“No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.” —James Madison (1787)
Donald Trump announced with great fanfare on Black Friday that he is terminating each and every one of Joe Biden’s autopen signatures, citing his predecessor’s mental incapacity and questions of who authorized those signatures. To that point, we have raised serious questions about who was actually in control of Biden’s autopen and whether there were any presidential authorizations for those actions.
On Tuesday, Trump reiterated: “Any and all Documents, Proclamations, Executive Orders, Memorandums, or Contracts, signed by Order of the now infamous and unauthorized ‘AUTOPEN,’ within the Administration of Joseph R. Biden Jr., are hereby null, void, and of no further force or effect. Anyone receiving ‘Pardons,’ ‘Commutations,’ or any other Legal Document so signed, please be advised that said Document has been fully and completely terminated, and is of no Legal effect.”
It is not clear how the Trump administration will determine if appropriate authority was in place for Biden’s autopen use, but it is certain that Biden was not consulted on perhaps many of the 162 autopenned executive orders. According to Trump, “The Radical Left Lunatics circling Biden took the Presidency away from him.”
As I noted the day after Trump took office this year, “It’s Biden’s unpardonable pardons issued in his final weeks — and final minutes in office — that warrant investigation.”
Recall that Biden commuted the sentences of 1,499 people and pardoned another 39 convicts to divert the news cycle attention away from the corrupt pardon favor for his son. That was followed just before Christmas by his commutation of the sentences of 37 of 40 federal death row inmates, some being the most evil people in federal custody. Biden then began the new year by commuting another 2,500 sentences.
Hours before leaving office, despite warnings from Demos not to issue preemptive pardons, Biden did just that by preemptively pardoning Anthony Fauci, GEN Mark Milley, and the J6 inquisitors, including witness-tampering former Rep. Liz Cheney.
According to Biden, the former leader of the Demo cavalry of “lying dog-faced pony soldiers,” “I believe in the rule of law, but these are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing.”
Then, just minutes before Trump took his oath of office, Biden extended pardons to his immediate family members — to the astonishment of many of Biden’s Leftmedia defenders, including even CNN leftist Jake Tapper. Apparently, this exceeded even Tapper’s tolerance for hypocrisy. He posted a photo of the Biden family pardons with a link to a 2020 CNN article about Biden’s concern that Trump might issue preemptive pardons to family members (which he did not do) just before Trump left office.
Biden declared back then: “It concerns me in terms of what kind of precedent it sets and how the rest of the world looks (at) us as a nation of laws and justice. … You’re not going to see, uh, um, in our administration, that kind of approach to pardons.”
Well, as we have often opined, if not for double standards, Demos would have no standards.
Clearly, the last-minute pardons for Biden’s immediate family members indicate that he was the godfather of the Biden Crime Family syndicate, and he issued pardons to those closest to him to protect himself. Of that unprecedented action, political analyst Buck Sexton concluded, “Biden pardoning his whole crime family on the way out the door is the perfect ending to this fetid, corrupt, failed presidency.”
Over the Biden/Harris regime’s four years in office, Biden issued pardons and clemencies to more than 10,500 criminals, which is, as he proudly declared, “more individual pardons and commutations than any president in U.S. history.” (For context, Trump issued a total of 237 pardons and clemencies in his first term.)
When Trump took office in January, I affirmed my strong support for his second-term agenda, outlining that affirmation in “Trump 2.0 — Attack of the Disruptors.” And he has had many policy successes since then.
However, Trump lost the moral high ground on Biden’s pardons when he issued a blanket pardon to all but 14 of the J6 offenders, including 220 with convictions for felonies that included assault on police officers.
At the time, we all anticipated that Trump would issue pardons for the J6 protesters charged or convicted of nonviolent offenses. As Trump himself said, “A vast majority should not be in jail,” and he was correct. He earlier insisted, “If they were nonviolent, I think they’ve been greatly punished.” Again, correct.
JD Vance was also clear about who should not be pardoned: “Look, if you protested peacefully on January the 6th, and you’ve had Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned. If you committed violence on that day, obviously, you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi affirmed that Trump would not release violent offenders. “I condemn any violence on a law enforcement officer in this country,” she declared, adding, “The president does not like people who abuse police officers, either.”
The J6 pardons of violent offenders were and remain indefensible.
Since then, Trump has issued hundreds of executive clemencies, citing a wide range of justifications. Among those, and reflecting better judgment, Trump has righted some egregious wrongs by issuing pardons to those who helped him expose the Demos’ rigged bulk-mail ballot fraud in the 2020 election.
However, in an unfortunate and poorly timed executive order this week, Trump’s pardon pen undermined his critical national security agenda and his moral high ground.
In recent months, the Trump administration has authorized surgical military strikes on Venezuelan narco-trafficker boats, part of a strategy to depose dictator Nicolás Maduro, who operates terrorist organizations including TdA (Tren de Aragua), Sinaloa, and Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns).
But this week, Trump issued a pardon to the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando “JOH” Hernández, a notorious convicted trafficker of weapons and drugs.
Trump announced the pardon in an endorsement of Nasry “Tito” Asfura, the Honduran conservative presidential candidate: “Tito will be a Great President, and the United States will work closely with him in order to ensure the success, with all of its potential, of Honduras! … I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly. … MAKE HONDURAS GREAT AGAIN!”
(That election was held on 30 November, and Nasry Asfura is tied with Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla with 80% of the vote counted — amid fraud claims.)
JOH was arrested by the DEA in 2022 at the end of his second term and subsequently convicted in June 2024 for running Honduras as a “narco-state.” Having allegedly flooded the United States with more than 400 metric tons of cocaine, he was sentenced to 45 years in prison. Notably, his brother is convicted narco-trafficker Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, who was arrested by the DEA in November 2018 during Trump’s first term, for manufacturing and smuggling at least 185,000 kilograms of cocaine into the U.S.
Asked about the JOH pardon, Trump responded: “Well … many of the people of Honduras, they said it was a Biden setup. I don’t mean Biden. Biden didn’t know he was alive, but it was the people that surround the Resolute desk, surrounding Biden when he was there. … And the people of Honduras really thought he was set up, and it was a terrible thing. … And I looked at the facts and I agreed with them.”
For the record, JOH was the leader of the conservative National Party of Honduras, and his policies were pro-business, pro-security, and affirming of U.S. relations in the region.
His pardon comes amid the Demo-manufactured claims that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth issued a “kill them all” order to finish off some survivors of a 2 September missile attack on a Venezuelan drug-running boat.
They are claiming that the alleged Hegseth order constitutes a “war crime,” though, in fact, it does not. Leave it to congressional leftists to find a way to defend narco-traffickers.
Of course, these are some of the same Demos who, two weeks ago, issued a video attempting to drive a wedge in the military chain of command, advising military personnel to “refuse illegal orders” and warning them that “the threats to our Constitution are coming from right here at home.” This was Joe Biden’s “threat to democracy” propaganda 2.0.
If they can’t get Hegseth, they hope to pin blame on ADM Frank Bradley, the distinguished commander of United States Special Operations Command that directs the operations against the drug runners.
For the record, now that the Trump administration has regained control of our southern border, narco-traffickers have been forced to smuggle large quantities of drugs into the United States by boat. Those operations provided Trump the opening we needed to go after Maduro, given the enormous strategic hemispheric implications of Venezuela, particularly related to Red Chinese influence.
I suspect that the pardon and release of Juan Orlando Hernández is part of a backroom quid pro quo connected to where Nicolás Maduro will seek asylum, and how to eventually have him extradited to the U.S. for prosecution as a narco-trafficker.
That being said, the optics of the JOH pardon were terrible — in fact, indefensible.
Back in 2017 after Trump took office, I wrote, “Memo to POTUS: Stop Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory.” This was in response to his penchant for saying and doing things that undermined his agenda success.
In his second term, Trump has been much better about controlling his messaging and the resulting optics. I suspect this latest pardon blunder is an anomaly, but time will tell.
Pardon pen problems aside, there was good political news for Trump and Republicans this morning. Despite all the Demo/Leftmedia assurances that their candidate would win a hotly contested special congressional election in Tennessee, Republican Matt Van Epps won the seat, defeating his opponent by a whopping nine points despite Democrats throwing everything they had behind their candidate.
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