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.
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.
These pardons fall into the category of “cronies who tried to help Trump cling to power.” Another group of people let off the hook by Trump are those who properly suck up to him, like Blagojevich, Santos, and Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business associate who was convicted of ripping off a Native American tribe to the tune of roughly $60 million. Archer turned on the Bidens, testifying before Congress as part of Republican efforts to impeach the former president.
Finally, there are those who help the president and his family to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth. That’s where Changpeng Zhao, the recently-pardoned founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, comes in. Zhao was convicted of allowing Binance to be used as a money laundering front for terrorists and international criminals. He also happens to have substantial business ties to the Trump family’s growing cryptocurrency empire. The president pardoned him on October 21, stropping Zhao from having to serve one year and one day in prison.
Pardons for business associates
In a November 2 interview on 60 Minutes, Trump claimed he had no idea who Zhao was. He was probably lying, but if he truly has never heard of Zhao, his sons surely have.
After all, $2 billion of the $5 billion in wealth that Trump’s sons, Eric and Don Jr., have accumulated through their cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial, came thanks to an investment from Zhao’s Binance.
Pressed by 60 Minutes host Norah O’Donnell about Zhao, whose various crimes allowed terrorist organizations like Hamas to move cash around to carry out their own crimes, Trump claimed ignorance.
“OK, are you ready?” Trump said. “I don’t know who he is. I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that and I heard it was a Biden witch hunt.”
After a follow-up from O’Donnell on Zhao, Trump at least noted his sons’ interest in the fast-growing and increasingly lawless world of cryptocurrency, at the top of which sits Zhao.
“Um, my sons are into it,” Trump said. “I’m glad they are because it’s probably a great industry, crypto. I think it’s good.”
Zhao represents one class of pardon recipient: the shady businessmen getting rich off the Trump administration, some of whom appear to be laundering their dirty money through Trump family businesses. The myriad connections between Zhao and the Trumps’ crypto business makes the “Biden Crime Family” look quaint in comparison. And it didn’t even take a congressional investigation from Comer’s Oversight Committee to uncover Zhao’s $2 billion bump to the Trumps’ World Liberty Financial. That was reported by the Wall Street Journal.
It makes the $30 million in profits that claims the Biden family made off the former president’s influence look like chump change.
Permission to steal the next election
While Trump’s use of pardons and commutations for those who help him and his family become fantastically wealthy is obviously very troubling, it’s not exactly surprising. Trump is notoriously corrupt, and his second administration clearly views last year’s election, in part, as permission to make as much corrupt cash as possible.
What’s perhaps more troubling — from the perspective of Will we have a country after all of this? — is the second category of Trump pardon recipients, which was on full display this week.
Just after 2 am Monday, Trump’s pardon attorney, Ed Martin, announced that the president had pardoned 77 people who were directly involved in attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Some of those individuals served as the “alternate” slates of electors stood up by Republicans in states like Georgia to sign fake certificates purporting to give Electoral College votes to Trump — despite the fact that he had lost the popular vote in those states. Some, like Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, were charged in states like Georgia for their role in the fraudulent attempt to install Trump as president in 2020. But none were charged with federal crimes, so the pardons issued early Monday don’t apply to those state cases.
So, why pardon them at all? On X, Martin helpfully explained, saying Trump had directed him to “look at those people who had been targeted by the Biden administration.”
“We’ve been working hard to find them and one group that jumped up right away is the [2020] alternate electors and their affiliates who were targeted by Jack Smith and others,” Martin wrote, noting that Attorney General Pam Bondi and deputy attorney general Todd Blanche had “pushed us to do the right thing and fast.”
“There are many more Americans who Biden targeted. And we’re working to help them,” Martin said. “God bless us all.”
Among those pardoned on Monday is Misty Hampton, a small-town election official in Georgia who helped Trump campaign surrogates illegally access voting machines in their failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Monday’s pardons were more than just the latest in Trump’s unprecedented use of pardon power to embolden corruption and consolidate power. They were also a signal that if you work to keep the president in power by any means necessary, he will have your back.
It’s hard to imagine a more corrupt use of the presidential pardon than to set people free who made the president more wealthy, and tried to illegally keep him in office. This makes Trump’s use of pardons as corrupt and undemocratic as anything else he does.
That’s it for this week
We’ll be back with more Monday. Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.
Projection is protection. Sift through any Trump or Trump adjacent legal pronouncements, actions, or musings and you’ll end up with a pile of evidence of Trump wrongdoing. As cruelty is the point, accusations are the smokescreen for the most serious Trumpian offenses and crimes. Trump has a pathological need to throw yellow snowballs while his zipper is down.
This guy (47) is siphoning all of our sanity and pissing it away… this is definitely insane… 🤦🏼♀️. Thanks for reminding us that we aren’t the crazy ones😞