Should Joe Biden Pardon Donald Trump?

In the wake of Donald Trump’s indictment by the Justice Department, some members of the Republican establishment have dared to criticize the former President. Trump’s second Attorney General, Bill Barr, blasted Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified documents, calling him “a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s.” Even Mike Pence said that he could not defend Trump’s behavior. But amid these criticisms have been attempts to place at least some of the blame for the scandal—and its potential consequences—elsewhere.

Last week, in the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen, a former George W. Bush aide and Post columnist, and Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, co-wrote an op-ed titled “Biden Should Pardon Trump.” According to the authors—who co-host the podcast “What the Hell Is Going On?”—if Joe Biden “wants to deliver on his promise to heal the country, he could do so with one action: Pardon Donald Trump.” Furthermore, they argue that, despite Trump’s bad behavior, Republican voters are not wrong to find the justice system partisan; therefore, this indictment has “opened a Pandora’s Box,” which could eventually lead to Presidents of both parties going after their political enemies.

I recently spoke by phone with Pletka. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed Republicans’ loss of trust in the criminal-justice system, how the G.O.P. might respond to January 6th charges, and why so many in the Party want to blame everyone but themselves for Donald Trump.

Why a pardon? What would a pardon do?

Well, look, apart from anything else, it’s clever, with all of the positive and the negative implications of that word. It’s something that would at once defang a lot of the arguments that Donald Trump makes, and defang Donald Trump.

Rationally speaking, he would have nowhere to go.

Right. He says, “The Biden Administration has weaponized the federal government against me. The deep state tried to do it to me when I was President.” We can argue about the rhetoric, but that is arguably true. And Biden can say, reasonably, “You know what? You did a bad thing. I’m not going to let you off the hook. We need to issue a report. We need to detail to the American people exactly what happened, like the Mueller Report, like the Durham Report, but I recognize that this is a former President of the United States, that more than seventy million people voted for him, and in my Inaugural I promised to heal the nation, and I hope that this is a step in that direction.”

You write in the piece, “The threshold for the sitting president’s administration to indict the leading candidate of the opposing party should be extraordinarily high. High enough to mitigate the suspicion held by 80 percent of Republicans and almost half the nation, per ABC News-Ipsos polling, that these charges are politically motivated.” I don’t know that we can give polls of Republicans veto power over the justice system. Is that a problem?

No, that is completely right. If ninety per cent of Americans believe that Joe Biden should nuke Russia, does that mean that Joe Biden should nuke Russia? Absolutely not. We are a representative democracy, not a mobocracy. On the other hand, there should be no doubt that the Justice Department has an enormous breadth of discretion. And let’s not lie to ourselves; it has exercised that discretion in ways that have benefitted Democrats. Now, has it also exercised that discretion in ways that have benefitted Republicans? Probably, yes. But front and foremost in the minds of a lot of Republicans and Trump acolytes is that they have exercised that discretion when it comes to Hillary Clinton. The Hunter Biden investigation has taken five years, if it was indeed an investigation at all.

Again, I want to underscore, this is not necessarily how I see the world, sitting in Washington, D.C., but it is how a lot of people see the world. And, whether we want to label these people as deplorables or whatever other term is used in élite Democratic circles to talk about them, the reality is they are still Americans, and their loss of faith in our government, and their belief that our government is irreparably politicized, is a bad thing. Now, you can turn around and say, “That’s all Donald Trump’s fault.” That’s not really right. In fact, I would go further and say that is one of the reasons that Donald Trump got elected.

The conservative former judge J. Michael Luttig recently tweeted that “there is not an Attorney General of either party who would not have brought” the charges against Trump. The conservative movement could be saying this to Republican voters.

That is a whole other problem, O.K.? What conservatives choose to say about this is a different kettle of fish.

We can go back and forth and back and forth about whether, on the merits, Trump deserved this indictment. I think the answer is yes. Whether on the merits other people should have been indicted: Yes, possibly, but they weren’t. The point that we try to make is not “Ooh, Trump should be exonerated for the good of the country,” blah, blah, blah. It is because there’s a judgment call to be made. Note, we did not argue that he should be pardoned for any future possible state-level charges, like surely in Georgia, which arguably is not within the power of the President in any case. Again, this is an argument about a decision being made at the federal level to try to heal some part of the government’s behavior, to not begin a cycle wherein we have Joe Biden’s Administration indicting Trump, and then we have the next Republican Administration indicting the Biden family, and then we have the next Democratic Administration indicting them. This is not a joke.

Do you think the “cycle” actually started more with Trump having rallies where he would say “Lock her up” about his opponent?

Well, his hypocrisy is worth an entire additional twenty-eight op-eds.

To say that the next Republican will have to prosecute Biden and his family: they will only have to do so if they choose to do so. These aren’t iron laws of history. Republicans can make that choice, just like Democrats can make the choice to prosecute Republicans for bullshit crimes. People have to make those choices, and they can be criticized for those choices, right?

Right. I mean, certainly we remain a country of free will, and people can do the right thing. Dozens of members of the intelligence community didn’t have to sign that letter saying that the Hunter laptop story was Russian disinformation, but they did. So, again, of course we’re a country of choices. Nonetheless, I was on “Meet the Press” yesterday, and someone said the Democratic base wouldn’t allow it. Yeah, well, O.K. That’s right. And I would say the same thing. “Well, the base wouldn’t allow a Republican to not do this.”