The debate over President Joe Biden’s granting pre-emptive pardons to Donald Trump’s potential political targets has clearly reached a new phase. A Politico report this week helped get the ball rolling, drawing attention to a “vigorous internal debate” within the White House.
In every respect, that conversation is becoming more and more intensive. The Washington Post published a front-page above-the-fold report on the deliberations, which noted: “The effort is being led by White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients and White House Counsel Ed Siskel said the people, suggesting that the issue is being treated seriously at the highest levels of government.”
The Associated Press released a related report, noting that the outgoing president personally “discussed the subject with some senior aides,” and The New York Times report on the developments said the same.
Not surprisingly, there is also an increasingly public component to the conversation, as some members of Congress and leading commentators – such as the Times’ Michelle Goldberg – express support for the provocative idea.
The debate is new, but simple: as regular readers know, the idea behind preventive pardons is to protect innocent people from possible – by some measures likely – prosecutorial abuses before they happen. In other words, people close to Biden believe that Trump and his loyalists, bent on revenge and fueled by retaliatory ambitions, are likely to conduct unlawful investigations of perceived enemies — and the outgoing Democratic president can prevent that by issuing a sweeping series of pardons now grant. , before leaving the White House.
This isn’t an easy decision for a variety of reasons, but for many Republicans watching the discussion unfold, it’s all completely unnecessary.
For example, Republican Rep. Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania described future preventive pardons as “nonsense” because “nobody” plans to go after people like former House Republican Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney. What the congressman may not remember, however, was an online post Trump amplified in June that accused the former Wyoming congressman of “treason” and raised the prospect of “televised military tribunals.”
Similarly, Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin asked online, “If Anthony Fauci and Liz Cheney committed no crimes, why are Democrats asking Joe Biden to pardon them?” The answer, of course, is that Trump and his sycophantic allies — including Kash Patel, the president-elect’s pick to head the FBI, who has already drawn up a literal list of enemies — could very well try to prosecute Fauci and Cheney, among others . whether they did something wrong.
But the piece de opposition came from Republican Representative Jim Jordan. HuffPost noted the Ohioan’s head-shaking comments to Fox Business host Larry Kudlow:
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said Thursday that Donald Trump has “never talked about retaliation,” as the White House considers the idea of preemptive pardons for people who have long been in the president-elect’s crosshairs.
The far-right chairman of the House Judiciary Committee began by calling the idea of preemptive pardons “ridiculous,” before telling the television audience in apparent seriousness, “Donald Trump has never talked about retribution.”
Maybe he was referring to another Donald Trump?
I can understand why a preemptive pardon would be controversial, but to pretend that the president-elect has little interest in seeking revenge on his perceived enemies is to deny what is plainly true.
In the recent past, Trump has been in the White House, spending a bizarre amount of time and energy on reprisals against perceived political enemies – both in the political and private sectors – seeking worthless prosecutions of opponents. All this has been thoroughly documented and confirmed by officials who worked closely with him during his tenure.
In the run-up to Election Day 2024, Trump was a private citizen with no access to government power, yet he sought to use his political influence to exact revenge — even against members of his own party.
As for the immediate future, the president-elect essentially deployed a retaliatory platform: Trump said he wanted to go after his perceived domestic political enemies, and he didn’t seem particularly interested in hiding his intentions. On the contrary, he continually spoke of his desire to abuse presidential power.
Reasonable people can disagree about the value of preemptive pardons, but the question of whether or not Trump has unprecedented vengeful ambitions has already been answered.
This message updates our related previous reporting.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
