these officials could face inquiries and even indictments, fears that have been heightened by Trump’s appointment of Kash Patel to lead the FBI. Patel has said he would go after the president-elect’s critics. Overall, Democrats are ramping up the pressure on Biden to grant clemency to other Americans, and they aren’t afraid of leveraging the Hunter Biden pardon to get their message across.
Criminal justice advocates and Democratic lawmakers this week asked the president to use his clemency power to grant relief for death row inmates and nonviolent offenders before he leaves office. Some advocates have floated a Biden pardon of Trump as a way to turn down the political temperature, Politico reports.
The sense of urgency across the criminal justice movement has intensified since Biden made the party-splitting move to clear his son of a gun conviction and guilty plea in a tax case, as well as any other “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed” over a 10-year period. “This is a matter of doing the right thing, as well as it’s a matter of legacy. I would hate for Joe Biden’s presidency to end and in history’s final accounting that Donald Trump have a better legacy on clemency than Joe Biden, said Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA). “That would be shameful, and he has the power and the authority to do something about it.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said this week that "you could expect more" pardons and clemency action as the president finishes out his term. The U.S. Office of the Pardon Attorney has received nearly 12,000 requests for clemency during Biden’s term. He has granted 25 individual pardons and 135 commutations, more sentence commutations at this point in his presidency than his recent predecessors in their first terms. Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) said, “We need to make sure these poor people, military personnel, law enforcement, civil servants, people like Liz Cheney, Cassidy Hutchinson, Adam Kinzinger, etc., they need and deserve legal protections from what Trump and ... Patel are saying that they plan to do.”
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