There’s been a good bit of handwringing over President Biden’s next presidential pardons. Hard on the heels of his unsurprising yet still somehow bombshell pardon for his son Hunter, the chatter has turned to who might be next. Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.)? former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci? Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.)? The guy who cut Kash Patel off in traffic last week?
Speculation runs rampant.
The prospects have both Democrats and Republicans all atwitter. Some are calling for blanket pardons for just about everybody, while others are lamenting the decline of standards of our civic leaders.
Count me among the group who would love to see Biden pardon just about everybody he can imagine. I mean, give him the entire office directory for the House and Senate, and the plum book for the executive branch, and just let him go to town.
My reasoning however, is probably different from most others’.
I don’t fear broad criminal reprisals aimed at President-elect Trump’s enemies. If Trump really wanted to do that sort of thing, he would have followed through on the “lock her up” mantra from the 2016 campaign.
And, as I wrote in these pages several months back, while there is absolutely nothing wrong with applying the same standards to prominent Democrats that were ostensibly used against Trump, I do think there is value in restraint. Put another way, the country is fine with charging a politician with a crime if it involves gold bars from foreign governments. We are really tired of trying to throw people in jail for bookkeeping offenses, failure to return boxes of books or for paying off bank loans early.
So I don’t really think sweeping pardons are necessary to protect anyone from undeserved criminal prosecution.
My reason for wanting to see broad, blanket immunities is entirely different. I would, for once, like to see the truth come out. And the best way to get the truth is to take away the Fifth Amendment privilege from a whole bunch of powerful and potentially culpable people. That is precisely what pardons do, since they remove criminal jeopardy.
For instance, the blanket pardon that Biden gave his son does more than just immunize him from prosecution. It also means that Hunter, if called to testify, can no longer lawfully maintain his silence about anything he did in the last ten years that could have otherwise given rise to criminal charges. Since it is literally impossible for him to incriminate himself with respect to anything that has happened since 2014, he has no basis for invoking his Fifth Amendment privileges under any circumstances.
The United States Supreme Court has made it explicitly clear that “the United States can compel testimony from an unwilling witness who invokes the Fifth Amendment privilege against compulsory self-incrimination by conferring immunity.”
Hunter just got absolute immunity from his dad. So I say it’s time to start compelling some testimony.
Imagine what we might learn if Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) holds hearings where the witnesses, having been granted blanket immunity by virtue of a sweeping presidential pardon, are free to spill the beans — or more accurately, compelled to spill the beans.
From Hunter, we might finally learn what he was doing for Burisma. We might learn who “the Big Guy” is. We might finally know whether the Bidens are the crime syndicate some Republicans claim, or whether they are just doing the same thing so many other folks do in this town. The public could decide for itself the relative merit of any of those possible outcomes.
The same applies to Fauci and members of the January 6 Committee, among others.
Of course, jail time would be off the table for everyone, even if Fauci was cooking up gain-of-function cocktails in his garage. I think we should all be good with that. If he were to go to jail for pretty much anything at this point, half the country would probably think him a political prisoner.
Besides, while blanket pardons do run the risk of obviating jail time for anyone who might truly have committed heinous crimes, public shaming can often be just as powerful a penalty.
Imagine, for example, how history might treat headiness like, “Fauci admits he lied about masks,” or “Cheney, Johnson acknowledge destroying January 6 evidence.”
Cynics, of course, will worry that not even full immunity from prosecution will encourage true and honest transparency. To those folks — and to Hunter Biden — I would point out that pardons for past behavior do not protect one’s current or future wrongdoing, including perjury. So, there is at least some hope that transparency might rule the day.
If the truth is what some on the right surmise that it might be — that Fauci hid information, that Schiff lied about the Russia investigation, or that the January 6 Committee tampered with evidence, simply hearing the truth about it might help heal the nation, even if just a little.
At the same time, if full and complete testimony — stripped of even the remotest fear of future criminal prosecution — establishes that all of those sorts of concerns are indeed false, that would also help.
Broad presidential pardons might give us a chance to get there.
Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina, is a contributor to NewsNation. He served as director of the Office of Management and Budget, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and White House chief of staff under President Donald Trump.
