Wednesday, Feb 12, 2025

As Trump Prepares to Take Office, Democrats Push for ‘Preemptive Pardons’

 

 

Leading Democrats are calling on President Biden to issue “blanket” preemptive pardons for a broad group of people, including Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Dr. Anthony Fauci and many others whom they believe will become targets of Donald Trump once he takes office.

Preemptive presidential pardons would arguably shield these individuals from prosecution by the incoming Trump administration. The flip side is that accepting a pardon could be seen as an admission by these officials that they committed wrongdoing.

This would leave them open to congressional investigations whose political fallout could potentially ruin their reputations and end their careers. In addition, they could still be compelled to testify in congressional probes implicating the Biden administration, without recourse to “pleading the Fifth” (as they already have immunity).

But a tarnished reputation is still preferable to a jail sentence, most would agree.

As discussions about preemptive presidential pardons gain momentum, some argue that the idea of a president granting broad immunity to friends and family runs counter to fairness and common sense.

“[Blanket] preemptive pardons should alarm anyone who values justice and accountability, especially considering President Joe Biden’s expansive pardon of his son Hunter,” wrote former Michigan AG Michael Cox in the Detroit Free Press.

Cox was referring to the sweeping pardon Hunter just received for the past 11 years of crimes or potential crimes.

“While the U.S. Constitution grants the president broad authority to pardon, using this power to shield political allies…twists it into a weapon of impunity, not a tool of justice,” Cox wrote. “This was not intended as a blank check for presidents to inoculate their allies or family members from accountability.”

Senior White House aides say the nominations of Trump loyalists Kash Patel to lead the FBI and Pam Bondi as U.S. Attorney General indicate Trump’s intent to focus on retaliation, prompting talk about his political adversaries needing protection from his wrath.

Donald Trump denies that revenge is his priority, and supporters note that he did not prosecute or harass political opponents during his first administration.

Asked in a Meet the Press interview whether he would seek retribution against his political enemies, the president-elect said, “I’m really looking to make our country successful. That would be the best retribution.”

 

Taking Aim at ‘Deep State’

Patel, former senior director at the U.S. National Security Council, and Florida AG General Pam Bondi, have both declared their intention to dismantle the “deep state” which they claim is thoroughly corrupt.

The deep state refers to a network of elected and unelected federal officials and party leaders deeply entrenched in Washington, who exert significant behind-the-scenes influence to advance their own agendas.

While elected officials leave office at the end of their terms, many deep state bureaucrats outlast leadership changes. They maintain their powerful posts and their grip on influence, sometimes to the point of hobbling the new political leadership.

Patel and Bondi have both set their sights on reforming the DOJ and FBI, which they claim have been infested with deep state power brokers who, in coordination with the Biden administration, have weaponized these agencies against Republicans.

Patel has repeatedly declared that United States’ security and law enforcement agencies need to be rebuilt from the top down.

 

‘Government Gangsters’

Patel published an explosive book last year called “Government Gangsters, The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy.”  In the book, the author singles out a number of people he identifies as members of the “deep state” who “must be held accountable and exposed.”

President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, outgoing FBI Director Christopher Wray, and former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton are among the most prominent names mentioned.

“The shocking details of what the Deep State has already done to increase its power fill this book,” Patel wrote. “There are no depths to which the Deep State will not descend, no lives they will not destroy to get their way,” he wrote in his book. “But that doesn’t mean they are invincible.”

Patel explicitly called for the revamp of the FBI in a chapter dubbed “Overhauling the FBI,” where he attacked the agency for its “betrayal of the American people.”

“The FBI has gravely abused its power, threatening not only the rule of law, but the very foundations of self-government at the root of our democracy. But this isn’t the end of the story. Change is possible at the FBI and desperately needed,” he wrote.

According to Patel, FBI Director Wray will be unfavorably remembered for the launching of multiple investigations of a sitting and then former president for political goals. His legacy will be tainted by his rounding up of peaceful pro-life protestors, and the harassment of law-abiding parents for demanding school boards remove obscene content from their children’s school curriculum.

Other scandals which undermined the FBI’s image under Wray are his election interference by bullying social media to conceal the Hunter Biden laptop story, and the fact that under his watch and that of U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, fentanyl traffic increased exponentially, causing thousands of American lives to be ruined through addiction.

 

Sen Grassley’s Scathing Letter

Two weeks ago, Senator Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, sent Wray a scathing 11-page accounting of the FBI director’s “contempt for Congress,” as expressed in his consistently stonewalling and ignoring requests for crucial documents sought in Senate probes.

Grassley also harshly criticized the FBI director for slow-walking investigations that could cast the Democrats or the Biden administration in a negative light.

“At the very beginning of your tenure as FBI Director, I presented you with evidence of the FBI’s failure to adequately investigate Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of highly classified information when she was secretary of state, another example of federal law enforcement double standards,” Grassley wrote.

“Yet another glaring example of FBI’s broken promises under your leadership is its inexcusable failure to investigate bribery allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden, while strictly scrutinizing former President Trump,” the letter continued.

“You’ve repeatedly claimed you would ensure the FBI does justice, ‘free of fear, favor, or partisan influence,’” Grassley wrote. “However, the FBI under your watch had possession of incriminating information against President Biden for three years but did nothing with it, until I exposed the existence of [this information].”

The Iowa senator traced a pattern of deceit that he said dated back to 2016, when Wray pushed for the infamous “Steele Dossier”—a fraudulent document that was orchestrated by Hilary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign—to be included in the debunked Russian-collusion probe intended to undermine President Trump.

Wray supported the dossier despite indications that it was bogus. After it was exposed as a fraud, there was no acknowledgment of error from the FBI director.

“This represented some of the most egregious, Orwellian conduct I’ve witnessed in my nearly 50 years in the Congress,” Grassley wrote.

 

DHS, FBI, Secret Service Fail to Respond to Task Force on Trump Assassination Attempt

Grassley’s harsh words about the FBIs double standards and lack of accountability carry extra weight in light of a report just released by a bipartisan House Task Force, summing up its findings about the two assassination attempts on President Trump in the summer of 2024.

The report detailed the “preexisting conditions and leadership failures” that led to the assassination attempts, but indicated its investigation into the second attempt was stonewalled by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

According to Fox News, the Task Force noted that “as of the date of publication of this report, DHS, Secret Service, FBI, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) have not produced any documents responsive to our requests regarding their preparation for, and response to, the second assassination attempt that occurred on September 15.”

Speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation” a few days before the report was released, task force chair Mike Kelly, R-Butler, and ranking Democrat Jason Crow of Colorado said federal law enforcement agencies have refused to release the information the group needs to finish its picture of the assassination attempts, both in Butler and in West Palm Beach, Fla.

“There is one area, as you point out, that we weren’t able to get to,” Rep. Crow said. “That’s actually a really important element to the story. And people have rightful questions about it. I have questions about it. And that is, why did the shooter do this? What drove him to do it? Was he a lone wolf shooter? Did he have associates or affiliates? What was his motivation? How was he radicalized?”

Crow said that while the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI have said they can’t release information about an ongoing investigation, members of Congress regularly are briefed on the nation’s top secrets. They go to a secure room and they receive the details, he said.

“When they stonewall you, when they hold you back, what would you automatically think? What is it they don’t want us to know?” Mr. Kelly said. “We’re here to make sure this doesn’t happen again, to the best of our abilities. So it was frustrating.”

He said the failure of the federal agencies to give the task force the information it sought “just sends up a red flag right away.”

“At the end of the day, the American people have to have confidence in you and at this point it’s hard to have confidence with people who won’t share information with you,” Kelly said.

From ‘Hiding in the Shadows’ to Under the Spotlight

Complaints about a lack of cooperation from federal agencies that employ a double standard of justice are not new.

Long before Trump won a landslide victory in the Nov. presidential election, Pam Bondi predicted that Republicans, after taking back the White House, would have to “clean house” at the Department of Justice.

In August 2023, during an appearance on Fox News, Bondi railed against the criminal indictments against Trump and the “two-tiered system of justice” on display.

“When Republicans take back the White House, and we will be back in there in 18 months or less, you know what’s going to happen? The Department of Justice, the prosecutors—the bad actors—will be prosecuted. The investigators will be investigated,” Bondi vowed in 2023.

“Because during President Trump previous term of office, the deep state was hiding in the shadows,” Bondi continued. “But now, they have a spotlight on them and they can all be investigated … We can clean house next term and that’s what has to happen.”

She also implied action could be taken against President Joe Biden amid Republican allegations that President Biden was personally involved in and benefited from his family’s overseas business dealings.

Biden, who corresponded frequently with Hunter’s business partners, dined with his foreign associates and who, according to the House Oversight Committee, received direct monthly payments from Hunter’s business entity, Owasco PC, is almost certainly guilty of influence peddling, Bondi has said.

 

A Quest for Accountability

Democrats assume that Trump and his appointees will use the Department of Justice to retaliate against some of the perpetrators of the long-running attacks on him, because that is the course they have pursued against their own political foes.

“Through subpoena after subpoena, impeachment after impeachment, FBI raid after FBI raid and court case after court case, Democrats have terrorized Mr. Trump, his children, his aide and many of his advisers,” wrote former Trump advisor and Deputy Director of Trade Peter Navarro in a Washington Times op-ed.

“Even today, Mr. Trump faces a possible prison term from one bogus case in New York, another Manhattan judge has stolen nearly $1 billion from him in legal costs and fines, and a D.C. judge is holding him hostage in a lawsuit,” Navarro wrote.

“Our country’s law enforcement agencies for years have bent in only one direction,” agreed a Fox News op-ed. “While more than 1,100 Trump supporters who protested the 2020 election on January 6 have been rounded up, and over 600 sentenced to prison, there have been few prosecutions for the riots that took place after the murder of George Floyd.

“We don’t want vengeance. We want accountability,” the author wrote. “Accountability for the Russia collusion lie, the elaborate hoax cooked up by Hillary Clinton’s campaign that undermined Donald Trump’s first four years in office.”

Where is accountability for a person like Adam Schiff, who lied repeatedly that he had secret proof of Trump’s supposed ties to Russia, the article demanded.

Rep. Schiff, D-Ca, served as chair of the House Intelligence Committee and was privileged to information many other government officials were not. So, when he lied about having evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, many believed him, and an investigation was launched. After millions of American tax-payer dollars were spent investigating the claim, Schiff was revealed as a liar.

He was impeached by the House and publicly censored in the halls of Congress, but retained his post and was just elected to the Senate by Californians.

“We want accountability for the DOJ giving Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton a slap on the wrist for their mishandling of classified documents, but indicting Donald Trump for the same thing,” the op-ed continued.

“We want someone held accountable for allowing a sniper to lie on a roof and almost kill Trump, for the disastrous pull-out from Afghanistan that cost 13 service members their lives, for tens of thousands of fentanyl deaths and for so much more.”

Many have called for accountability in another case of the guilty walking free—Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the NIAID, whose name was floated by White House aides for a possible preemptive pardon.

Fauci has drawn renewed scrutiny after the release of the massive Final Report released earlier this month by the House subcommittee that included a damning indictment of his pandemic policies.

The report — which confirmed that Covid-19 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China — corroborated allegations that Fauci “played a critical role in disparaging the lab-leak theory” among top scientific circles early in 2020 and later to the public. The report reveals the likely reason he strove to cover up the virus’s man-made origin.

It supports claims that Fauci funded the gain of function research in Wuhan that may well have triggered the pandemic that killed millions of people. It suggests that he lied to Congress in his congressional testimony to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. when he denied this fact.

However, it’s doubtful whether Dr. Fauci would accept forgiveness for his crimes; he says he hasn’t committed any.

“I don’t know what anyone would prosecute me for,” he told CNN in August.

***

 

Cover Up At the Highest Levels

As an example of what he called the perversion of justice at the nation’s top law enforcement agencies, FBI nominee Kash Patel, speaking to Fox News, cited a 2016 episode regarding two former FBI heads of the counterintelligence committee, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

These two officials led the Russia collusion investigation against Donald Trump during his first administration. The pair were fired when confiscated text messages to one another on their phones showed their hatred for Trump and determination to scuttle his presidency.

The Strzok-Page texts, which were uncovered by an associate of Strzok, revealed a widespread practice of “unauthorized media-leaking of classified information by high-ranking FBI and DOJ officials,” according to the Daily Signal.

In one text exchange that helped seal his doom, Strzok tells Page that he wants to talk to her “about a media leak strategy with DOJ.”

The very next day, the Washington Post broke the story that the FBI had obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants to electronically eavesdrop on the Trump campaign, after “evidence surfaced” that Trump’s campaign manager was working for the Russians.

With their cover blown, Strzok and Page were dismissed but their telltale texts with their explosive contents “remained in the hands of the FBI for a year, while FBI and DOJ thwarted congressional investigators from accessing them,” disclosed Kash Patel during a Fox News appearance.

“We finally were able to access the material when I became senior director of the National Security Council,” Patel said, and the full story came out of how the media-leaking scheme in collusion with the DOJ was orchestrated.

The story ends with a startling twist.

This July, Strock and Page received from Department of Justice a combined payout of $1.5 million to settle a lawsuit they brought for “improper disclosure” of their private texts on FBI phones.

“In other words,” Patel emphasized his point, “the DOJ rewarded the two people who broke the law, the chain of command and every FBI regulation to weaponize the justice department against a political target they hated.”

Ironically, just a few days before FBI Director Chris Wray announced his resignation, a report was released by the Inspector General that revealed that Kash Patel himself was the target of a secret investigation launched by the FBI.

With his resignation last week, some speculate that Wray may soon join the ranks of the erstwhile “hunters” who now fear becoming the hunted.

 

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