WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Friday said he was still considering whether to give pardons to people who have been criticized or threatened by President-elect Donald Trump.
Speaking to reporters at the White House, Biden said he and his aides were playing close attention to rhetoric from Trump and his allies about his political opponents and those involved in his various criminal and civil woes.
“It depends on some of the language and expectations that Trump broadcast in the last couple days here as to what he’s going to do,” Biden said. “The idea that he would punish people for not adhering to what he thinks should be policy related to his well-being is just outrageous.”
Biden has just 10 days left in office, and the institutionalist has been using his waning days in office to restore some of the transition norms broken by his predecessor-turned-successor. But issuing preemptive pardons — for actual or imagined offenses by Trump’s critics that could be investigated or prosecuted by the incoming administration — would stretch the powers of the presidency in untested ways.
Trump’s frequent targets include Republican Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman, and Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat. They helped lead the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters. He has aimed particular criticism at special counsel Jack Smith, who charged Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Biden, who Trump has said should be jailed, scoffed at the notion that he would pardon himself. “What would I pardon myself for?” he asked incredulously. “No, I have no contemplation of pardoning myself for anything. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of the Republican members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, rejected the prospect of a pardon from Biden earlier this week in an appearance on CNN.
“I understand the theory behind it because Donald Trump has clearly said he’s going to go after everybody,” he said. “But the second you take a pardon and it looks like you’re guilty of something — I’m guilty of nothing besides bringing the truth to the American people and, in the process, embarrassing Donald Trump.”
In his remarks to reporters, Biden said a decision by the social media giant Meta to end fact-checking on Facebook was “really shameful,” calling it “contrary to American justice.”
The move to replace third-party fact-checking with user-written “community notes,” similar to those on Trump backer Elon Musk’s social platform X, was the latest example of a media company moving to accommodate the incoming administration. It comes on the fourth anniversary of Zuckerberg’s banning Trump from his platforms after the insurrection.
Biden added: “You think it doesn’t matter that they let it be printed? Where millions of people read it, things that are simply not true. I mean, I don’t know what that’s all about. It’s just completely contrary to everything America’s about. We want to tell the truth.”