Former President Joe Biden said he was “concerned” about Donald Trump giving preemptive pardons to family members, according to a resurfaced interview from 2020 — before he went on to pardon his own son and siblings while doling out the highest number of presidential pardons and commutations in US history.
In a December 2020 interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Biden warned against then-outgoing President Trump issuing preemptive pardons to his adult children, his attorney Rudy Giuliani and possibly even one for himself before the Democrat’s Department of Justice took over.
“It concerns me in terms of what kind of precedent it sets and how the rest of the world looks (at) us as a nation of laws and justice,” Biden told Tapper during the joint interview with then-Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
That concern, however, was short-lived, with the ex-commander-in-chief on Monday announcing the unprecedented decision to grant blanket, preemptive pardons to his siblings and their spouses, claiming his family had been “subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me — the worst kind of partisan politics.”
“Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end,” he said.
Biden was lambasted by both Republicans and Democrats last month after he pardoned his troubled son, 54-year-old Hunter Biden, who was convicted in September on federal gun charges and on federal tax evasion charges, after repeatedly promising he would not.
In addition to his family members, Biden on Monday pardoned Dr. Anthony Fauci, retired Gen. Mark Milley, and members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, fearing retribution from a resentful second-term Trump.
The move made him the first president to pardon people neither charged with nor suspected by law enforcement of committing a crime, according to the Washington Post.
Some of those pardoned had even warned Biden against such a flex of presidential power.
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who served on the Jan. 6 committee, said last month he didn’t want a pardon, telling ABC News that “preemptive blanket pardons on the way out of an administration is a precedent we don’t want to set.”
With a few strokes of the pen in his final few weeks in the White House, Biden set the record for the most presidential pardons and commuted sentences of any US president, Axios reported.
He is not the first president to pardon family members. Former President Bill Clinton infamously pardoned his half-brother, Roger Clinton, who had pleaded guilty to drug charges.
Trump granted clemency to fewer people than his successor during his first term, but he did pardon Charles Kushner — the father of his daughter Ivanka Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner, who was convicted in 2005 of preparing false tax returns, retaliating against a cooperating witness and illegal campaign contributions. Trump then named the wealthy real estate developer as his ambassador to France in November.
Hours after his second inauguration on Monday, Trump issued an estimated 1,500 pardons for Jan. 6, 2021, rioters, fulfilling a promise to grant clemency to nearly all of those convicted of trying to stop the transfer of power from Trump to Biden.
