Biden Set the Stage for Today’s Pardon Disgrace

By Noah Rothman

Monday, November 10, 2025

 

President Trump’s profligate pardons continued apace this week with the announcement that he would hand down “full, complete and unconditional” reprieves to anyone who was involved in his effort to alter the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

 

The recipients of the president’s beneficence include Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Boris Epshteyn, Sidney Powell, and dozens of Republican activists “who signed paperwork falsely claiming to be legitimate presidential electors,” Politico reported, “a key component of the bid to pressure [Vice President Mike] Pence” to deny the certification of the states’ votes on January 6, 2021.

 

The maneuver does not seem to have moved the activist left to outrage. Perhaps they have only so much bandwidth for ire, given that they are consumed with hostility toward Democrats for (as it appears) allowing the government to reopen. Or maybe the muted reaction to Trump’s decision to pardon the erstwhile members of his inner circle before they were even charged with a crime represents a prudent effort to avoid having to once again condemn Joe Biden. After all, it’s not like Trump invented preemptive pardons.

 

Biden’s pardons of his family members, January 6 committee participants, and public officials like Anthony Fauci — all in the absence of any charge and seemingly only to promote the political narrative that the incoming Trump administration was salivating over the opportunity to persecute them — set the stage for today’s disgrace.

 

“This proclamation ends a grave national injustice perpetrated upon the American people following the 2020 Presidential Election and continues the process of national reconciliation,” the document announcing Trump’s pardons read. But these pardons and commutations will put an end to nothing. The proclamation only present us with more evidence that the political party that forges new weapons for itself to wield in the ongoing culture war will see those instruments turned against it soon enough.

 

And yet this unavoidable conclusion seems to elude the political class. Either that or its members can convince themselves that the urgency of our present circumstances compels us to set aside our prudential concerns and leap into the abyss.