Leading voices across the political spectrum urged President Biden Monday to use his next pardon on a political rival: President-elect Donald Trump.
Democratic senators and conservative commentators have both come forward to say a pardon for Trump would help balance Biden’s controversial pardon of son Hunter Biden and help heal national divisions.
“Why don’t you go ahead and pardon Donald Trump for all his charges and make it more balanced,” former Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, I-W.V., told CNN. “The president has to be the president for the next four years, fighting all these criminal cases… Just clean that slate up.”
Constitutional scholar Alan Dershowitz said Biden should extend the same principle he used for Hunter – opposing selective prosecution – to Trump and all nonviolent January 6 defendants.
“What Hunter Biden did was criminal, whereas what Donald Trump did, certainly in New York, was not criminal. But in both cases, they would never have been prosecuted if their names were ‘Smith’ rather than Biden and Trump,” Dershowitz told Newsmax.
While a federal pardon wouldn’t affect state cases in New York and Georgia, advocates argue it would demonstrate moral leadership.
“Biden would stand no taller than if he defied partisanship to pardon his most bitter political rival,” wrote constitutional scholar Adonis Hoffman, comparing it to President Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon.
The calls come amid fierce Democratic criticism of Hunter’s pardon.
“President Biden’s decision put personal interest ahead of duty and further erodes Americans’ faith that the justice system is fair and equal for all,” Sen. Michael Bennet, D-C.O., wrote on X, joining a chorus of Democratic and Republican lawmakers that condemned the pardon of Hunter.
“If it becomes a one-off,” Dershowitz warned, “history will look very, very negatively upon him.”