House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday expressed two very different views about recent pardons from Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
“The president has the pardon and commutation authority. It’s his decision,” Johnson said about Trump’s decision to pardon almost all of his supporters who were convicted over the January 6th insurrection. “There was a weaponization of the Justice Department. There was a weaponization of the events, the following, you know, the prosecutions that happened after January 6th.”
“The president’s made his decision,” the Louisiana Republican added. “I don’t second-guess those.”
Two minutes later at the same news conference, however, Johnson took aim at Biden’s preemptive pardons for his family members.
“To us, it is disgusting. To us, it probably proves the point, the suspicion that, you know, they call it the Biden crime family. If they weren’t the crime family, why do they need pardons, right? Look, there’s a lot of attention that’s going to be paid to this — we will be looking at it as well.”
In an executive order Monday evening — in one of his first acts as president — Trump fully pardoned about 1,500 of his supporters who were convicted over January 6th. He also commuted the sentences of 14 others who committed violent crimes, such as assaulting police officers.
Trump’s order freed several far-right leaders who orchestrated the attack on the Capitol, including former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy, and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who got an 18-year prison sentence. Trump went further with Tarrio, giving him a full pardon. Biden’s Justice Department deemed Tarrio to be the ringleader of the plot to violently ensure Trump stayed in office. He wasn’t at the January 6th attack itself — he was arrested two days earlier in a separate case.
Biden, meanwhile, in one of his final acts as president, granted pardons to his family — seemingly in an effort to inoculate them from potential prosecutions from Trump, who in 2023 vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” Biden and his family. He and Republicans have pushed unproven claims that the Biden family covered up Joe and Hunter Biden’s corrupt business deals.
