President Joe Biden on Monday issued preemptive pardons to a slew of high-profile targets of President-elect Donald Trump — a striking last-minute effort to shield them from prosecution just hours before Trump, who has promised to punish his perceived enemies, is sworn in.
Biden issued the sweeping pardons to former public health official Anthony Fauci and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. He also pardoned the members and staff of the House special committee that investigated the Jan. 6 insurrection as well as officers from Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department and the U.S. Capitol Police who testified before the committee. All of Monday’s pardon recipients have been verbally attacked at length by Trump, despite no proof of illegal conduct.
The move, coming in the waning moments of Biden’s more than five-decade political career, is a final condemnation of Trump on the brink of a new political era in Washington that will see the president-elect exert near total dominance, with loyalists controlling both chambers of Congress and appointees throughout the court system. In his farewell address earlier this week, Biden warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy.”
“These public servants have served our nation with honor and distinction and do not deserve to be the targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions,” Biden said in a statement hours before Trump was to be sworn in. “I believe in the rule of law, and I am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics. But these are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing.”
Trump has long called for punishment for political opponents and people who try to hold him accountable — often while claiming the justice system has been weaponized against him and his allies. In campaign speeches and social media posts, Trump pledged to prosecute adversaries, including Biden and his family, Vice President Kamala Harris, members of the Jan. 6 Committee and journalists.
Biden had been carefully weighing whether to issue the preemptive pardons, which supporters had called for in the wake of Trump’s threats. But some aides in the White House had been concerned that doling out pardons to individuals who have been neither formally accused nor convicted of crimes could signal impropriety, fueling Trump’s long standing narrative of a double-barrel justice system that protects Democrats and persecutes their opponents.
Earlier this month, Biden told USA Today his ultimate decision on whether to issue the preemptive pardons would depend “on who [Trump] puts in what positions.” During a White House meeting with Trump in November, Biden said he had “tried to make it clear that there was no need, and it was counterintuitive for his interest to go back and try to settle scores” — but that the president-elect didn’t commit to anything.
During her Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday, Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for attorney general, sidestepped questions about whether she would prosecute Trump’s political targets. She emphasized that “there will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice,” but also defended FBI Director nominee Kash Patel, who has promised to go after so-called “government gangsters.”
Trump’s political wrath has perhaps been felt most by Liz Cheney, the Republican former lawmaker and House Republican leader from Wyoming who sat on the Jan. 6 Committee and campaigned alongside Harris. Trump has claimed Cheney “kills people,” suggested she should stand “with nine barrels shooting at her,” and called for her to “go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!”
Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, became a major target of conservative critics during the COVID-19 pandemic, through which he helped steer the country under both Biden and Trump. Elon Musk, Trump’s biggest donor and a close adviser, said last month on X, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” And when he was running for president, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services Secretary, told Fox News in July he would prosecute Fauci if his attorney general determined he had committed crimes.
In preemptively pardoning the full membership of the bipartisan House Jan. 6 panel, Biden issued broad immunity for the nine representatives, and multiple staffers, who led the investigation into the violent attack on the Capitol — and found in its final report that Trump should never hold elected office again. Last month, Trump told NBC News committee members “should go to jail.”
