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Notes -
Biden just set a precedent of pardoning future crimes.
It's minimal - the pardon was issued during the day Sunday and covered up until Sunday at midnight - and probably accidental; it feels like someone leaked the pardon news so Biden just ripped the bandaid off and pardoned Hunter a day early.
Pardoning for future crimes - however minimal - is still improper. Ex parte Garland states that presidential pardons are only for crimes after the crime's commission. But the Hunter pardon wasn't written to be severable (i.e., if a part is deemed invalid, the whole can still stand). Is Hunter Biden's pardon thus entirely invalid, because the couple of hours of future pardon is "against the rules?"
Or will we as a country accept the pardoning of future crimes moving forward? Can Trump now walk into the Oval Office day one and issue pardons for his entire administration for any federal crimes committed during his tenure? He can point to the Hunter pardon as allowing this kind of power, and he wouldn't necessarily be incorrect.
Social media marked all of this up as jokes - "Hunter can go on a one man purge tonight!!" and "hookers and crack for Hunter tonight!" I haven't seen it floating around legal blogs or anything of the like quite yet, although in the grand scheme of things, a few hours of future immunity isn't that big of a deal.
For the party of "Defending Democracy™️", pardoning crimes not yet committed is not really what they should be going for. The culture war discussion will focus on Biden being a liar yadda yadda, but the scarier part of this is the few hours of future immunity until midnight yesterday remaining unchallenged.
What stops the pardon power in the limit becoming a blanket grant of immunity to federal law?
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Following the logic as you've stated it, the pardon is valid if Hunter Biden didn't commit any federal crimes between the time the pardon was given and midnight last night.
Does anybody on Earth really believe that notorious crackhead Hunter Biden didn't celebrate his freedom from jail in typical fashion?
The only question is whether he left evidence of it. We'll have to wait until he leaves more laptops full of documentaries of his crimes at local repair shops.
Nobody really cares- the FBI doesn’t go after random crackheads, democrats want to sweep the whole thing under the rug, republicans are more interested in grandstanding on the pardon than in ensuring justice is done.
I've just read that his landlord is now complaining because he owed him hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent and that's all just been forgiven.
Hunter is a very lucky man, but collecting enemies isn't really a good way to live.
That hasn't just been forgiven, though, has it? The President can pardon federal crimes, but not state/local crimes or civil torts.
It's a bit unclear to me because allegedly he used or tried to use the Secret Service to avoid paying him. I don't know if that's a separate federal crime or part of the same thing or how exactly any of that works.
I sure hope that guy still has legal recourse.
I'm not even sure if that's a federal crime. The Secret Service generally won't commit crimes, and they aren't generally treated as co-conspirators or anything if they witness crimes and decline to intervene, although in theory they're at least required to report on it after the fact and testify about it if subpoenaed. This doesn't come up much for obvious reasons, but IIRC when one of GW Bush's daughters was drinking underage there was a Secret Service guard witnessing it without stopping it, and the justification was basically "if we interfere she's just going to decline or ditch protection and then she's neither sober nor safe".
But even if they couldn't turn the situation into some "manipulating the Secret Service for X" charge before and definitely can't do so now, it still can't be thrown out of civil court due to a criminal pardon, and a civil judgement could still be enforced.
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Is that actually true?
Since Ex parte Garland wasn't reaching the specific question of whether or not you can pardon crimes not yet committed, I think it would be dicta and (and ambiguously phrased at that), so I could see a court reaching a different conclusion (yes yes I just think it would be funny if Tom Clancy called a major legal development!)
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That would prevent him from punishing or having any real leverage (save from dismissal) to discourage any criminal action in office by eg. appointed officials, cabinet members etc, a huge neutering of the president’s own power.
Can the President annul a previously-issued pardon? If so, this suggests another interesting possibility: Trump could proactively pardon all of his cabinet members/executive branch employees for any crimes committed during his presidency, then order them to commit some crime, then (assuming they comply rather than resign) threaten to revoke the pardon unless they do exactly what he says. Boom, instant leverage over his cabinet!
No. Not a prior President's nor even his own.
Pardons obtained under duress are probably never valid in the first place, but there's still a great movie in there.
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It seems likely that the pardon would actually be filed at some point in the future, and cover the dates listed. What you were seeing was the press release, which was released just before the end of the period he was covering for the pardon.
I think it is effective immediately. The above quote is from the DOD about a past pardon.
https://www.defense.gov/Spotlights/Presidential-Pardon-Resources/
And Bidens pardon of Hunter (up to and including 1.Dec) was signed and released on 1.Dec:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/12/01/statement-from-president-joe-biden-11/
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The world will not know the answer because it won’t come up. Hunter likely didn’t murder anyone yesterday at 11:59 PM, and nobody wants to investigate whether he smoked crack in a brief window of immunity(the people most interested would rather make political hay).
Unless the plot of a Tom Clancy novel comes true, we simply won’t have an answer.
Brief?! It's a full decade!
It’s clearly future immunity that’s brief- a couple of hours.
Oh... well, that's not immunity, that's just being innocent.
Well yes, but it’s very possible he committed the kind of drug crime that was always more of a lurid detail than the thrust of the case yesterday evening.
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It's not even going to become an issue unless Hunter committed a crime in the interim and is charged with it, which seems unlikely. SCOTUS isn't going to entertain the theory that the pardon is wholly invalid because it included a period for which a pardon was not effective.
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