The Pardoners' Tales
Open and Shut
About a month ago I wrote the following in this space:
When the dust settles the Biden administration will be revealed as one of the most duplicitous and destructive administrations in U.S. history, with added emphasis from the “big guy” himself as he heads out the door. Biden’s cynical, kitchen-sink pardon of his son is really a self pardon, a legal firewall thrown up between his corrupt doings and culpability.
As it turned out, I was premature in my pronouncement as a few days later Joe Biden was back at it, issuing a follow up round of ironclad preemptive pardons to the likes of Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, and any member of the House January 6th Committee with a heartbeat.
And then, as things further turned out…I was doubly premature, as Biden passed out even more pardons - no less than 20 minutes before leaving office - to all near and dear; e.g fellow members of the family syndicate.
It was, of course, fitting that middle class Joe from Scranton - who spent his administration on the beach and had a weakness for vacationing at billionaires’ compounds - did not issue pardons to everyday people, who had suffered from glaring miscarriages of justice. Au contraire. Aside from commuting death sentences handed out to individuals convicted of doing patently evil things, Biden favored the venerable, not the vulnerable: Notables in positions of responsibility, authority, and leadership.
In other words, people of stature and standing, entrusted with more than just your garden variety sinecure. What is expected of such folk is a certain standard of proficiency, not to mention a loftier level of integrity. So why would our betters require such sweeping pardons in the first place, particularly when they had never been convicted of a crime, much less charged with one?
Exploration and Resistance
The answer, of course, lies more with the pardoner and less with the pardoned.
To my knowledge, none of these exalted individuals has rejected Biden’s offer, yet I suspect they would leap to protest their innocence. Biden, in his customarily inept form, may have provided them legal cover at the cost of conferring upon them a whiff - if not the stench - of guilt.
Beyond that, the president’s rationale for granting these pardons is that he feared that these individuals would be subjected to retribution from a new administration. Translation: He wanted to protect them from the same sort of lawfare he and his DOJ goons have visited upon his successor.
Joe Biden’s pardons relate to four of the biggest stories - and their accompanying fallout - of his administration, and perhaps of our generation.
These include: Covid, the January 6th Capitol Riot, the Afghanistan Withdrawal, and the exploits of the Biden Crime Family.
These are big, consequential stories that share a common taproot. But they have not been fully explored, and thus not fully explicated to the public, because they have been met with formidable resistance from people in power. Leading the obstructionist charge is no less a force than our overbearing administrative state, which, under Biden, has engaged in unprecedented campaigns of censorship, disinformation, and two-tiered justice. The leviathan, meanwhile, has garnered support and cultivated obedience from other influential parties, notably Big Tech, the Democratic Party, and the mainstream media.
Amid the chaos of the past four years people have died, been injured, and had their lives turned upside down. The country’s standing has fallen in the world whilst its fate has been cast adrift at home. Livelihoods have been lost, childhoods maimed, reputations ruined, and souls imprisoned just for trying to live and breathe in a “free” America.
Unresolved amidst the fog of political war are questions of who exactly knew what and did what and why. And most notably, perhaps, was our president on the take from the country’s principal adversary, and to what extent did that undermine national security.
Joe Biden’s pardons are a naked effort to ensure the public remains in the dark on those important questions - at a time when our elites went out of their way to abuse and squander the public trust bequeathed them. And above all, his pardons are not just a brazen attempt to legally immunize his cronies, but to shield the president himself. Joe Biden will be remembered for nothing if not the The Mother of all Coverups.
Under the Dome
The day he assumed office Donald Trump pardoned some 1600 people convicted of crimes relating to the January 6th riot at the U.S. Capitol. Roughly a quarter of these people received prison terms, some of them ample, if not draconian, in length.
Two days later, Trump also pardoned 23 people convicted of protesting outside abortion clinics and subsequently imprisoned. A number of these individuals were in their 60’s and 70’s. One of them was an 89 year old woman who at one point in her life had been imprisoned in a concentration camp.
(Compare the government’s legal response to that of the “mostly peaceful” riots of 2020 which lasted all summer and wreaked havoc across the country.)
It is impossible to understand the January 6th Riot without placing it in the full context of the time - and retrieving certain details that some are all too eager to memory hole. To wit:
- The strange goings on - Mark Zuckerberg’s $330 million worth of drop boxes, for example - surrounding the unprecedented flood of mail in ballots - nearly 70% of votes cast - and the voting irregularities on election day, notably in a handful of key swing states.
- The suppression of - and dissembling around - the Hunter Biden laptop, involving 51 so called intelligence “professionals” and orchestrated by that non player character, Antony Blinken, who went on to be handsomely rewarded with a top job in the Cabinet.
- The cherry picking and suppression of evidence and coaching of witnesses by the January 6th committee.
- January 6th being relentlessly peddled by partisans as an “armed insurrection” on a day in which a single (fatal) shot was fired - by a Capitol Hill police officer at a protester entering the building.
It would be nice if some day the full story of what led up to January 6th and what occurred on that day would be told. We would be privy to the whole truth and nothing but the truth; the good, the bad, and the ugly. It would not only be a gripping documentary, but a salutary effort. But that will not occur, as Biden, with his host of pardons, has buried that possibility. Somebody should tell him that democracy dies in darkness.
While Biden gave out multiple unprecedented and legally dubious pardons, corrupting the process in his inimitable fashion, Trump gave out two blanket pardons in the traditional sense - to people already convicted of crimes, and perhaps worthy of mercy.
Trump’s pardons will perhaps have the effect of opening up part of the January 6th saga, or lending nuance to the white hot debate around abortion. People might be able to decide for themselves if justice was served, or were citizens exercising their constitutional rights suddenly cast into America’s Gulag by a punitive state?
Biden’s pardons were a wholesale effort to ensure that that question - and a host of others - never be fully answered. They were intended to put a lid on questions of incompetence, corruption, and malfeasance surrounding matters of not just national interest but national security. He wants these matters consigned to the dark. He wants to keep the bodies buried. After all, exhumation could produce an unbearable stench that would pursue him beyond his own grave.