Transcript for Pardon Me

[Announcer]
This is Extemporaneously presented by Jacobin Brothers. And now, Marc Jacobin.

[Marc Jacobin]
Literally on his way out the door, Joe Biden issued another flurry of pardons that challenged the boundaries of presidential power, and will surely be seen by history as abuse of power.

James, what did he do this time?

[James Jacobin]
Well, on January 19th, right before he would leave office, good old President Joe pardoned preemptively, in historic fashion, members of government such as the January 6th Committee members, Dr. Fauci, among others. And even more concerning and strange, he pardoned members of his own family, who had never been subject of accusations of criminal wrongdoing. Now, obviously, his son Hunter was, but we covered that in a prior show.

He pardoned both his brothers. It makes one wonder what exactly his brothers did to need a pardon, because I don't believe they'd ever even come up in the public discourse.

[Marc Jacobin]
That is very strange, because there are elements of the Biden opposition who refer to the Biden crime family. And with Joe pardoning all of the members of his family, that would seem to lend credence to that allegation.

[James Jacobin]
It could, but also it's the political rumblings forever. In the 60s, it was the Kennedy crime family. Then it was the Nixon criminal organization, which was true by then.

[Marc Jacobin]
For both of them.

[James Jacobin]
And then you had the Clinton crime family, the neocon Bush criminals, the Obama regime.

[Marc Jacobin]
This is the first time that a sitting president has seen fit to pardon his inner circle. That's what's strange.

[James Jacobin]
I mean, preemptively, the argument they're making is based on stuff that Trump had not done. They take Trump at his word when it suits their need to abuse power and their means to hoodwink the public and gaslight the public. If Trump says, I'm going to build a wall, they'll believe him, right?

Or excuse me, they won't believe him and they'll mock him and they'll say he's incompetent and stupid and he doesn't know what he's doing. But if he says, I am the retribution, and then he flat out says, I mean, on behalf of the American people for the bad deal they've gotten the last four years and the last 20 years, they interpret that to their supporters as he's going to, without cause and provocation, use the power of the office and the Justice Department to unlawfully investigate people he does not like.

[Marc Jacobin]
Now, that sounds awfully familiar.

[James Jacobin]
Well, this is what happened. It's what they did to him, as some legal scholars say, and a lot of the American public believes. That's why Trump got elected.

And their proof of that now is the fact that he's signing executive orders looking into the January 6th Committee. Their proof that he's acting outside the Constitution or non-presidentially is him using a presidential authority granted him by the Constitution, the executive order, the right to ask for things to be looked into, exactly what the January 6th Committee did. And Trump is now looking in to see the validity of the January 6th Committee and his second impeachment.

Now, Marc, as we know, I'm no fan of Trump. I did not think it was legal, constitutional, or the right thing to do to hold a impeachment trial after the president left office. Now, Mitch McConnell disagreed with me, and it came and went.

Trump is now looking into the legality of that. That is not retribution upon political adversaries. That's simply clarifying something to the American public that should have been clarified four years ago.

[Marc Jacobin]
Because the ultimate arbiter of truth and law and constitutionality is not the president, is not the Congress.

[James Jacobin]
Well, it's the Supreme Court.

[Marc Jacobin]
It's the Supreme Court.

And unless and until a matter hits the Supreme Court, no one can say definitively whether something is legal or constitutional.

[James Jacobin]
Yeah. And getting back to the pardons of this, Marc, the power of the pardon as defined in Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution, pretty much gives the power of the pardon as absolute. And if there's any debate about that, we can often go back to, oh, my goodness, the Federalist Papers or the body of evidence that took place during the debate before something was put in the Constitution to clarify what the founders were thinking.

And then the Supreme Court can also take that into consideration as far as is this the spirit of the law. There was a massive debate between Alexander Hamilton and George Mason. Now, George Mason is not nearly as well known because no one did a Broadway play about him rejuvenating his image.

But George Mason, Marc, argued against the pardon. And I'm not going to read the quote, but I'll paraphrase it, was he strongly objected to it, not because it would be taken abuse in their time, but a future president could pardon people with involving crimes that could lead back to the president. Now, that's exactly what appears to have happened here, although I have no proof that Joe Biden did this, but his action makes him look guilty of something.

What that is, I don't know. And no one does. Because when you're pardoning members of your inner circle and members of your personal family, not involved in government, you're doing this, and I'm going to quote Joe Biden himself here, this should not be looked at as these people having committed any criminal actions, nor their acceptance of it, an admission of guilt.

Now, that's a statement by the president, but he's acting like the monarch that George Mason feared 260 years ago, when it is law that when you accept the pardon, such as Richard Nixon from Gerald Ford, that's an admission of guilt of what you're being pardoned for, even if you hadn't been charged for it. So Joe Biden's statement is a monarchical statement. He's just saying as absolute fact, and he signed his name to it.

And when you read the Fauci pardon itself, it reflects this. It reflects a breaking of tradition, and it reflects a monarchical attitude towards precedent and towards what's actually in the constitution.

[Marc Jacobin]
And that brings us to preemptive pardons. This is the first time in the country's history that a president has taken to preemptively pardoning, saying this person hasn't done anything, but I'm going to pardon them anyway, so don't take it as a presumption of guilt. In every prior instance of pardons, especially blanket pardons, there has been either A, a conviction, or B, a presumption of guilt, such as after the Civil War, pardoning the draft dodgers.

There was a presumption of guilt that yes, you had done this thing wrong and we're going to forgive you for it, and that will be the end of it. So to pardon someone who's presumed to be innocent, that has not happened.

[James Jacobin]
No, and it goes against the general spirit of what the foundation was to word it in the constitution itself by making the power absolute, is the underlying foundation of that is this. Give the power of the pardon to the president and the president only, not to the president and a committee, not to the president and his cabinet for this reason. The president is charged with the welfare of the country.

And it specifically says, not in the constitution, but in the Federalist Papers, the president needs the unlimited power of the pardon for the welfare of the nation. Now you could use Gerald Ford specifically for this. When he pardoned Richard Nixon, he came out and said, it is for the welfare of the country in so many words.

And he said, someone has to put a stop to this. And the Congress embeds me with that authority, so I shall do it. Now he went on national TV and publicly explained himself to the electorate, most likely costing him re-election, but it was good for the overall welfare of the country.

And history has been kind to Gerald Ford for that. Jimmy Carter unpopularly pardoned all the draft dodgers. Looking back on it, a very presidential thing to do was for the welfare of the country.

The country was coming apart at the seams over this issue. When Joseph Biden pardons his brothers, and when he pardons preemptively Dr. Fauci for any crimes he may have committed, mainly in relation to the COVID fiasco, he's also pardoning him going back to 2014. Now, where they get this 10-year period from, I don't know, because he did the same thing with his son, Hunter Biden.

So I don't know, maybe he's saying a president. So if Dr. Fauci, prior to becoming a national figure due to the COVID worldwide pandemic, if he committed some other federal crime in his office, he's now pardoned for that as well. He's also short-circuiting the fact that we, as the public, have a right to have our so-called public servants, as Joe Biden described all these people in his pardons, on whether or not they're publicly serving us and if they've misused their power or committed federal crimes.

Now, we don't know if Dr. Fauci did or did not do anything that was criminal. But this is an attempt to keep the American public from ever finding out for ourselves and judging for ourselves whether or not Dr. Fauci or his staff acted not improperly or in bad faith, but criminally and violated federal statutes, specifically as I think it relates to gain of function.

[Marc Jacobin]
Yes, gain of function known colloquially as bioweapons. And that brings us up to the next topic of these preemptive pardons, which is Joe Biden has denied justice to the American people. He has short-circuited government.

He has told the American people, no, you don't get to know what has happened and you don't get to hold the people responsible who may have committed a crime. And this, I think, is horrendous. Now, had Anthony Fauci been convicted of a crime or had he been at least indicted and Joe Biden pardons him, that's well within the bounds of precedence.

But simply saying, well, if he did commit a crime, we're going to forgive him for it, that smacks of George III and every other European monarch that has ever lived where the king protects the people loyal to him.

[James Jacobin]
Yeah. What do you think the most damage has been done here in relation to all these, I guess we're calling them preemptive pardons, preemptive of what? I'm not sure.

What do you think the most damage done here to the American people is?

[Marc Jacobin]
First of all, I think it's justice denied. Second, it's a very dangerous precedent because every future president can now use this preemptive pardon power to their advantage and create or continue to advance the banana republic in which we now live as a result of Joe Biden's expansion of presidential power. It does not bode well for a rule of law.

[James Jacobin]
It speaks straight to the heart of the matter of why the media is dying and why the media is no longer credible and why it's being completely reshaped on the run. Marc, we don't have to go back to the Andrew Johnson's pardon of the entire Confederacy. We don't have to go back to the controversial Nixon forward pardon of which no one listening to this either knows about or it's not modern pop culture.

We can go back four years and just go to YouTube and look at the media, specifically the networks not favorable to the Trump administration, talking about the grievous injustice it would have been if Trump on his way out the door, Marc, and we're talking, this is before Trump leaves office, and they categorically were against him pardoning his children or his family for crimes they may or may not have committed while in office with President Trump or prior to coming to office in their dealings with the Trump organization.

Now, they were just up in arms about that. Now, Trump didn't do it. Biden comes along just four years later, does that, and goes much, much further.

There has not been a peep from the so-called media objecting to or calling for a national conversation or a national debate or a congressional debate even on the legality. Also, on our government, Marc, so much is based on precedent. It's not necessarily legal, but presidents usually follow the good moral standards set before them, such as George Washington leaving after two terms voluntarily.

When Trump does not abuse the power of the pardon nor pardon himself, which is a big gray area, and then four years later, the people accusing him of doing something of which he never did do just that. It opens the door for President Trump on day one of his administration to pardon all 1,500 people convicted through due process in the January 6th riots. Now, had Biden not done what he did on the way out the door, there would be a very legitimate backlash against President Trump for doing this because some of these people committed horrendous acts of violence and should remain in jail.

[Marc Jacobin]
The difference is these aren't preemptive. These people have either been indicted or convicted or charged. And Trump isn't saying that this isn't an implication of guilt.

He's exercising the power in accordance with history. So even if Biden hadn't issued his preemptive pardons, Trump is within the bounds of tradition to pardon these people.

[James Jacobin]
But I don't think it even comes close to meeting the standard of the welfare of the nation, the person who breaks the...

[Marc Jacobin]
Yes, it does, because the rule of law must be applied evenly. And when you had thousands of people running rampant across the country, burning down metropolitan areas, and none of them were held to account by the Democrat establishment that ran those cities. And now you have people who were simply present.

Present. I'm not talking about the people that committed crimes, who were standing around, or whose cell phone was determined by the FBI through warrantless searches to have been present in the Capitol that day. Those people were charged.

So you really were talking about prosecutorial misconduct long before you get to whether or not they should be pardoned.

[James Jacobin]
And those cases should have been individually pardoned. But when you're talking about the riots that took place, colloquially known as the George Floyd riots, those were on the state level. The power of the pardon does not extend to the states.

That is a completely separate issue. So when Donald Trump is responding to the lack of action by governors who allowed crime to run rampant and didn't hold their individual citizens responsible for crimes committed against, say, the state of Oregon, right? He is now using the power of the pardon to write a wrong that was never within the purview of the federal government to write to begin with.

And this is what I mean, this slippery slope of, sure, there's certainly of the 1,500, there's many people that deserve a pardon, right? And they should have been looked at individually. But Donald Trump was able to sweep it all away because no one would complain.

Like, what you just said, Marc, is not being said on one national talk show or one well-known podcast. And that would be a great debate, wouldn't it now? The wordless convictions of these people, the prosecutorial misconduct in those individual cases, but that doesn't change the extreme violence that I'd say 10 to 20 of these people got convicted of, or the sedition conviction of the person that was proved through his communications to go to the Capitol to create chaos, mayhem, and stop.

[Marc Jacobin]
And those folks weren't pardoned. Six of the folks who were guilty of the most serious crimes.

[James Jacobin]
Most of these presidents pardoned people on their way out the door. When Bill Clinton pardons Marc Rich, which really kicked off the abuse of the pardons, the billionaire tax cheat and finance fraud guy who was overseas, had no connection to politics, certainly not the welfare of the country, but he's a friend of the Clintons and a Clinton donor. And that line was broken.

Now, instead of the midnight pardons on the way out the door, Donald Trump on day one is tossing out controversial pardons because a new standard has been set. If you see the prior president does something like the Hunter Biden pardon or the Dr. Fauci pardon, and there's no uproar over it, well, then I'll just go ahead and stretch this even further. And now we're getting dangerously close because Trump was implicated in this.

[Marc Jacobin]
I think we should blame Oprah for this.

[James Jacobin]
I think we could probably blame Oprah for a lot, but what did she do this time?

[Marc Jacobin]
A pardon for you, a pardon for you, a pardon for you.

[James Jacobin]
We have now two presidents in a row within the span of a week saying that they themselves don't believe in the very justice system that they are oathed to protect, that they don't believe in the very laws that they are sworn to uphold. The pardon process, although by the time it gets to the president, he just signs a piece of paper, but each one historically gets reviewed on its way to the president to see, okay, was this person given due process? Yes.

Okay. Did they get a jury of their peers? Yes.

Did they have their right to appeal? Yes. Did they have the right to face their accusers?

Yes. Were they convicted? Yes.

Now the question becomes, was this a political prosecution, which would fall under the unwritten rule of, okay, welfare of the nation. We do not want political prosecutions. And then the second one, the unwritten rule, is showing mercy, such as on his way out the door, Trump, Roger Stone, a friend of his and the owner of, I believe, National Enquirer, was convicted.

Trump commuted his sentence. Before he went to prison, the same thing with Steve Bannon. Although controversial, they're still guilty of these crimes.

They were found guilty and Trump showed mercy and or believed it was political, both of which could be true in these cases. And these are very highly unpopular people.

[Marc Jacobin]
And he has stitched bets by commuting the sentence, not pardoning them. There's a big difference between a pardon and a commutation.

[James Jacobin]
Sure. Such as when President Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning for leaking military secrets to WikiLeaks, President Obama said, it does not take away the crime itself, but I'm commuting the sentence because I feel that, you know, Private Manning had suffered enough. And he took into consideration that.

What Joe Biden has done has said that it doesn't matter. It matters not to me. If we now find that Dr. Fauci committed federal murder from 2014 until January 20th of last week, he cannot be charged with that. Hoping to short circuit investigation into the greatest public health crisis maybe ever under the guise of, well, Trump is Hitler. He's going to seek retribution on Dr. Fauci because Dr. Fauci displeased him. And you've got a segment of the American population that believes that.

[Marc Jacobin]
And this is where we get into justice denied, because there is evidence available to the public that suggests, it's not conclusive, it hasn't been tried in a court of law, but the evidence that's available to you and I, James, suggests that Dr. Fauci violated one or more federal laws with regard to funding gain of function research. Not only does this violate about 10,000 treaties that the United States has signed over the years, but when you're talking about bioweapon research, you're talking about tens of millions of deaths globally that Anthony Fauci may be single-handedly responsible for, this should be the headline around the world now until an investigation and or subsequent trial is completed.

[James Jacobin]
Yeah, I'm in total agreement with you. And let's use Dr. Fauci as the, I guess, the archetype for this conversation, Marc, is the CIA has now come out recently and said that they now believe that the virus was created in that lab in Wuhan and leaked out somehow. They're not saying how, but they're saying that's what they now believe.

[Marc Jacobin]
They're now as smart as we are.

[James Jacobin]
They're now as smart as we are because we tossed that out there as an alternative in March of 2020 and were called conspiracy theorists simply for posing the three options of how this could have started because there could only be three. So now the intelligence community has come around four years later to say this most likely happened like this. Now, Dr. Fauci in 2020 and 2021 made several public statements denying that. If he actually believed that was true, there's no problem. If he knew it to be otherwise, and he's a member of the executive branch and he's lying to the American public, he can then be investigated for the age old question, what did you know and when did you know it and why did you deceive the American public? And what is there behind the curtain to see?

And what Joe Biden has done, he's denied the American people the peek behind the curtain. Because let's just say that Trump is a lunatic and that Pam Bondi is going to do his bidding and in an evil way, charge Dr. Fauci with things he didn't do. And Dr. Fauci finds a jury that is unfavorable to him and he gets convicted. We have safeguards in place currently to protect Dr. Fauci and any American citizen from that. And let's just say he gets convicted of something in the next year or two, which turns out to be absolutely false. We'll have a new president in a couple of years who could then pardon him based on the welfare of the country or saying that that conviction was political.

What Joseph Biden has done here is said, any conviction, any investigation, any indictment potentially is political and it's in the best interest of the nation to not even have the conversation about the Dr. Fauci's of the world as it relates to the COVID pandemic. You see how completely reversed that process is?

[Marc Jacobin]
Absolutely. But there is a way around it. What is the way?

We can look back to our old pal, Chief Justice Earl Warren of Warren Commission fame, who led the investigation into the death of John F. Kennedy in 1963.

[James Jacobin]
It was Oswald.

[Marc Jacobin]
It may or may not have been Oswald, but the precedent that they set is that they weren't concerned with finding criminals during the course of the Warren Commission because they believed they had the criminal. They believed it was Oswald, but they couldn't be sure that Oswald acted alone. Everyone who testified before the Warren Commission during the eight months that it ran was offered immunity so that the Warren Commission could get to the truth.

Not one person who testified before the Warren Commission accepted immunity, which is really strange, don't you think?

[James Jacobin]
Not if they had nothing to hide and they didn't fear the government at that point.

[Marc Jacobin]
Exactly. These preemptive pardons actually work for the people. Because the president could assemble a commission to investigate the spread of COVID, whether or not post-presidential impeachments are constitutional, that would not pose any implication of harm or guilt on Anthony Fauci or anyone else.

We could set Anthony Fauci down before a commission, swear him in, and guess what? If he accepts this pardon, which must be accepted if you are to remain immune in a court of law, then Anthony Fauci does not have the option to take the Fifth Amendment because he cannot impugn himself because he has immunity. So, if done properly, not only can we flip this abuse of power on its head, but we can use this to the people's advantage to find out what actually happened during the COVID era and the 10 years prior to it.

[James Jacobin]
Well, that would be something that to actually get answers. It would also be a weird rehabilitation of the Warren Commission that they actually did something right, that they actually weren't looking to trample on people's civil rights. Also, Marc, it says a lot about the differences in the country from six years ago to now where they offered people immunity and no one took it because they thought, well, I was just a witness to these things.

I had no part in it. Why would I need immunity? What the Warren Commission was attempting to do, and I think what you're suggesting a new, Fauci Commission should attempt to do, is say, not only are we not going after anybody improperly, we're not going after anyone at all.

We're trying to get to the bottom of a crisis that killed a million Americans and crippled our economy.

[Marc Jacobin]
And don't you think our buddy John would want something called the Roberts Commission?

[James Jacobin]
Well, I think our buddy John wants something called a legacy.

[Marc Jacobin]
Exactly. And that's how you get it because without the Warren Commission, Chief Justice Earl Warren gets relegated to a dusty shelf in a library that nobody goes to anymore.

[James Jacobin]
And our buddy Clarence would want to do anything to keep his legacy from being that he's a bought and paid for associate justice on the US Supreme Court. So I think this would benefit the Supreme Court members individually. It's almost understandable because I myself in July of this year said that President Trump should pardon Hunter Biden if he wins the election.

I also said that President Biden in the summer should pardon President Trump for any federal abuses he may or committed to clear the slate and leave the public with the perception that we do not prosecute our political adversaries. And we do not prosecute the family members of our political adversaries. And I think it's fair to say that if Hunter Biden was named Hunter Smith, no one would know who he is.

He would not have been charged with that gun charge. Most likely, it's a very rarely charged thing. But he was.

And it's probably politically motivated because he's a public guy. So the pardon of Hunter Biden or the commutation of the sentence itself for the crimes he was convicted of is legitimate, I do believe, for the welfare of the nation. The backdating the pardon to 2014 just leads me as a citizen with no investigative power to ask the question, what in the fuck did Hunter Biden do in 2014?

And then when you extend that past Hunter Biden to members of the president's inner circle, it gets me really curious onto what these people did between 2014 and today, this 10-year window, this arbitrary 10-year window that's been now created. What did these people do? And the only statement we got from the now retired Biden White House is, well, Donald Trump will come after these people.

And they didn't even have the force of their conviction to give a public presidential address about it, such as Ford did, such as Carter did, such as Papa Bush did. They followed the Clinton model of pardon this stuff, get the hell out the door and continue raising money for my wife's future presidential campaign. And they believe the public's just that stupid because we prove to them over and over again we are.

[Marc Jacobin]
I am Marc Jacobin, along with my brother James, and this is Extemporaneously.

[Announcer]
This has been Extemporaneously, presented by Jacobin Brothers. For more episodes and content, visit jacobinbrothers.com.