U.S. President Joe Biden has pardoned Dr. Anthony Fauci, Liz Cheney and members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and retired general Mark Milley, to guard against potential retaliation by the incoming Donald Trump administration.
The decision by Biden comes after Trump warned of an enemies list filled with those who have crossed him politically or sought to hold him accountable for his attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss and his role in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump has selected cabinet nominees who backed his election lies and who have pledged to punish those involved in efforts to investigate him.
“The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offence,” Biden said in a statement. “Our nation owes these public servants a debt of gratitude for their tireless commitment to our country.”
It’s customary for a president to grant clemency at the end of his term, but those acts of mercy are usually offered to everyday Americans who have been convicted of crimes.
But Biden has used the power in the broadest and most untested way possible: to pardon those who have not even been investigated yet. And with the acceptance comes a tacit admission of guilt or wrongdoing, even though those who have been pardoned have not been formally accused of any crimes.
“These are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing,” Biden said, adding that “even when individuals have done nothing wrong — and in fact have done the right thing — and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances.”
Biden cites threats and intimidation
Fauci was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health for nearly 40 years and was Biden’s chief medical adviser until his retirement in 2022. He helped co-ordinate the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and raised the ire of Trump when he refused to back Trump’s unfounded claims.
He has become a target of intense hatred and vitriol from people on the right, who blame him for mask mandates and other policies they believe infringed on their rights, even as tens of thousands of Americans were dying.
Fauci said he appreciated the gesture from Biden.
“I have committed no crime … and there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation or prosecution of me,” Fauci told ABC News.
Mark Milley is the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and called Trump a fascist and detailed Trump’s conduct around the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Since leaving office, Trump has directed his ire at Milley in social media posts and speeches over perceived wrongdoing, sometimes using explicit language and even suggesting the military leader was treasonous. Milley has said he has had to take security precautions into retirement.
U.S. President Joe Biden is reportedly considering pre-emptive pardons for prominent critics of Donald Trump, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, to shield them from potential retaliation when Trump takes office.
“I do not wish to spend whatever remaining time the Lord grants me fighting those who unjustly might seek retribution for perceived slights,” Milley said in a statement. “I do not want to put my family, my friends and those with whom I served through the resulting distraction, expense and anxiety.”
Biden in his statement Monday cited how the public servants pardoned had faced “ongoing threats and intimidation for faithfully discharging their duties.”
Biden is also extending pardons to members and staff of the Jan. 6 committee, including former House members Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, both Republicans who angered Trump’s base by agreeing to join the bipartisan group, which included seven Democrats led by committee chair Bennie Thompson. Biden’s pardon also pertains to the U.S. Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan police officers who testified before the committee.
Kinzinger told CNN earlier this month that while he understand the rationale for potential pre-emptive pardons from Biden, he wasn’t personally interested in receiving one.
“The second you take a pardon it looks like you’re guilty of something,” he said. “I’m guilty of nothing except bringing the truth to the American people and, in the process, embarrassing Donald Trump.”
Trump hints at his own pardons
Biden has spent years warning that Trump’s ascension to the presidency again would be a threat to democracy. His decision to break with political norms with the preemptive pardons was brought on by those concerns.
Biden has set the presidential record for most individual pardons and commutations issued, a list that included a pardon for his son, Hunter. The president announced on Friday he would commuting the sentences of almost 2,500 people convicted of nonviolent drug offences.
Biden previously announced he was commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row, converting their punishments to life imprisonment just weeks before Trump, an outspoken proponent of expanding capital punishment, takes office. In his first term, Trump presided over an unprecedented spate of executions, 13, in a protracted timeline during the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump, taking office Monday, has mused about pardoning some who have been convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, siege, calling them “political prisoners” on occasion in the past. J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice-president-elect, has said people responsible for the violence during the Capitol riot “obviously” should not be pardoned.
More than 1,500 people have been charged with federal crimes stemming from the siege that left more than 100 police officers injured and sent lawmakers running into hiding. A female Trump supporter was shot to death inside the Capitol when a throng of people tried to enter a restricted area.
Hundreds of people who did not engage in destruction or violence were charged with misdemeanour offences for illegally entering the Capitol. Others were charged with felony offences, including assault for beating police officers. Leaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys extremist groups were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Biden is not the first to consider such pre-emptive pardons.
President Gerald Ford granted a “full, free and absolute pardon” in 1974 to his predecessor, Richard Nixon, over the Watergate scandal. He believed a potential trial would “cause prolonged and divisive debate” and that Nixon had “already paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest elective office of the United States.”