Would Joe Biden dare do the unthinkable?
Would Biden pardon Donald Trump?
Is that possible?
Joe Biden Is Laughing
President Joe Biden laughed off the idea of pardoning former President Donald Trump for potential crimes committed in connection with January 6 and the Mar-a-Lago documents cases.
“Ron DeSantis said that if he became president that he would pardon Trump. Where are you on the idea of pardoning Trump,” Fox News’ White House reporter Peter Doocy asked Biden as he prepared to board Marine One.
Biden waived his hand at Doocy, walked away, and mouthed words that were drowned out by the helicopter noise.
“The FBI and the DoJ have been weaponized. We see that, and we see that in a varied of contexts,” DeSantis said on the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show last week. “I would say any example of disfavored treatment based on politics or weaponization would be included in that review no matter how small.”
Precedents for Pardoning Trump
Pressure to pardon Trump could mount in the increasingly likely event that Special Counsel Jack Smith indicts the former president for keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago in violation of the presidential records act, Politico reported.
Former President Gerald Ford set a clear precedent for a president pardoning his predecessor when he gave a full and pre-emptive pardon to former President Richard Nixon for his role in Watergate. Ford believed he put the good of the nation ahead of his own political career. Many analysts believe that Ford’s pardon of Nixon led to his losing a second term to Jimmy Carter in 1977.
“It was Ford who quite frankly convinced me, who said, ‘I pardoned Nixon not for myself but for the country, and let me tell you the world I was living in looked like if Nixon was not pardoned, he’d be further investigated, indicted, tried, going to jail; this would be two or three more years of Watergate … I had to pre-empt the process. We were in the middle of the Cold War, serious economic problems, and my sense of purpose of being president at that moment was to get Nixon off the front page,” Bob Woodward said during a 2011 talk at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
Biden addressed the idea of pardoning Trump in 2019 when Washington was in the midst of the first impeachment over the former president’s request that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky investigate him and Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine.
“It wouldn’t unite the country,” Biden told Radio Iowa, adding, “I think President Ford, God love him, he’s a good guy, I knew him pretty well. I think if he had to do it over again, he wouldn’t have done it.”
Psaki: Pardoning Trump Would Be ‘Autocratic’
Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki shared her former boss’s view of pardoning Trump. She asserted on her MSNBC program “Inside with Jen Psaki that the idea of pardoning Trump or the January 6 rioters would be outside the president’s powers.
“It’s entirely possible … and that [DeSantis] isn’t interested in the limitations on presidential power in Article II of the Constitution. That’s some pretty autocratic stuff there,” Psaki said.
Trump Presidential Pardon Would Not Solve Nation’s Problems
The presidential power to pardon only extends to federal crimes. If Biden or DeSantis were to pardon Trump, he would still face criminal ramifications in New York where Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg indicted him in April for 34 counts of business fraud. He also would face criminal charges in Georgia where reports suggest Trump could be indicted for his effort to intimidate Georgia election officials.
In those two cases, it would be up to Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to decide if they were to pardon the former president.
“It’s not a presidential pardon that’s at issue that would cure any problem for our country, and so the legal process is gonna have to work through this. I’ve always said that Trump’s future should be decided at the ballot box and not in the courtroom,” Republican presidential candidate and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said on Fox News.
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John Rossomando was a senior analyst for Defense Policy and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
