In his sweeping pardon of Hunter Biden, President Biden handed President-elect Trump a template to shield his own allies and stretch the pardon power further. Legal experts say Trump has fresh precedent — and political cover — to issue expansive pardons absolving his allies not only of specific offenses, but even any undetermined crimes they may have committed, Politico reports. With the exception of Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon, no modern president had ever issued such a broad grant of clemency until Biden’s “full and unconditional” pardon of his son on Sunday. The younger Biden is now effectively cleared of legal consequences for any federal law he might have broken over a nearly 11-year period. The terms are so unusual — and the process leading to it was so secretive — that the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney was taken by surprise.
In Trump’s first term, former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) — requested a similarly sweeping pardon, but White House aides made clear it was a nonstarter. After the Hunter Biden pardon was announced, Trump hinted that he may cite it as justification for granting broad clemency to Jan. 6 defendants. Trump, took a freewheeling approach to pardons in his first term, granting clemency to cronies like former national security adviser Mike Flynn, longtime adviser Roger Stone, 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort and White House aide Steve Bannon. All of those pardons were tied to specific investigations and crimes those men had been accused or convicted of. Biden deviated from past practices by invoking fairness, rather than acceptance of responsibility, as the reason for pardoning his son, said Samuel Morison, who worked in the Office of the Pardon Attorney for 13 years. Trump is now freer to invoke that same reasoning to grant broad protection to his own allies. “I do think this gives Trump greater leeway to exercise the pardon power in ways that he might otherwise have hesitated, because it gives Trump more political cover to do what he wants,” Morison said. “How can you say that the president can’t grant pardons to correct something that he believes is an injustice? Biden just did it.”
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