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On the precipice of the institutionalization of pardoning lawlessness

Writer's picture: Armstrong WilliamsArmstrong Williams

PUBLISHED: January 27, 2025 | newschannel9.com

President Joe Biden speaks during a church service at Royal Missionary Baptist Church in North Charleston, S.C., Sunday, Jan. 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
President Joe Biden speaks during a church service at Royal Missionary Baptist Church in North Charleston, S.C., Sunday, Jan. 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)

The following is an editorial by Armstrong Williams.


We fought a revolution to make the rule of law king and overthrow the tyrannical doctrine that the king can do no wrong.


We are in danger of losing it all and returning to the law of the jungle dominated by cavemen.

On his last day in office, President Joe Biden jumped all constitutional and historical boundaries in preemptively pardoning his family and many of President Donald Trump’s detractors: Joe’s brother James Biden and his wife Sara; brother Frank Biden; sister Valerie Biden Owens and her husband John Owens; Retired General Mark A. Miley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Anthony S. Fauci and his former chief medical adviser; all Members of the Jan. 6 Committee, including Liz Cheney and Bennie Thompson, and Capitol police officer Michael Fanone, who risked that last full measure of devotion to preserve the peaceful transfer of presidential power.


Jan. 6 members Adam Kinzinger and Adam Schiff explicitly refused the unprecedented pardons for hypothetical crimes as stigmatizing and unwarranted. The United States Supreme Court held that pardons can be rejected because they carry “an imputation of guilt and a confession of acceptance of it” in Burdick v. United States (1915).


None of the pardon recipients were under federal investigation for crime. None had been formally charged with a federal crime. None had any reason to fear the formidable procedural safeguards against injustice — including the right confront and cross-examine accusers, to call exculpatory witnesses, to a jury of peers, to proof of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and an automatic right of appeal — would be insufficient to protect them against wrongful prosecution or conviction. Moreover, the pardons were powerless to protect the recipients from a Trump vendetta pivoting on alleged facts post-dating Jan. 20, 2025, like easily contrived crimes of money laundering or tax evasion. What was Biden’s point other than to show disdain for our constitutional order?


Biden was undeterred by the flagrant conflict of interest in pardoning his own family members. He is a recidivist on that score. Remember Biden also pardoned his son Hunter Biden (after promising he wouldn’t) pivoting on the absurd allegation that the president’s own administration had treated Hunter unfairly!


Trump predictably promised to better Biden’s pardon instruction on his last day in office in 2029. He should be taken at his word.


But Trump also abused the pardon power on his first day in office. He pardoned or commuted the sentences of nearly all 1,600 participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack to thwart the peaceful transfer of presidential power. The beneficiaries included defendants convicted of violent crimes against the Capitol or Metropolitan Police defending the Constitution and the rule of law.


In the days after the attack on the Capitol, officer Brian D. Sicknick suffered a stroke and died of natural causes. Two others traumatized officers, Jeffrey Smith and Howard S. Liebengood, died of suicide in the days after the violence. More than 150 police officers were injured during the attack.


Trump’s pardons or commutations were as demoralizing to police as were the “Defund the Police” chants after George Floyd’s death. Aquilino A. Gonell, a former Capitol Police sergeant, complained to The New York Times, “It’s a miscarriage of justice, a betrayal, a mockery, and a desecration of the men and women that risked their lives defending our democracy.” Mr. Gonell’s views were echoed by others, including the older brother of Sicknick and Harry Dunn, former Capitol Police officer.


The Fraternal Order of Police, which endorsed Trump in 2024, and the International Association of Chiefs of Police, were equally critical. They protested that, “Allowing those convicted of...crimes [against law enforcement] to be released early diminishes accountability and devalues the sacrifices made by courageous law enforcement and their families.” Who will join the police and put their lives in the cross hairs with the knowledge that they could be attacked and even killed with impunity?


Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D. responded that his concerns were forward-looking, not backward-looking to evade criticism of Trump. But pardons look backward to what has happened. They cannot reach the future. Did the majority leader’s sophistry betray political cravenness?


The Constitution’s authors recognized that the pardon power could be abused to shelter personal or political friends. They believed that such abuses would be treated as impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors resulting in the offending president’s removal from office. They did not anticipate the emergence of a polarized two-party system in which supreme party loyalty has turned impeachment into a scarecrow. Witness the failed impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton and Trump (twice).


We should consider amending the Constitution to delete the pardon power which has fallen into a downward spiral. There are no guardrails against misuse.

___

Mr. Williams is Manager/Sole Owner of Howard Stirk Holdings I & II Broadcast Television Stations and the 2016 Multicultural Media Broadcast Owner of the year.

Follow me on X: @arightside

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