WSJ Pretends Trump, Not ‘Grant Clemency Like Candy’ Biden, Wrecked ‘Sober-Minded’ Pardon Process
The Wall Street Journal published an article on Wednesday complaining that President Donald Trump has “turned the pardon process into the Wild West” without hardly addressing the unprecedented pardon rampage that dominated President Joe Biden’s White House tenure.
“What had long been a sober legal proceeding done by career officials in the Justice Department increasingly resides in the White House and depends on the whims of a president who is receptive to arguments of political persecution,” the article states.
“Sober-minded” is not a fair or accurate description of the recent get out of jail free frenzy led by an obviously mentally declining president who issued the largest number of pardons (some allege using an autopen). to date.
Biden’s rushed end-of-term pardons included unprecedented preemptive forgiveness for family members such as his brother James Biden and reckless bureaucrats such as Mark Milley and Anthony Fauci, essentially confirming their guilt. More notably, the Democrat exculpated his son of several tax evasion and federal gun convictions mere weeks before his scheduled sentencing, even though he repeatedly insisted his offspring would not get a free pass for his alleged crimes.
Biden also quietly commuted the sentences of Chinese spies, including one who was convicted after “police found more than 47,000 images and videos of child pornography in his computer.”
The authors, all WSJ reporters, devoted just one of their more than three dozen paragraphs to acknowledge that “Biden also skirted the pardon system.” They immediately followed that small admission with a paragraph criticizing Trump for issuing “more pardons than any of his predecessors at this stage of a presidential term.”
The placement of that factoid was deliberately designed to redirect negative attention away from Biden’s elbow-rubbing pardon frenzy back to Trump. Even after one term and counting, however, Trump issued only a fraction of the 8,064 pardons Biden initiated over his four years in office.
Would the Founding Fathers, who warned that “the benign prerogative for pardoning should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed,” be happy about the significant increase in presidential pardons since George Washington’s days? Probably not. They would, however, likely understand Trump’s attempt to rectify the nation-destroying harms Democrat-led lawfare wreaked on Americans during Biden’s term through the lens of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist 74.
The quality of the pardons granted by Trump versus those granted by Biden, however, is also wholly ignored by the authors. In fact, Trump’s sympathy towards “defendants he believes have been wrongly prosecuted” such as pro-lifers and J6ers was lamented by the WSJ writers as just another way convicted criminals “use lobbyists, personal connections to president” to obtain clemency.
“Traditionally, the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney has played a key role in the clemency process,” the article continued. “The office was sidelined after Trump took office, according to Liz Oyer, who had been the pardon attorney until she was fired in March.”
What the WSJ wrote as an alleged concern actually suggests a startling admission. If the DOJ, which few U.S. adults say they have confidence in, truly “played a key role in the clemency process” during the Biden administration by aiding and abetting the president’s attempt to wash away his family’s alleged sins, then it is corrupt and deserves to be circumvented — if not dismantled.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
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