President Biden has recently drawn scorn for pardoning his son, Hunter, from his crimes of evading taxes and lying on a gun permit application. While he rightly fears that his son will be the target of right-wing vengeance under a Trump administration, the pardon is nonetheless another sign of how rotten our system is. The richest 1% like Trump and the career politicians like Biden manipulate the legal system to work for them, allowing them and their family members to get away with crimes even when they’ve actually been convicted of them! Their hypocrisy is once again in plain sight.
But since Biden has actually used the Presidential pardon powers far less than past Presidents, we’d like to suggest that he make up for pardoning his son by pardoning people who have been truly wronged by the system and have suffered enough. Some of those people might include:
Leonard Peltier, the American Indian Movement activist imprisoned for the past 50 years after what is widely considered to be a wrongful conviction for killing two FBI agents.
Edward Snowden, the National Security Administration (NSA) contractor who in 2013 leaked details of the NSA’s mass electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens, and who has been living in Russia ever since, under the watchful eyes of Vladimir Putin.
Many of the inmates on federal death row in the United States today, many of whom were undoubtedly wrongfully convicted, and most of whom have already spent decades behind bars. And the thousands of others who are incarcerated for crimes that are no longer illegal.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents about the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and who spent 14 years in a state of international legal limbo in international embassies and prisons.
The dozens of U.S. soldiers who became conscientious objectors by refusing to fight in the invasion and occupation of Iraq and are still being charged with desertion or other military crimes. Some were imprisoned, and others have fled the U.S. to avoid imprisonment.
Biden could even preemptively pardon millions of undocumented immigrants before Trump tries to go after them. Most committed the so-called crime of migrating into the U.S. over the past few decades and most have been living in the U.S. for years if not longer. Biden could preemptively pardon them just as he preemptively pardoned his son.
And this is just a partial list, in case Biden cared for them nearly as much as he cared for his son.
