This article was published by The National on December 2, 2024
By pardoning his son Hunter, departing US President Joe Biden has not only gone back on his word, but he has also cast another terrible stain on his already tarnished legacy. The Gaza war had already greatly besmirched Mr Biden’s record, but he could still point to a creditable response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including the expansion of Nato to include Finland and Sweden. And his domestic legislative accomplishments were truly remarkable.
He seemed to bolster his legacy by stepping aside after a disastrous debate performance, in which his pronounced ageing visibly rendered him unfit for another four years in the White House. Stepping aside was obviously a very difficult thing to do. But he had no choice.
Many would say Mr Biden should never have run in the first place. But that’s easy to say from the outside. It is very likely that he, like a great many ageing people, did not recognise the extent of his decline, and his immediate inner circle, including his own family, must bear tremendous blame for failing to confront him with that cruel fact.
But now, by breaking his promise not to pardon his son, Mr Biden has embraced at least a limited version of the culture of corruption and abuse of power he warned about regarding his incoming successor, Donald Trump.
The presidential pardon power is virtually unlimited, but it was presumed by the framers of the US Constitution to be deployed for socially useful purposes, not family favours. The fact that Mr Biden’s predecessors, including Bill Clinton and Mr Trump, cynically used pardons to benefit allies is no excuse. And it is particularly alarming given what Mr Trump is preparing for federal law enforcement and the Department of Justice.
He has just nominated one of his most ardent supporters, Kash Patel, to become director of the FBI, the American central government’s police force. Mr Patel is noted, amid many other disqualifying statements and actions, for vowing to prosecute everyone “involved” in the non-existent rigging of the 2020 election, which Mr Trump lost.
Like all the other election deniers, Mr Patel knows perfectly well that Mr Biden won. There is no evidence of any significant fraud in the 2020 election, and a great deal of evidence that it was one of the cleanest and best-run in US history. Moreover, it’s absurd to claim that the “deep state” and the Democrats were unable to “rig” the two elections Mr Trump won in 2016 and 2024 when they held the White House and all the mechanisms of federal power but were somehow able to do so in 2020 when Mr Trump was in the White House.
There’s never been any plausible theory, let alone evidence, about how the 2020 election was “stolen” and the whole scenario defies plausibility, with at least 435 different voting districts in the US, each with their own ballot. In many cases Mr Biden and a prominent down-ballot Republican were selected on the same ballot. The whole thing makes no sense. But Mr Patel appears sincere in wanting to prosecute somebody for doing something to try to soothe Mr Trump’s ego.
Mr Trump learnt something crucial in 2020: he had failed to pack loyalists entirely beholden to him in high-power portfolios, such as law enforcement, military and intelligence, so his path to retaining power was, ultimately, narrowed to inciting a riot that attacked Congress in an effort to block the confirmation of Mr Biden’s victory. This time he’s taking care to try to appoint loyal, though less-qualified, people in such positions, including the FBI.
The main bulwark now will be Republicans in the Senate, only a few of whom will be needed to join Democrats in blocking these alarming appointments. These are precisely the kind of American politicians most likely to fail the test of standing up to Mr Trump.
They already informally baulked at his attempted nomination of the scandal-plagued Matt Gaetz for attorney general. So now they will be stuck with a more qualified nominee, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. She’s a long-time Trump loyalist, known for endorsing the chant of “lock her up” aimed at Hillary Clinton in 2016, being part of his defence team in his first impeachment trial, vocally supporting him at his trials in New York, and denouncing federal prosecutors preparing charges against him as “horrible people” who are “weaponising our legal system”. But compared to Mr Gaetz, she looks like a perfectly reasonable selection.
To get Mr Patel into the FBI, Mr Trump will somehow have to force out serving director Christopher Wray long before his 10-year term has ended. But merely the nominations of the likes of Mr Gaetz, Ms Bondi and Mr Patel signal that Mr Trump is committed to doing away with the traditional independence of the FBI and the Justice Department and to their actual weaponisation as a tool of politics.
It is shocking that Mr Biden, who was one of the loudest voices warning about Mr Trump’s intentions, would give him such a powerful tool for justifying his own transgressions by pardoning his son. He swore time and again that he wouldn’t do it, because he knows it’s absolutely wrong and antithetical to the civic virtue nature of the presidential pardon power.
As he appoints and empowers his friends and relatives, as he pardons his allies, and as he packs the government with personal loyalists, you can expect Mr Trump to point to this outrageous pardon and say: “See, everybody does it.” It’s what he’s always tried to say about his worst misbehaviour. It’s not true, and it never was, but many will conclude Mr. Biden has confirmed it.