Preemptive Pardons: Biden’s Scarlet Letter

Well, now he’s done it. Biden has finally carried out preemptive pardons for the people he feared would be targeted by Donald Trump. He’s afraid that Trump will seek revenge for the actions that these people took during his presidency. It apparently hasn’t occurred to him that these people have nothing to worry about unless they broke the law.

Oops.

That’s the problem that Biden seems to want to ignore. All the people he has pre-pardoned—retired Gen. Mark Milley, Dr. Anthony Fauci, members and staffers of the Jan. 6 Committee, and the police officers who testified before the committee—all of them are suspected of breaking the law. And if they accept the pardon, they will have given up their 5th Amendment rights.

These preemptive pardons are intriguing because they incriminate all of these people with the crimes they did commit: for one, Gen. Milley betrayed President Trump by offering to alert the Chinese:

Milley made two phone calls in the waning months of the Trump administration to Gen. Li Zuocheng, the commanding general of the Chinese military. The first occurred Oct. 30, four days before the election. Woodward and Costa relate that Milley sought to reassure his counterpart in Beijing that the U.S. would not launch a surprise nuclear attack. Milley is reported to have told Li that he would contact him if an attack by the U.S. was imminent. Milley reached out a second time in the aftermath of the assault on the U.S. Capitol to reassure the Chinese that the U.S. government remained stable. Milley reportedly told Li that ‘democracy can be sloppy sometimes.’

After the fact, Milley claimed that his actions were appropriate.

The evidence is available on Anthony Fauci’s crime:

Richard Ebright, board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University and laboratory director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology, told Newsweek these documents show ‘unequivocally’ that NIH grants were used to fund controversial gain-of-function (GOF) research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China—something U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci has denied.

There are questions about “missing” evidence from the Jan. 6 Committee, as Rep. Barry Loudermilk describes in a letter to Rep. Bennie Thompson:

Nowhere in the letter does Loudermilk say the recordings were destroyed. There are no reputable news reports that he made that claim and no evidence of the destruction of the records. ‘Whether the missing information has been destroyed, was sent to other entities or is still in the possession of members of Congress from the select committee is uncertain at this time,’ Loudermilk said in an emailed statement to USA TODAY.

Questions about the Capitol Police's role in the Jan. 6 riot emerged:

While we found no evidence that officers allowed the mob in willingly, the security breakdown that enabled rioters to breach the building is under intense scrutiny, and officials have said an investigation is imminent.

And there are questions about police testimony:

The whistleblower, who requested anonymity for privacy reasons and left the force months after the attack, sent the 16-page letter late last month to the top members of both parties in the House and Senate. His missive makes scorching allegations against Sean Gallagher, the Capitol Police’s acting chief of uniformed operations, and Yogananda Pittman, its assistant chief of police for protective and intelligence operations — who also served as its former acting chief. The whistleblower accuses Gallagher and Pittman of deliberately choosing not to help officers under attack on Jan. 6 and alleges that Pittman lied to Congress about an intelligence report Capitol Police received before that day’s riot. After a lengthy career in the department, the whistleblower was a senior official on duty on Jan. 6.

It’s unclear whether those pardoned by Biden would need to apply for the clemency or even accept the offer at all. Any acceptance could be seen as a tacit admission of guilt or wrongdoing, validating years of attacks by Trump and his supporters, even though those who have been pardoned have not been formally accused of any crimes.

We’ll have to wait and see whether people accept Biden’s preemptive pardons, ignore them, or reject them. No matter what they decide, they have been branded as likely criminals. Whether they can still be investigated by Congressional committees is unclear.