Biden team considers blanket pardons before Trump’s promised ‘retribution’
WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden’s staff is debating whether he should issue blanket pardons for a swath of President-elect Donald Trump’s perceived enemies to protect them from the “retribution” he has threatened after he takes office, according to people familiar with the discussion.
The idea would be to preemptively extend executive clemency to a list of current and former government officials for any possible crimes over a period of years, effectively short-circuiting the next president’s promised campaign of reprisals.
The discussion of blanket pardons, remains primarily at a staff level, although Biden has talked about it with senior members of the team, according to the people familiar with the matter. It comes after Biden pardoned his son Hunter to spare him from prison on gun and tax charges. The White House declined to comment Thursday.
Such a sweeping act of clemency covering even theoretical crimes over the course of a decade went beyond the scope of any since at least the Watergate era, when President Gerald Ford pardoned his disgraced predecessor, Richard Nixon, for any crimes even though he had not been charged. Never before has a president issued mass pardons of government officials for fear that a successor would seek to prosecute them out of partisan vindictiveness.
But the choices of Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general and Trump surrogate, to run the Justice Department and Kash Patel, a former Trump aide and far-right provocateur, to be director of the FBI have put the issue front and center. Patel has vowed to “come after” Trump’s critics and even published a list of about 60 people he considered “members of the executive branch deep state” as the appendix to a 2023 book.
Ed Siskel, the White House counsel, is leading the discussions as part of a broader plan to issue pardons and commutations to more traditional recipients, including those convicted of nonviolent drug offenses, as is customary in a president’s final days.
Among those whose names have been floated are former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who was vice chair of the bipartisan committee that investigated Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol; Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former top infectious disease expert for the government; Jack Smith, the outgoing special counsel who prosecuted Trump; and Sen.-elect Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif., who was a lead House prosecutor at Trump’s first impeachment trial.
Schiff said he did not think blanket pardons would be a good idea. “I would urge the president not to do that,” he told Politico. “I think it would seem defensive and unnecessary.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.