President Biden’s and President Trump’s pardons have generated a lot of controversy. But there are considerable differences between the two sets of pardons, with a two-tiered system of justice unfairly biased against Jan. 6 defendants.
Last month, Biden pardoned his son, Hunter. And then, on his last day in office, Biden pardoned five family members. That same day, Trump pardoned 1,500 people who were convicted or facing trial for the Jan. 6 riot.
The media’s coverage of these pardons has been dramatically different. Take the New York Times, which describes Biden’s preemptive pardons as a way to “guard” from a “promised campaign of ‘retribution’ by his incoming successor, Donald J. Trump.”
But after the 2020 election, the Times accused President Trump of using his power to “apply his own standard of justice for his allies.” That included Paul Manafort, his 2016 campaign chairman, and Roger J. Stone Jr., his longtime informal adviser and friend. Another beneficiary was a family member, Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
The New York Times quoted this week the older brother of Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick, who died naturally from a stroke the day after Jan. 6. “The message to me is that the United States is no longer a nation under the rule of law and anything goes,” Craig Sicknick was quoted as saying.
News coverage on ABC, CBS, and NBC spent 46 minutes and 32 seconds covering Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons but only three minutes and 32 seconds on Biden pardoning his family.
Overall, Biden has pardoned and commuted sentences for a record 4,245 criminals, including 37 murderers on death row. Some of these individuals are mass murderers, child rapists, and torturers who then murdered their victims, and many have never expressed remorse.
While the pardons by both Biden and Trump are controversial, there are big differences between them.
The cases against the Jan. 6 defendants overwhelmingly involved legal system abuses. A politicized Department of Justice brought charges before juries in the District of Columbia that were heavily biased against Republicans and a circuit court that Democrats heavily control. The jury pool was from a district where Biden had received over 92% of the vote in 2020. Prosecutors with infinite budgets prosecuted ordinary people who didn’t have the resources to defend themselves.
The Biden Department of Justice clearly overcharged these defendants. For example, when a case finally got to the U.S. Supreme Court (Fisher v. United States), the court sternly reprimanded the Biden Department of Justice, saying a statute dealing with corporate fraud clearly shouldn’t have been used against more than several hundred defendants. Finally, the Department of Justice never gave defense lawyers 44,000 hours of video evidence. It isn’t a prosecutor’s job to determine what you think might be helpful to defense lawyers.
Trump’s pardons of those who engaged in violence during the riot, particularly those who had hurt police, generated the most controversy. But even here, there was a two-tiered system of justice.