The pardon issued by US President Joe Biden to his son Hunter has been described as the “most sweeping” this side of Gerald Ford’s reprieve of Richard Nixon.
“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served as the US pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997, to Politico.
“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned.”
Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son, on the other hand, is deliberately vague, apparently aimed at heading off future prosecutions from a Trump-controlled Department of Justice. Indeed, in the face of condemnation in the media — and from both sides of politics — Biden’s defenders have noted Trump’s appointee for FBI director, Kash Patel, seemingly has a fixation on Hunter.
Way back at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Virginia delegate Edmund Randolph worried that “the prerogative of pardon in these cases was too great a trust. The President may himself be guilty. The Traytors may be his own instruments.” Indeed, this is only the latest in a long line of controversial uses of the presidential pardon, which is by its very nature frequently a heady cocktail of conflicts of interest and eccentric choices.
Donald Trump
Randolph may have been thinking of Donald Trump. Indeed, the frequently intoned argument that Biden’s decision gives cover or “permission” for Trump to act more brazenly seems fairly thin, given the pardons Trump issued in his first stint in the White House.
Trump pardoned many members of his inner circle who had been charged with various crimes. There was former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who had previously been sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for an array of charges, including witness tampering in the then ongoing Robert Mueller investigation into Russian influence on the Trump campaign.
The former president also pardoned former campaign adviser Steve Bannon, who was arrested and charged with defrauding Trump supporters. Trump pardoned Charles Kushner too, the father of Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner (over the weekend, Trump nominated Charles to be ambassador to France). And Trump issued several reprieves to long-time Republican operative Roger Stone, which must have been such a thrill for a guy with a photorealistic Richard Nixon tattoo on his back.
Other noteworthy recipients include rapper Lil Wayne, who had pleaded guilty to a federal weapons charge. There was also an attempt to posthumously pardon the pioneering suffragette Susan B. Anthony, who had been convicted of voting in 1872, before it was legal for women to do so. The head of the Anthony Museum declined to accept the pardon on the grounds it would validate the original conviction.
Bill Clinton
Joe Biden is far from the first person to pardon a relative. On his last day in office in 2001, President Clinton busied himself with a staggering 140 pardons, including one for his half-brother Roger, who had spent a year in jail after pleading guilty to drug charges.
However, that wasn’t the last-day pardon that drew the most ire — he also pardoned disgraced financier Marc Rich, who had fled to Switzerland after being indicted for evading more than US$48 million in taxes. Rich’s ex-wife Denise just so happened to have donated more than US$1 million to Democrats and Clinton’s presidential library. A DOJ investigation into the pardon followed, which ultimately found that Clinton had done nothing illegal.
George HW Bush
While Kamala Harris was desperately keen for their endorsement, Ronald Reagan’s former staffers did not run a scandal-free administration. Reagan’s defining scandal was the Iran–Contra affair, the revelation that the US had been secretly selling arms to the Iranian regime for most of his presidency. Reagan held off pardoning any of the figures associated with the scandal, leaving it to Bush, his vice president and successor, to get that done towards the end of his only term.
Reagan pardoned several figures associated with the Watergate affair — including Mark Felt, the FBI official who would later reveal himself to be “Deep Throat”, the insider who fed information to journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein before the story broke. As California governor, Reagan had pardoned country music legend Merle Haggard.
Gerald Ford
Surely one of the most notorious pardons in US history is Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon his predecessor, Richard Nixon, for his “official misconduct” as president. His logic in granting it is perhaps the inverse of the reason Susan B. Anthony’s representatives refused it: in accepting the pardon, Ford argued Nixon had accepted his wrongdoing.
Coming as it did before Nixon had even been charged with anything, it caused outrage at the time — Ford’s press secretary resigned in protest — and came to be known as Ford’s defining act as president before he lost in 1976 to Jimmy Carter.
For his part, Nixon’s most controversial pardon was mafia-linked Labor leader and “solidarity”-yeller Jimmy Hoffa, who had been a strong supporter of the Republicans following the investigations he was subject to by Democrats like Robert Kennedy Sr.
Other noteworthy pardons
Jimmy Carter, on his second day in office, granted amnesty to thousands of young men who had “dodged the draft” to escape military service in the Vietnam War. In the aftermath of the American Civil War, Andrew Johnson issued pardons to thousands of former Confederate officials and military personnel. Johnson also pardoned, after he had spent some years in prison, Dr Samuel Mudd, who had treated the leg John Wilkes Booth broke in the aftermath of assassinating then president Abraham Lincoln.
Have something to say about this article? Write to us at letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
