How bad were former President Joe Biden’s last-minute autopen pardons and clemencies? So bad that his administration’s own Department of Justice begged him not to issue many of them.
How bad was former President Joe Biden’s administration? His Department of Justice was apparently blocked from weighing in on those autopen pardons and clemencies — in other words, from how justice was administered.
And to think: They wanted this man and his enablers in the White House for another four years.
According to an email reviewed by the Washington Times, Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer thought language used in a single autopen warrant, which gave pardons to hundreds of federal criminals, was “highly problematic.”
In the Jan. 18 email — sent two days before Biden left the White House — Weinsheimer said that the wording of the autopen pardon was so non-specific that it would commute sentences “in circumstances, including for crimes of violence, that was not intended.”
Well, intention was a heck of an assumption to make on Weinsheimer’s part — but I’m guessing the rest of his email wasn’t.
From the Times’ report on Tuesday:
[Weinsheimer] also noted that the Justice Department was blocked from playing any role in vetting the candidates for clemency. He said the White House granted some pardons despite “voluminous objections” from the victims’ families.
Should all of Biden’s autopen pardons be overturned?
The Justice Department released the Weinsheimer email to the legal watchdog group Oversight Project amid the Trump administration’s investigation of the Biden White House’s heavy use of the autopen. It shows for the first time that top career lawyers at the Justice Department objected to the volume and scope of the last-minute pardons and questioned their legality.
Biden’s DOJ was already a deeply poisoned institution for reasons that could again be described as “voluminous” — too voluminous to recount in any great detail here — but apparently even they were appalled by the record number of pardons and commutations being issued by Biden in the final days of his presidency.
Yet, the only one which the 82-year-old president put pen to paper on himself, according to reports, was the one he clearly wanted: the pardon for his son, Hunter, who had been convicted on federal gun charges and pleaded guilty to federal tax charges.
Despite the fact that federal attorneys in both Republican and Democratic administrations have deemed that the use of the autopen by the executive is legal and makes a document authentic, this assumes the president is in his right mind. If he’s non compos mentis, that presents a unique set of problems that law scholars haven’t really dealt with in any detail, one assumes, because they’d figured that this was a pure hypothetical that would be sorted out under the 25th Amendment should that situation arise.
Well, turns out that wasn’t the case, despite the party that called for it to be used during Donald Trump’s first term having a chance to try it out themselves once it became clear Joe Biden was in no shape to govern.
They didn’t, and the fact that at least someone knew it would be wise for him to hand-sign the pardon for Hunter as opposed to the rest indicated that someone in his circle knew that the autopen signature in his case was a new legal gray area.
And, indeed, reports have come surfaced that the autopen operators were given a list of people to prepare pardons for before Biden’s people decided on pardons — with, apparently, no clear evidence on the autopen operation side of things that it was actually Biden who approved wide swaths of categorical pardons.
As the Times reported, the sweeping categorical pardon that Weinsheimer was objecting to put some, um, interesting folk in a better legal position, in some cases to the point they’re out of jail:
Among those granted clemency were dozens of violent criminals whom the Justice Department deemed “highly problematic.” They included Russell McIntosh, who fatally shot a woman and her 2-year-old child after she threatened to expose his drug business. Others who received commutations were violent gang leaders and people convicted of crimes involving killings, kidnapping and rape.
McIntosh and most of the other violent offenders pardoned by Mr. Biden have been released from prison and now freely walk the streets.
Other pardoned offenders remain behind bars on shortened sentences, and the Oversight Project wants the Justice Department to deem their pardons illegal and bar them from release. They also want more documents and emails released that reveal who in the Biden administration put together the pardon list, as well as how they may have acted improperly on behalf of a cognitively impaired president.
Good luck with that. Back in June, President Donald Trump ordered an investigation into the autopen pardons — but these things often take media pressure to make happen, and that simply isn’t going to occur if recent history is any guide.
On the three major broadcast news networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — there was zero coverage of damning Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the autopen usage between June 18 and June 23, but over 229 minutes of coverage on the trial of Karen Read, the Massachusetts woman found not guilty of killing her police officer boyfriend.
And how much coverage will there be of the fact that even Biden’s DOJ had questions about the autopen pardons, which put infant-killers, kidnappers, drug dealers, and rapists back out on the street? Probably zero, again.
After all, Karen Read is back in court and wants most of a wrongful death lawsuit against her dismissed, according to the Boston Globe — and that’s what’s really important, right?
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
