Pardons Pardons & More Pardons

pardons starting on the Biden side. So President Biden early yesterday morning pardons and has a big to do about it, has a big public statement on Twitter about it, declares that he's going to pardon Anthony Fauci and then all the members of the January sixth Committee, and make this big deal about what wonderful, heroic and dedicated public servants they all are. And it's a shame that he has

to issue this pardon. But there were threats against them that he's just trying to protect them from, you know, politicized prosecutions from the Trump side, And you know, these were wonderful, heroic public servants who I don't think committed any crimes whatsoever. But this is to provide them with protection.

Now you have all that, but then later on in the day, you have with with far less fanfare, far more sheepishly, without a lot of stirmin drong and no trumpets blaring, a pardon issued for a bunch of Joe Biden's family members for any criminal activities that may or not any federal offense that may have taken place from January first onward January first of twenty fourteen onward. And yet again, this date, January first, twenty fourteen, very specifically

chosen lines up perfectly with the Hunter Biden pardon. I feel sure that Hunter's pardon would have happened today except for the fact that Hunter was looking at you know, his sentencing was coming up in one of his criminal cases in December, so President Biden gave him his pardon, you know, as a nice little early Christmas president. Now, what's going on with the Biden family. Well, let's clarify

what's going on. We've done this segment a lot on the show, and probably this is the last time we're going to do it because Biden is now the ex president.

He is now a very old old man. I'm betting the next time we see Biden, He's going to look so horrible that we're all going to guess if we see him, and this is his last shot to kind of protect his family on the way out, his family who was very very possibly involved with criminal activity, or if not criminal, at the very least incredibly sleazy and

shady activity. What was the business. The business that Hunter and Jim were involved in was getting foreign companies to give them money, with the understanding being that they would get positive American foreign policy advantages to those companies by virtue of the fact that Hunter's last name is Biden, Jim's last name is Biden. They were selling access and political favor from Joe Biden. That's what they were selling. It's impossible that Joe didn't know that's what they were doing.

There's no way Joe met clients of Hunters. Joe was. He clearly knew that there was money stuff going on. We have checks written from Jim Biden to Joe Biden, like two hundred thousand dollars checks for loan repayment. Loan repayment allegedly a scheme so unsophisticated that basically it's just Jim giving Joe Biden two hundred thousand dollars just writing on the bottom of the check in the memo line loan repayment, because then it's not weird. So that was

the business. That was the deal. That was the long and short of it. Sell access to Joe Biden at best, sell the appearance of access in the best case scenario. What can you say about this, Well, the very best case scenario that you can say about all this is that it was shady and sleazy and corrupt. The best case you can say is that they were selling the appearance of access even though they couldn't actually get Biden to do anything. Except for this, Joe Biden was often

the head of Obama administration foreign policy. The time frame when these pardons run it covers twenty fourteen to January. It includes in its ambit January of twenty fourteen through twenty seventeen, the end of Biden's second term as Vice president, when he was overseeing foreign policy for countries like Ukraine. One of the big things the Obama administration was trying to promote through its European and especially it's Eastern European

foreign policy was various kinds of anti corruption effort. Hey Eastern Europe, you get American foreign aide, you benefit from the United States or any of you countries that are not directly in the ambit of Russia. You need to clean up your government corruption, clean up your government practices, et cetera. So what seems to have happened, and the Barisma case with Hunter Biden seems to be the classic example of this. You had these countries where anti corruption

efforts were taking place. Sorry sounding like OURFKA junior right now, you have these countries where anti corruption efforts are taking place. The Biden administration, the Obama administration rather is pushing these

anti corruption efforts. These individual companies that maybe they are corrupt, maybe they're not, want to keep themselves protected from crackdowns pushed by the Obama administration and directed by the government, so they give money to Hunter, they give money to Jim so that their companies aren't subject to various kinds of anti corruption investigations. And that's precisely what happened with Barisma, the Ukrainian energy company that Hunter Biden was on the

board of. So it's very it's a very clear setup. Now, were crimes committed in all of this, I think so I think there is very good evidence that money laundering took place. These different Biden family members, Hunter, Jim, etcetera. Were setting up all these different companies and corporations and lcs and this and that to shift the money around to this to this, to this to this to this, to make the trail of money extremely difficult to track. I don't know. I've never had to do that for

any of my employment. Just hey, direk deposit there, we go easypsy have a salary. The likelihood that Jim and Hunter Biden were in violation of what's called farah, the federal registration of the Foreign Agent Registration Act. That's what it is, Foreign Agent Registration Act. Basically, if you are an American citizen and you are working, your work is being done as an advocate, as a lobbyist basically on behalf of another country. That's okay to do, but you

have to register as a foreign agent. Jim and Joe A, Jim and Hunter never did. I think it's very likely that they committed crimes in that regard. They were working on behalf of all these different companies, in all these different companies in foreign countries. So and a lot of this activity was happening from twenty fourteen to twenty seventeen. So Joe, I think knew one hundred percent that this

was going on. He had to have known the whole basis for this business, that this whole business scheme that Hunter and Jim were doing, Joe was the essential linchpin of it all. Without Joe as the product to be sold, the business doesn't work, It doesn't happen these other because basically what was happening. You had clear money going one way towards the bidens. You did not have a clear and obvious good or service going back the other way to those companies. So, as a result, Gym's off the hook.

Biden's other siblings are off the hook. And it's also a question of like, were these other siblings, like other family members were in receipt of this money, so are they now part of a chain of the sort of the chain length of money being passed on that was basically money laundering. Well, at this point, I wonder if we're ever gonna really know all these Biden family members get pardoned and as a result, none of them are going to go to jail, None of them are gonna

get it prosecuted. Probably a lot of these crimes were past the statute of limitations anyway. You know, a lot of this stuff was happening in twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen. You got to bring your charges for some of these things with in you know, five or six years, and probably the statute of limitations had passed already for a lot of this stuff. So we may be pasts that. And it's kind of the cherry on top of the

Sunday of the Biden era. I think the Left really, really, really wanted to have this sense of moral superiority about its governance, to say that Trump was a bad guy, Trump was sleazy, Trump was corrupt, Trump did bad things, and January sixth being the worst thing of all, and they wanted to be able to point to Biden as let's have a return to normalcy, let's have a return to responsible, good, decent Obamaian government. And what better way to return to the Obama model than by electing his

vice president Joe Biden. What a good guy, what a good solid man. And everyone bought into this idea that Joe Biden was a good guy because everyone felt sorry for him after the death of his son Bo. And it turns out Biden is what he always was. A mediocrity, a moral mediocrity, an intellectual mediocrity, a governing mediocrity. In fact, when you and then when you elevate someone who's a mediocrity like that into these extremely high positions, he becomes

far less, far worse than a mediocrity. He was a train wreck. He was a train wreck, he was corrupt, he was venal, he was a jerk, and the simple venality of wanting money. Now he has to do this embarrassing thing. And apparently their Democrat senators really ticked off at this. I don't know why they're ticked off, as if that like the only reason you'd be ticked off is if you were surprised. I was not surprised at this pardon of the family members. I was sure it

was going to happen all along. It doesn't make any sense to pardon Hunter and not pardon Jim. Jim was doing the same stuff Hunter was doing. It's all the same stuff. Now when we return two things, One the benefits of being immune from prosecution. Two, how this could actually help facilitate a real investigation into what were the Bidens actually doing all this time. That's next on the John Girardi Show. Two things I want to point out after these Hunter Biden pardons, and now President Trump has

issued similar partons to all the January sixth defendants. But I want to talk about these two things with the Hunter Biden partons. One with the Hunter Biden parton, well, actually the rest of the Biden family, excuse me, the rest of the Biden family pardons at least to two things. One, what does criminal immunity mean? The good and the bad? So let's talk about what criminal immunity means that's good and bad or maybe that's good for the person receiving it and bad as far as for them that they

might have to now testify about stuff. So the left refuse the left has been so angry about the idea of immunity in the context of President Trump. Okay here, So President Trump's been going through this Manhattan Deal, his prosecution in man for falsification of business records in furtherance of some felony that we don't actually define with regards to the non disclosure agreement he got Stormy Daniels to sign, which I still don't think he violated the law at

all with regards to it. I don't think it was. I know it was not illegal to ask someone to sign a non disclosure agreement. I know it was not illegal for him not to report it as a campaign expense. It's not a campaign expense. I'm not sure that it was even unlawful to characterize, basically, to characterize his payment of money to Michael Cohen. So Stormy Daniels signs the non disclosure agreement, she says, I won't talk about this affair that we allegedly had in exchange for money, Michael

Cohen pays her. Trump pays back Michael Cohen. Trump characterizes the payments to Michael Cohen as attorney's fees rather than load repayment. That is the crime. Allegedly, It wasn't hush money was the crime. No, it was characterizing his repayment to Michael Cohen as attorney's fees rather than loan repayment. I'm not sure that it's even inaccurate to call it attorney's fees, let alone to say that it's falsification of

business records and furtherance of a felony. Now, in all of that, in the midst of this, in the midst of Trump being found guilty by a jury in Manhattan over this, after the judge one Merchon, who was himself a was he a Biden or a Harris donor? I believe he was a Biden donor, like a small dollar donor, which why a judge would do that seems beyond me. Just to give a little bit of money seems ridiculous. And whose daughter, Judge Murchon's daughter was like a campaign

fundraiser for Kamala Harris. Judge Murchon ruled against Trump every single step of the way and the whole trial. He was ridiculous in ways that I think genuinely disadvantaged Trump and led to his conviction. Allowed in evidence that was not pertinent to the case, that was highly prejudicial against Trump without really being probative towards the actual charge, Like that he brought Stormy. He allowed the prosecution to bring Stormy Daniels in to testify about their relationship. That wasn't

the crime. The crime was did you falsify the business records? Did you miss characterize it as loan repayment versus legal fees? Her testifying about the nature of their relationship and then dropping all of a sudden without ever telling anyone before this new version of what their relationship was like, and then saying that, oh, it was non consensual, which she had never claimed at any point up to then. Anyway, the jury finds Trump guilty. Trump's not actually convicted until

a sentence is entered against him. And between the jury finding him guilty and the sentencing, what do you know? The Supreme Court issues a new ruling on the immunity that a president enjoys after leaving office. Basically, you cannot prosecute a president for his official acts, and you cannot use evidence of his official acts against him. You cannot use his official acts as evidence in a subsequent proceeding

against the president. What's official acts? Well, that's not one hundred percent clear one hundred percent of the time, But discussions with his cabinet, those are official acts. He is immune from prosecution. And when we say immune from prosecution, that the benefit of that is not just the benefit of you're not going to get convicted. The benefit of immunity is a benefit of you don't even have to face a trial. You don't even have to face an indictment.

You're not going to be subjected to any legal action whatsoever. You don't have to go through the stress, the worry, the anxiety, the difficulty of a trial. You don't have to. So that's the beneficial side. That's the benefit of immunity. That's precisely what Biden is wanting with all these pardons

he's issuing. Even for Anthony Fauci and Lynn Cheney and the January sixth Committee, a lot of people were trying to make the argument and had some decent arguments that Lynn Cheney engaged in witness tampering, which would be a crime, witness tampering for her work on the January sixth Committee to get people to change their stories to make them

more negative against Trump, which if true, could be criminal. Well, Lynn Cheney doesn't have to worry about any of that crap now she received a pardon from Biden, and that pardon gives her immunity. Not just like if she she'll go to trial and during the trial they'll say, well, President Trump partoned her, so she's not going to get convicted. No, the pardon prevents her from ever having to face an indictment to begin with. It prevents her the same with

Anthony Fauci. That's the benefit of immunity. So here's President Trump who actually has who has immunity from these things, and Judge murch On just, eh, I ignore it. I'm gonna continue with the sentencing in spite of the fact that a bunch of the evidence from your Manhattan trial came from official acts or very arguably came from official acts. Now, I'm just gonna keep up. You can just carry on

with our sentencing hearing. No, No, that's ridiculous. Trump is being subjected to all these harms when he has immunity, including by the way, now that a sentence of no time has been entered against President Trump, he is a convicted felon, and that puts limits on like there are a bunch of foreign countries that don't let him travel that a lot of foreign countries will not let someone into the country if they have a felony conviction in

their home country. So Trump's gonna have to go through all this like rigmarole through the State Department, all this diplomatic rigmarole for these different countries to grant an exception so that he can come travel to their countries. So anyway, the Biden pardons are ridiculous. I think they in some cases they were needed because these people committed a bunch of crimes. Now, when we return, I want to talk about is the power. Is the pardon power out of control?

Should we amend the constitution to stop it or limit it? That's next on the John Girardi Show. We had a flurry of pardons yesterday. President Trump issued pardons for I believe it was all of the January sixth defendants. President Biden issued pardons for the members of the January sixth Committee and Lynn Cheney. He also issued pardons for a bunch of his family members. And I've gotten a lot of sort of common questions, and I'll give some common answers.

I guess to the pardon power, and I want to sort of publicly sort of speculate, roll around in my mind if the pardon power has gone too far so and should there be some amending of the Constitution with regards to the pardon power. Now, some people have asked me, how can President Biden pardon his family members who when they haven't even been charged for any crimes yet, just just for anything they possibly could have done. That doesn't

seem right, That doesn't seem fair. And the answer is, well, yes, that you can do that. You can pardon people for stuff they haven't been charged with yet. The most famous instance of this probably was Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon for anything having to do with Watergate. Nixon had been investigated for Watergate. There had been an impeachment inquiry about Watergate. The impeachment committee, I guess it was the House Shary Committee.

The House committee investigating it had found a lot of evidence, but he hadn't been subject to any criminal action whatsoever yet, right, no one had, you know, there was no prosecutors involved. Nixon was not subject to any kind of criminal action for Watergate as of yet. And Ford I think very wisely. I think this was a very wise decision on his part.

Ford basically said, we need to turn the page on this episode of history as a country, and he just flat out pardoned Nixon for anything having to do with Watergate. And that was that. Jimmy Carter had a similarly famous pardon. He pardoned all the Vietnam War draft dodgers. He said, listen, we need to turn the page on Vietnam. I'm just partoning everyone who you know, dodged the draft during the Vietnam War, and this includes people who were not yet

charged with anything. Okay, Nixon was not charged with anything for Watergate. Most of the Vietnam Draft dodgers had not yet been subject to any kind of criminal action. They were pardoned, and that gives them immunity from prosecution. The pardon power is this kind of awesome thing that the presidency has. It's actually, in fact a holdover from the British monarchy. Okay, let's recall here in the United States, we used to be a British possession. The crown had

the prerogative to pardon people for criminal offenses. The King of England, King Charles, can grant acts of clemency for people who commit crimes, and the monarch has done this for centuries. In fact, I remember learning about this law school. One kind of pardon that the Crown would very often

give was for voluntary manslaughter. So voluntary manslaughter basically was you come home, you find your wife sleeping with another man, and you're so overcome with fury that you you shoot him, and you're struck by some immediate sort of traumatic like emotional thing that triggers you. You don't have a cooling down period. You kill somebody. Queen Victoria was often called upon to pardon people and so that that's called voluntary manslaughter. Okay,

so it's not quite murder because there's no premeditation. And Queen Victoria eventually said, I'm not gonna do these kinds of pardons because very often it's women getting killed in them, and like, what, I'm sorry, Like maybe these women did a bad thing, maybe they were subjected to someone else doing a bad thing or something. I don't think these people deserve to be killed, and I think it's okay to prosecute these people who engage in that kind of

a violent reaction with some kind of criminal proceeding. So Queen Victoria actually didn't like pardoning people for certain kinds of things. Anyway, the pardon power was this royal prerogative, and in the American Constitution they discussed the idea of having the president wield this power for people who committed federal crimes, and the governors of the various state also

have the pardon power. All the various state constitutions give their state governors the pardon to power people for violations of state crimes. So that's an important distinction. The president only has pardon power over people who commit federal offenses. So a crime in the District of Columbia or some interstate crime a violation of a federal statue. Governors can pardon people for state crimes. Now beyond pardoning, sort of

a logical corollary of the pardon power. If you can completely wipe away someone's criminal conviction and sentence, then you can also partially wipe away someone's criminal sentence or conviction. Obviously, if you have the power to do this really large scale thing, you can. You clearly would have the power to do something on a smaller scale as well, So a president can, as President Biden did, declare, Okay, your sentence to death, I'm going to commute your sentence to

life imprisonment. President Biden did this in a completely ethically incoherent way with regards to all of the people on the federal death penalty, all the people on federal death row except for three people who are just really bad guys, the Boston marathon bomber and then a couple people involved in race related shootings. Well, because terrorism and race related shootings are really bad, Okay, Well, then clearly Biden does.

This was the thing Biden had said for his whole career that he didn't believe in the death penalty, that he opposed the death penalty, And now he's saying, well, I oppose the death penalty, but I think we need to keep the death penalty in place for really really bad cases like race related shootings and terrorism. Okay, well, then you don't oppose the death penalty. Then either you oppose the death penalty or you don't oppose the death penalty.

You don't really oppose the death penalty if you just say, oh, I oppose the death penalty except for these really really rare cases, and then you don't oppose the death penalty.

What kind of silliness is this? Anyway, So that's the pardon power, and it's really enormous, and people have started to look at the fact that, well, there's kind of a flaw there if you use the pardon power in a corrupt way, If you use the pardon power and in the kind of blanket way, could a president just have somebody like a member of his family or something committing all sorts of crimes, just crime after crime after crime after crime after crime, for his entire presidency, and then

just at the end of the presidency just say, oh, I'm pardoning you could a president just on an ongoing basis just keep pardoning his wayward family member. Oh well, I'm missuing another. Here's my January pardon for my brother for all of his violations of federal drug crimes. Here's my February pardon for my brother for all of his violations of federal drug crimes. No, we don't have an agreement. I just keep pardoning him. Where does it stop? Where

does it really? It's a pretty open ended power. It's pretty limited, and it calls for assumes, begs for demands good faith on the part of the partner. Now, in America, we hate the idea of something being left to good faith. We are distrustful of the idea that any government. This is an assumption that's really kind of baked into the federalist papers, the anti federalist papers, and as a result, kind of baked into the Constitution. We assume public officials

won't exercise good faith. We put in place mechanisms to safeguard us from government officials not exercising good faith. This is a frequent feature that's what the whole system of checks and balances is for. You have the various ways in which the legislature can check the executive, the judicial branch, cantect both, and blah blah blah blah blah, because you don't want any one of those three powers to get

too big to start acting in an oppressive fashion. So we have a really underdeveloped idea of good faith on the part of people who wield political power. So this leads me to ask the question that I've heard other conservative commentators ask, is this an area where maybe the Constitution could or should be amended? Because you'd have to amend the constitution. This part power to pardon is in the Constitution. You can't change it. You can't limit the

president's pardon power by means of a statute. Is there a way you limit it? Or do you just accept, well, we're gonna get some bad with some good, and the ability of a president to sort of right wrongs through the pardon power is so much more beneficial than the ability to absolve people who did bad things could be. Maybe that's the position most Americans are going to take. I don't know, to amend the Constitution in order to limit the pardon power, Like any amending of the Constitution

would be really extremely difficult. You need two thirds majorities in both houses and three quarters of all the state legislators to do it. I don't know. Maybe after this round of Biden partons you could get some Republicans on board. Maybe after Trump pardoning all the January sixth defendants you

get some Democrats on board. I think it's an interesting question though, like, is this too much of an unchecked power, a power within the Constitution that relies too much on good faith on the part of the office wield or someone exercising restraint if you want. I hate using the word common sense, but if you want common sense, is this something that should be reviewed now? When we return, I almost didn't even talk about this, the insane Biden

effort to just amend the Constitution by FIAT. Why the Equal Rights Amendment is not part of the Constitution. Next on the John Jruardy Show, I can't believe I went the whole show without talking about President Biden trying to amend the Constitution via tweet. So President Biden said, I recognized, I'm gonna express my long held view that the Equal Rights Amendment part of the Constitution of the United States.

This is the twentieth Amendment. So Biden just says, I think that the Equal Rights Amendment should now be considered part of the Constitution. Let me explain what this is for those who don't know. In the seventies, this effort to introduce a new constitutional amendment got off the ground called the Equal Rights Amendment. It's very short. It just says, equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state

on account of sex. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. The Amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification. Now, at first, when this was introduced, it was like a slam dunk that it was going to be adopted into the Constitution. All these states were the two thirds majorities in both houses of Congress. Democrats Republicans

supported it. Then Phyllis Schlafley came along and said, hey, you guys, realize how this is going to be interpreted in the courts. It's going to be interpreted to say legal abortion is now right there inside the Constitution. Even more so than Row it's going to be interpreted to eliminate differences between men and women, to eliminate women's only spaces. It's going to say separate but equal for accommodations for men and women are no good. It's going to eliminate

womens sports. Blah blah blah blah blah. And she was sort of mocked. But in fact, a lot of these cultural changes did in fact happen as Phylischlafley called them, and as a result, conservatives were like, whoa why are we rushing to pass this era? Conservatives all flipped to be against it, and so to be ratified as part of the constitution, a proposed constitutional amendment needs again two thirds majorities in both houses three quarters of the state legislatures,

so you need thirty eight of the state legislatures. It never got to thirty eight. In fact, the preamble of this proposed constitutional amendment said we need to get three quarters of the states to ratify this within seven years. It didn't get it. Now, after that seven year ratification window, a bunch of liberals tried to argue, well, the seven year ratification window doesn't matter, and so they kept having states ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Some states had de

ratified their prior ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Also said, wait, we had ratified it before, but now we realize this as bats, we're unratifying ourselves. So in twenty twenty, Virginia ratified it and became the thirty eighth state to do so. Unless you think that the seven year ratification window is belogne and that states can't unratify that, that's the only way it could become the law of the land, and

there's no way the super Court would agree. So here's Biden saying, I think it's the law of the land. He's not forcing it to be published by the National Archivist. It's total bologney. It's not part of the constitution that'll do it. Johns already show see next time on Power Talk.