Pardon me

President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter is understandable, but it inadvertently gives Trump ammunition

Friends,

My first reaction to the Sunday news that President Biden was pardoning his son Hunter was sadness.

Biden has a constitutional right to pardon his son, and I can understand his concern that Trump’s overt aim to use the Justice Department and FBI to pursue “retribution” against political enemies might subject Hunter to further charges and harassment.

House Republicans have claimed Hunter is guilty of more than the felonies he was charged with: lying on a firearms application form about his drug addiction and failing to pay taxes that he later did pay.

My sadness comes from President Biden’s suggestion that the charges against his son were influenced by Republican politicians. “It is clear that Hunter was treated differently,” he wrote. “The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election.” Biden continued: “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

I can understand President Biden’s frustration, but his claim that Republican politicians were responsible for Hunter’s legal problems lends credence to Trump’s long-term claim that the justice system was “weaponized” against him and that he was the victim of selective prosecution, as Biden says his son was.

Biden’s claim also makes it more difficult for Democrats to stand against Trump’s plans to use the Justice Department for political purposes as Trump seeks to install as director of the FBI the cringeworthy sycophant Kash Patel, who has vowed to “come after” Trump’s enemies.

Of course, we know that the prosecution of Hunter Biden was completely different from the prosecutions of Trump. Many legal experts agree with President Biden’s contention that his son’s offenses wouldn’t normally have resulted in felony charges.

Trump, on the other hand, was charged with near treasonous actions — illegally seeking to overturn the results of an election he lost in order to hold on to power, and endangering national security and trying to obstruct justice by taking classified documents when he left office and refusing to return them. These cases are being dropped because of his election.

But in suggesting that the charges against his son were politically motivated, President Biden has handed Trump something of a Trump card for arguing that of course the Justice Department is used for political ends, so watch me do the same.

Biden’s pardon also makes it more difficult for Democrats to criticize Trump for his use of the pardoning power to immunize friends and allies, at least one of whom he’s now appointing to an important diplomatic role.

Almost immediately after the news broke of President Biden’s pardon for Hunter, Trump used it to justify his planned pardon of the January 6 rioters. “Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years?” he wrote on social media. “Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!”

Among the people Trump pardoned in his final weeks in office was Charles Kushner, the father of Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who spent two years in prison on tax evasion and other charges. Over the weekend, Trump announced he would nominate the pardoned Kushner to be ambassador to France.

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There’s a larger issue here. The pardoning power was never supposed to be a means for presidents to put themselves, their families, members of their administration, and campaign staff above the law. Yet that’s precisely what it has become.

Bill Clinton pardoned his brother, Roger, on old drug charges. George H.W. Bush pardoned former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and others in his administration on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra affair.

As the framers of the Constitution saw it, the pardoning power was supposed to be a safety valve against injustice. The origins of the power in the United States Constitution are found in the “prerogative of mercy” that originally appeared during the reign of King Ine of Wessex in the seventh century.

George Washington first exercised the power in 1795, granting amnesty to those engaged in Pennsylvania’s Whiskey Rebellion. Thomas Jefferson granted amnesty to any citizen convicted of a crime under the Alien and Sedition Acts. Lincoln used clemency to encourage desertions from the Confederate Army. In 1868, President Andrew Jackson pardoned Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy.

In another act of mercy, President Warren G. Harding commuted the sentences of 24 political prisoners, including socialist leader Eugene Debs.

But in what was clearly a political use of the pardon rather than a use for humanitarian reasons, Nixon commuted the sentence of James Hoffa, former president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and a Nixon ally who was convicted for pension fund fraud and jury tampering.

Gerald Ford’s 1974 pardon of Richard Nixon was arguably the most famous exercise of executive clemency in American history. Ford explained that he granted the pardon as an act of mercy to Nixon and for the broader purpose of restoring domestic tranquility in the nation after Watergate.

We need a constitutional amendment to prevent the continuing misuse of the pardoning power.

Representative Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee’s 9th District, has repeatedly introduced just such an amendment, which would prohibit a self-pardon and pardons of family members, administration officials, and campaign employees. It would also bar the president from issuing pardons to those whose crimes were committed to further a direct and significant personal interest of the president or others close to him or her, and those whose crimes were committed at the direction of, or in coordination with, the president.

Cohen’s proposed amendment deserves widespread support.

What do you think?