RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Biden is enmeshed in a pardon scandal of his own making. So what are Democrats and their media allies doing? What they always do: They’re blaming Trump.

At Politico on Wednesday, Jonathan Martin reported that the Biden-Harris White House is spun up over President-elect Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel to replace Chris Wray as FBI director. “Patel,” Martin stresses, “has publicly vowed to pursue Trump’s critics.” Against the backdrop of Trump’s fiery campaign riffs against his nemeses — the House January 6 Committee, Democratic prosecutors, et al. — we are supposed to believe it’s the Patel nomination that triggered President Biden to grant his son a pardon with a breathtaking eleven-year immunity bath. Moreover, the Patel pick apparently has the president and his advisers “carefully weighing the extraordinary step of handing out blanket pardons” to Trump’s enemies — even though they’ve “committed no crimes.”

Just two weeks ago, I observed that the eleven-week interregnum between the November election and Inauguration Day on January 20 was the season for histrionics. If you’re already exhausted, there are still more than five weeks to go. If you’re like me, you’re more bent out of shape by the “golden at-bat” proposal, the latest evidence that MLB’s anarchist commissioner Rob Manfred is bent on destroying the national pastime. The proposal is so ludicrous that even my pal, the closet baseball progressive Rich Lowry, is outraged!

Remember, I’ve argued that Trump must end lawfare — and have thus endeared myself to the MAGA warriors, . . . just as I’ve endeared myself over the past four years to apologists for progressive Democratic prosecutors and congressional Trump obsessives, who exploited the public’s investigative authorities (to say nothing of the mountain of taxpayer dollars) to pursue their partisan vendettas. I am also on record — and will be again come Saturday — urging that the president’s unilateral pardon power is an anachronism that ought to be repealed by a constitutional amendment. So, please, don’t take me to be urging either more lawfare or more pardons.

Let’s start with Hunter Biden. Kash Patel’s nomination has nothing to do with Hunter’s sweeping pardon. As Rich and I just discussed on the podcast, the immunity shower that Daddy Biden gave his son is exactly the one that Biden DOJ prosecutor (and faux special counsel) David Weiss did not have the temerity to describe in public court when Judge Maryellen Noreika asked him to state which exact crimes the proposed sweetheart plea deal was immunizing Hunter from.

The immunity provision is a standard, critical term in any plea agreement, but Weiss and Hunter’s lawyers tried to hide it in this one. Once she located it, Judge Noreika was mystified by the hieroglyphics in which it was expressed. Why the intrigue? Because the Biden-Harris DOJ did not want to damage the president’s reelection bid and knew it would be a PR problem if prosecutors acknowledged their intention to assure that the president’s son could not be charged with eleven-years’ worth of felonies under circumstances in which they were trying to plead him out on two trivial tax misdemeanors with no jail time. Alas, Hunter’s lawyers, seeking certainty, wanted Weiss to spell it out (foolishly, in my view). That’s why the plea bargain imploded.

This was back in July 2023. So, . . . why is a proposal which was too toxic to be uttered in court a year and a half ago now written so explicitly in the pardon? Because the election is over.

The president was always going to make sure that (a) his son never saw the inside of a federal penitentiary, and (b) details of the Biden family influence-peddling scheme (the $27 million enterprise in which Biden himself, Hunter, brother Jim, and other longtime Biden associates were complicit) were not going to be described in exacting, damning chapter and verse, as is typically done in plea agreements and pardons. The only way to avoid describing specific crimes was to blanket-immunize Hunter from every conceivable crime starting in 2014 — which just happens to be the heyday of the family business, when Joe was Obama’s VP and his influence was at its most saleable.

Hunter Knew All Along He’d Be Pardoned

Prior to the election, Biden and his Justice Department tried to get away with this by keeping mum and ramming the plea deal past what they hoped would be a complaisant judge. When Noreika wouldn’t play ball, Hunter was indicted and prosecuted for public consumption — but always with the full understanding that he would be pardoned in the end, even as Joe Biden and his White House repeatedly denied this.

How do we know that? Because, despite overwhelming evidence, Hunter never negotiated a plea, never admitted guilt, and allowed himself to be found guilty on all three gun charges and all nine tax charges. In fact, when he pled guilty on the first day of the tax trial in September 2024, it was in an extraordinary procedure (a so-called Alford plea) in which he refused to concede guilt.

Why didn’t he just go to trial and be found guilty, as he had done in the gun case? Because the priority was the Democrats’ presidential campaign. The guilty plea spared Kamala Harris and other Democratic candidates across the country a six-week trial in the run-up to Election Day that would have focused on the big bucks Hunter raked in (and didn’t pay taxes on) from the Biden family business of being bought by agents of corrupt and anti-American regimes.

No rational defendant with highly experienced defense counsel willingly goes down on every single charge, with potential decades of prison exposure — unless he knows he’s going to be pardoned. Indeed, as Hunter’s failed sweetheart plea deal elucidates, defendants typically fight hard for an agreement in which they plead to just one or two counts, aiming for the lightest potential incarceration term.

To run the FBI, Trump could have nominated Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris, Hunter’s “sugar bro,” and Biden would still have issued the sweeping pardon. There was too much risk to do otherwise, not just for his son, but for Biden himself and the others implicated in the influence-peddling scheme.

Biden Family Influence-Peddling Pardons

That is why, as I predicted earlier this week, there will surely be additional pardons for those implicated. Again, I don’t think Biden will pardon himself. He has to be reasonably confident that the Trump Justice Department will not pursue an 82-year-old former president — one suffering mental decline, one who an experienced DOJ prosecutor has already suggested is not fit for such an ordeal, and one who just did Trump a solid by dismissing his own Justice Department’s Trump prosecutions (rather than make Trump do it himself once he takes over, which would have been a political headache).

Hunter’s pardon makes no sense, however, unless the other major figures in the Biden influence-peddling scheme are pardoned. That’s because the immunity bath has eviscerated his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. That is, unless other pardons are granted to make the scheme comprehensively non-prosecutable, the Hunter pardon would become an enticement to the Trump Justice Department to subpoena the president’s son to the grand jury and probe him for evidence regarding crimes and suspects to which the Biden Justice Department turned a blind eye.

Swing and a Miss

As for ongoing Biden White House deliberations over the preemptive “blanket pardons,” one must ask: What were the Democrats expecting? When you strike at a king, you must kill him (cue progressive X/Twitter: “MAGA suck-up Andy McCarthy proclaims Trump is a king!”). The axiom is attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, but he probably got it from Machiavelli.

The Democrats knew that Trump is a habitually vengeful sort (a “fighter,” say his fans) who prides himself in punching back harder at all detractors, no matter how relatively trivial. Yet Democrats decided to play with fire. They spent four years exploiting the government’s law enforcement apparatus and Congress’s boundless investigative authority to probe, prosecute, civilly sue, imprison, stigmatize, and endeavor to bankrupt Trump, his advisers, and his political allies. They indicted Trump in four different jurisdictions simultaneously, expecting him, while campaigning for office, to prepare for four felony trials under the threat of centuries of imprisonment. In so doing, they further decided to search his home, which included tossing his wife’s private spaces. For good measure, New York’s attorney general, aided and abetted by another elected progressive in judicial robes, tried to put him out of business in a fraud suit with no actual fraud victims. Oh, and as progressives ratcheted up their Trump-is-Hitler rhetoric, two maniacs tried to assassinate him.

I’m sure there are no hard feelings, right?

Of course, Democrats thought they were killing the king. They assumed (as did I, as an observer) that no one could survive this kind of onslaught. But they were out on legal limbs, which, to their consternation, the federal courts sawed off. Plus, their unabashed weaponization of the legal system offended and frightened untold millions of Americans. No matter how voters felt about Trump (and a narrowing majority still holds him in disfavor), they realized that if progressive Democrats could do this to Trump, they could do it to anyone — an impression progressives bolster by becoming irrational, hysterical, cancel-prone, and occasionally riotous when things don’t go their way.

Despite himself, and despite taking the Democrats’ best shot, Trump survived and thrived.

Pardon Games and Government Gangsters

Remember the House January 6 committee? Trump dubbed it the “unselect committee” because the Democrats’ then-speaker Nancy Pelosi outrageously blocked the Republicans’ chosen members from sitting because of their Trump loyalties (a move Pelosi conceded was “unprecedented”) even as Democrats, bereft as ever of self-awareness, derided Trump for breaking norms. Well, in some of the slickly produced made-for-TV hearings, Vice Chairwoman Liz Cheney — a Republican with strong conservative national security credentials who decided to become the personification of Trump abhorrence — made a huge deal of testimony that, following the Capitol riot, several of her then-fellow House Republicans had made entreaties to the Trump White House about pardons.

These Republicans hadn’t broken any criminal laws. They had engaged in partisan, duplicitous behavior: playing along with Trump’s post–2020 election “stop the steal” mischief and soft coup attempt. They knew these stratagems had no possibility of reversing the election result, but they calculated that the performance would enhance their status as MAGA darlings. But then, as sometimes happens, things got out of hand: Trump supporters rioted at the Capitol. Suddenly, Trump’s House GOP allies were thinking that maybe they needed pardons because the Biden-Harris DOJ was surely going to make their lives miserable — actual indictments might be unlikely, but years of anxiety and legal fees loomed. Maybe if Trump would pardon them — especially if he was thinking of pardoning himself — that would discourage the onslaught.

Naturally, Cheney portrayed her colleagues who had made pardon inquiries as having effectively confessed that they were felons. In this, she took a page from the Supreme Court’s 1915 opinion in Burdick v. United States, which asserts, in dicta, that a pardon “carries an imputation of guilt” and that acceptance of a pardon is tantamount to “a confession” of guilt.

Well, now it’s Democrats who tried a strategy — lawfare — that got out of hand and, in the end, may not only have hurt them but helped get Trump elected. If you play these kinds of games and you fail to kill the king, what do you suppose is going to happen?

Kash Patel has said a lot of overwrought things about “deep state government gangsters.” As I mentioned a few days ago, it’s the topic of his 2023 book. Much of his critique about abuses of power attendant to Russiagate is sound, but his farcical “gangsters list” — which I imagine will be an interesting topic of conversation at his confirmation hearing — includes the likes of Bill Barr and Sarah Isgur, solid law-and-order conservatives who would be pillars of any Justice Department fortunate enough to have them. The schtick here is obvious: Whatever his virtues, Kash is a Trump loyalist and says, in his book, literally, that if you’ve been critical of Trump and you’ve served in the executive bureaucracy, you’re a “gangster.”

What Goes Around Comes Around

Well, okay, fine. But not all “gangsters” get prosecuted. More to the point, if there’s going to be lawfare in the Trump administration, the source of it is going to be Trump, not Patel — who won’t even have authority to charge anyone (that, as he correctly insists in the book, is DOJ’s call, not the FBI’s). It’s not Patel’s provocateur routine that puts Democrats in jeopardy. It’s that they took their shot at Trump, missed, and now have to worry about the oldest rule in politics (and in life): What goes around comes around.

Martin’s Politico report notes some actual wisdom on the topic of blanket pardons from longtime Trump tormentor Adam Schiff. A California Democrat who will enter the next Congress as a senator, Schiff is a shrewd, sharp-elbowed, often mendacious former prosecutor who will surely be assigned to the Judiciary Committee that will vet Trump’s nominees for top DOJ and FBI posts. “I would urge the president not to do that,” Schiff said of preemptive pardons. “I think it would seem defensive and unnecessary.”

He’s right. To repeat myself again, immunity principles similar to the ones that got Trump out of his predicaments would similarly protect government officials (including members of Congress) whom Trump and his allies have accused of misconduct.

Now, if people have given false testimony or destroyed evidence, that could be another story. I’d be surprised if anything actionable comes of claims that Anthony Fauci made misleading statements to Congress, or that the J6 committee deleted records before the 2023 Republican takeover of the House. On the former, I don’t know enough about the Fauci allegations, but, again, I’d be surprised if he didn’t carefully couch whatever he said — perjury is very tough to prove against a careful witness. On the latter, the propriety of a congressional committee’s disposition of its data is for Congress to deal with, not DOJ or the FBI. (And note that the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee already issued a report lodging various complaints about the J6 Committee but took no other action.)

Look, if Democrats are just generally worried about being investigated, pardons would be powerless to prevent that. Prosecutors and grand juries have broad investigative leeway, even when charges seem unlikely. Plus, pardons are no defense against civil suits, which DOJ also has jurisdiction to bring in various contexts. Beyond that, Schiff is correct: blanket pardons are unnecessary because these officials are not going to be charged with crimes over their official actions, and blanket pardons would seem defensive because Republicans would limn any pardons granted by Biden as implicit confessions of guilt — just like Democrats and the J6 Committee did regarding Republicans who broached pardons with Trump.

Democrats would like to prevent Kash Patel from becoming FBI director, and thus they’d like you to see him as the culprit in their pardon frenzy. As a political lightning rod, Patel is doing Trump no favors. But Democrats are in these straits because (a) the Biden family made big bucks peddling Joe Biden’s influence for many years, yet the Biden-Harris DOJ turned a blind eye, and (b) those who live by the lawfare sword should expect it to be swung right back at them — and while they’re unlikely to die by it, they should expect to feel the same kind of anxiety they’ve caused.

Of course, we’d all be better off, and Trump would have a better chance of a successful presidency, if there were no more pardons and no more lawfare. I’m not holding my breath.