Ben Wallace-Wells

But if you step back and think about what he was doing, most promises the president can make or make as a candidate cannot be kept because they require congressional action or the action of other people.

This is a unilateral authority that he can always deliver on.

And so imagine, you know, Trump saying tax penalties are too high.

I'm going to pardon all tax penalties.

Vote for me if, you know, the IRS is hounding you and I will relieve you when I come into office.

Or someone else saying environmental penalties are too high.

I'm going to pardon all the environmental fines.

It opens up this possibility of campaign promises for pardons.

And it also lets presidents just essentially undermine or nullify or vitiate statutes or policies reflected in statutes that they don't like.

And that takes us to the Hunter Biden pardons and the pardons of other family members.

You know, as you know, President Biden said for more than a year or two years that he would not pardon Hunter Biden.

But after the election, when a pardon wouldn't affect his electoral future, in part because he declined to actually finish the campaign for presidency, he gave him a pardon.

At that point, he knew there would be no sort of fallout from it or very little fallout from it.

And it was a remarkably broad pardon.

It was 10 years for all offenses, violent or nonviolent.

The final set of controversial pardons by Biden are all the people that were at odds with President Trump or who investigated President Trump.

In the final hours of his presidency, President Biden pardoning multiple people.

Those pardons include Dr. Anthony Fauci, the House committee that investigated the January 6 attack, and retired General Mark Milley.

Some of these people Trump had threatened to prosecute if he won re-election, and of course he did win re-election.

And so Biden said, I don't think these people should be prosecuted.