La Clemenza di Trumpo

Pardon me, boys...

Is that the Mar-a-Lago Cuckoo?

From Sun Valley Serenade (1941), with the Glenn Miller Orchestra and the always unbearably smug-faced Tex Beneke, in a stupid baseball cap, on vocals, redeemed later in the cut by the appearance of Dorothy Dandridge and the tapping Nicholas Brothers.

My dad's dad jokes tended to follow an exclusively linguistic pattern, as I guess they mostly do. If you gave him an opportunity to ask you, "What's an armored personnel carrier?" you'd answer "Tanks" and he'd say "You're welcome." And if you bumped into him and said, "Pardon me," he'd say, "Son, only the governor can do that." That's an index, by the way, of how rare the presidential pardon used to be.

So Joe Biden issued an official presidential pardon to his son Hunter for any crimes he may have committed between 2014 and 2024, including the ones he was in fact convicted for (false statement on a federal form seeking permission to buy a gun he turned out not to actually want, and a very late income tax payment). Crimes that wouldn't normally be charged (nobody would know they'd been committed if the defendant hadn't told on himself by acknowledging he was a drug user in the first case and paying the damn tax bill in the second place, as he did before the charge was filed).

The other crimes Hunter Biden was accused of, mostly by Chair James Comer of the House Oversight Committee, but not charged with, looked kind of serious, although the alleged evidence he might have committed them always fell to pieces, most recently and humiliatingly when his latest star witness, ex-FBI informant Alexander Smirnov, pleaded guilty to fabricating his story implicating Hunter and Joe Biden in a $10 million Ukrainian bribery scheme and was sentenced to six years of federal prison. In no way discouraged, Comer has just emitted a book, All the President's Money: Investigating the Secret Foreign Schemes That Made the Biden Family Rich, with blurb as follows:

Joe Biden made less than $200,000 a year for most of his life, but as soon as he left office, he bought his second multimillion-dollar mansion.

I'm sorry, Joe and Jill Biden earned $11.1 million in 2017 on a book deal and paid speaking engagements, and another $4.6 million in 2018. He bought the $2.7-million Rehoboth Beach house after signing the three-book contract. It's all public, and there isn't any mystery whatever about it. Meanwhile, Comer's book is getting known for its fabricated quotes from journalist Bob Woodward, who is pretty annoyed:

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“The statements attributed to me in what is apparently his book are false. I made none of those statements he attributes to me. I repeat none, and not even in a paraphrased form — either about Biden or about the media. I never said Biden was corrupt or sold access,” Woodward said.

“I say this on the record now. I don’t know any more about him or what else might be in his book. But it is a textbook case of someone seriously misremembering or putting his own comments into someone else’s mouth — in this case, mine. He is peddling stories, conclusions and allegations that just do not check out at all.”

I'm just saying, considering the implacable vendetta the Republicans have been pursuing against the Biden family since at least 2019 (the year Giuliani and Trump began shopping for bogus anti-Biden evidence in Ukraine, the effort for which Trump got his first impeachment) and the totally unscrupulous way they have been doing it, the preemptive pardons Biden has issued from Hunter's in early December to other members of the family yesterday, including particularly the president's brother James, as well as the members of the House January 6 Committee and Dr. Fauci and General Milley (who resisted Trump's illegal demands to have the military deployed against protesters in 2020), are pretty understandable. They may be unattractive. I'm more disappointed about the people Biden left out (such as Alexander Vindman and Marie Yovanovich) than the family members he included. (And very pleased about the clemency extended to 80-year-old Leonard Peltier, by the way.)

Not so easy about the 1,600 pardons and commutations Trump has issued as one of this one-day-dictator first acts, putting a final end to the prosecution of all the January 6 offenders, not just the many who pleaded guilty or were found guilty by juries—the Justice Department is responding to yesterday's action by moving to dump them all:

The pardons include some 400 people convicted of assaulting police in a planned, coordinated attack:

Gonell: "They kept saying, 'Trump sent me. We won't listen to you. We are here to take over the Capitol, we're here to hang Mike Pence...' They thought we were there for them and we weren't so they turned against us. It was very scary because I thought I was going to lose my life right there."

Some of the most horrific video shows Sgt. Gonell steps from Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges, caught in the doorway.

Gonell: "I could hear my fellow officers screaming. The agony in some of them. All I could think was we can't let these people in. There's going to be a slaughter inside."

In spite of the fact that Vice President Vance and incoming Attorney General Bondi both promised this would not happen:

Just a week ago, Vice President JD Vance said Trump “obviously” would not pardon those who committed violence. Last week, attorney general nominee Pam Bondi testified, “I’m not going to speak for the president, but the president does not like people who abuse police officers, either.”

Liars. Crooks and liars.

It also includes the most guilty of all, ringleaders of the Proud Boy and Oath Keeper paramilitaries convicted of seditious conspiracy, who planned and organized the insurrection: Elmer Stewart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs, sentenced to 18 years each, Ethan Nordean (18 years), and Joe Biggs (17 years), and Enrique Tarrio (22 years). Even Trump seems to have understood these were worse—they all got commutations rather than pardons, meaning they are still convicted felons, except, for some reason, Tarrio, who was given a full pardon (I speculated it might be because he wasn't in Washington on January 6, having been arrested two days earlier and kicked out of town, over his participation in vandalizing a church the previous December.) Juries took their crimes extremely seriously, and judges have been telegraphing alarm for weeks, as Kyle Cheney reported at Politico a month ago:

In extraordinary but little-watched court proceedings since Election Day, judges appointed by presidents of both parties have emphasized the need for accountability for the people who stormed the Capitol in an attempt to derail the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. These judges have sounded dire warnings about the fate of the country if the lessons of the 2020 election go unlearned, and they are bluntly bracing for a turbulent start to the second Trump presidency.

One Trump-appointed judge has already warned the incoming president against a “blanket pardon” for Jan. 6 offenders. A judge appointed by Barack Obama said Wednesday that any effort to absolve a former leader of the Oath Keepers, Jan. 6 ringleader Stewart Rhodes, would be “frightening.” ...

Now we're there. And Roger Stone, Mike Flynn, and Donald Trump will never face any kind of trial.