Just before ceding power to Donald Trump, Joe Biden frustrated his successor this Monday, January 20, of a possible personal revenge by preemptively pardoning elected officials, civil servants and five members of his family to spare them “partisan” investigations or prosecutions. “.
Among them are the former chief of staff of the armed forces, General Mark Milley, and the former architect of the White House strategy against Covid-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Former Republican parliamentarian Liz Cheney will also benefit from it, as will all the elected officials and civil servants who participated in the commission of inquiry into the assault on the Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump on January 6, 2021, as well as the police officers who testified before this commission.
“I believe in the rule of law and I am sure that the solidity of our judicial system will ultimately prevail in the face of political debates. But we live in exceptional circumstances and I cannot, in good conscience, do nothing “, explains the outgoing Democratic president, 82, in a press release, to justify an exceptional initiative. Some of these servants of the state were intimidated and “even threatened with criminal prosecution”, alarms Joe Biden, who ceded power to his great Republican rival just after 12:00 p.m. in Washington. In September, Donald Trump, who notably chose a very close friend, Kash Patel, accused of conspiracy, to head the federal police (FBI), had promised that after his victory “these people who cheated will be prosecuted with all rigor of justice, which will include long prison sentences.
“Unjustly seeking revenge”
General Milley, chief of staff of the armed forces during Donald Trump’s first term, warned during the campaign that the Republican billionaire was a “fascist through and through” and the “most dangerous person for this country “. Donald Trump had suggested that the officer had been guilty of a “betrayal” which in other times would have earned him the firing squad.
Having just been inaugurated, the new president denounced the pardons granted by his predecessor to “people who are very, very guilty of very serious crimes”, in particular with reference to the members of the parliamentary commission of inquiry into the assault on the Capitol.
“My family and I are deeply grateful to the President for his decision,” General Milley said in a statement Monday. He confided that, after 43 years in uniform, he did not want to spend the rest of his life “defending himself against those who could unjustly seek revenge”.
As for Dr. Fauci, whose outspokenness during the coronavirus pandemic often put him at odds with Donald Trump during his first term, he has since become one of the most reviled personalities for part of the right-wing and conspiracy movements, which are calling for his indictment. The 84-year-old practitioner thanked President Biden on Monday but assured that he had “committed no crime” likely to motivate “an investigation or criminal prosecution”.
Liz Cheney embodies the resistance to Donald Trump within the Republican camp. She lost her seat in Congress in 2022 to a Trumpist.
Sentence of Native American activist commuted
Later in the morning, a few minutes before the transfer of power, Joe Biden preemptively pardoned his brother James Biden, his sister Valerie Biden Owens, their respective spouses, as well as his brother Francis Biden, as he had done in December for his son, Hunter.
The latter, one of the favorite targets of the American hard right, was convicted in two separate cases of illegal possession of a firearm and tax evasion. “My family has been targeted with relentless attacks and threats, motivated only by the desire to get at me – the worst kind of partisan politics. Unfortunately, I have no reason to think that these attacks will stop,” argued Joe Biden. He also commuted to house arrest the life sentence of Leonard Peltier, 80, a Native American activist incarcerated for the 1975 homicide of two FBI agents, a fabricated case according to his defenders, and pardoned two convicts who have served their sentence. These were the final measures of clemency by the outgoing presidency.
Joe Biden had already announced on Friday that he had commuted a record number of nearly 2,500 sentences of those convicted of non-violent drug offenses. And in December, he had issued 39 pardons and 1,500 commutations, including 37 of the 40 death sentences handed down by federal justice.