President Biden granted a wave of pre-emptive pardons in his final hours in office on Monday to guard members of his own family and other high-profile figures from a promised campaign of “retribution” by his incoming successor, Donald J. Trump.
In an extraordinary effort by an outgoing president to derail political prosecutions by an incoming president, Mr. Biden pardoned five members of his family, including his brothers James B. Biden and Francis W. Biden, as well as others targeted by Mr. Trump like Gen. Mark A. Milley, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, and former Representative Liz Cheney.
“I believe in the rule of law, and I am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics,” Mr. Biden said in a statement. “But these are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing. Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety and financial security of targeted individuals and their families.
“Even when individuals have done nothing wrong — and in fact have done the right thing — and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances,” he added.
In addition to his brothers, Mr. Biden pardoned his sister, Valerie Biden Owens, and her husband, John T. Owens, as well as Sara Jones Biden, the wife of James Biden. He pardoned all the members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters, as well as their staff and the police officers who testified during their inquiry.
In issuing the pre-emptive pardons, Mr. Biden effectively turned the president’s constitutional power of forgiveness into a protective shield against what he maintained would be politically motivated vengeance. No other president has employed executive clemency in such a broad and overt way to thwart a successor he believes would abuse his power, and no other president, not even Mr. Trump, has pardoned so many members of his own family.
The White House announced the family pardons with less than 20 minutes left in Mr. Biden’s presidency, after he had already walked into the Capitol Rotunda to witness the swearing-in of Mr. Trump. The pardons were a remarkable coda to Mr. Biden’s half-century political career, underscoring the mistrust and anger that the president feels about Mr. Trump, the man who preceded and will succeed him in office.
His action offered a dramatic testament to how radically power shifted in Washington when Mr. Trump took the oath to succeed Mr. Biden. At the start of the day, the outgoing president used his pardon authority to protect those who investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. By the end of the day, the incoming president has said he will pardon many of those who mounted the attack.
“Innocent people are being pardoned in the morning, and guilty people are being pardoned in the afternoon,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, and a member of the Jan. 6 committee, said in an interview. “It is strange to receive a pardon simply for doing your job and upholding your constitutional oath of office. But the incoming administration has been consistently leveling threats.”
Mr. Biden emphasized that he did not issue the pardons because any of the recipients actually committed crimes. “The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense,” he said.
Mr. Trump reacted with indignation. “It is disgraceful,” he said in a text to Kristen Welker of NBC News. “Many are guilty of MAJOR CRIMES!”
Mr. Biden’s use of the pardon power to immunize people who have not even come under investigation, much less been charged with or convicted of a crime, has no clear precedent. But some legal scholars have said that he is within the boundaries of his authority.
The closest precedent might be President Gerald R. Ford’s pardon of his disgraced predecessor, Richard M. Nixon, in 1974 even though he had not been charged with any crimes. But Mr. Nixon faced a real threat of prosecution from a special counsel investigating the Watergate scandal that forced his resignation, and Mr. Ford was not acting to thwart a future president the way Mr. Biden is.
Throughout his campaign last year, Mr. Trump threatened to prosecute Democrats, election workers, law enforcement officials, intelligence officials, reporters, former members of his own staff and Republicans who do not support him, often without identifying any specific criminal activity.
Mr. Trump has said he would “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after Mr. Biden and his family. Mr. Biden previously issued a pardon to his son Hunter that covered any possible crimes over an 11-year period. The president did not include himself in the pre-emptive pardons announced on Monday, but he may be able to count on the immunity conferred by the Supreme Court on presidents last year in a case brought by Mr. Trump to avoid prosecution.
Mr. Trump has said on social media that Ms. Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming who helped lead the Jan. 6 committee, “should be prosecuted for what she has done to our country”and that the whole committee “should be prosecuted for their lies and, quite frankly, TREASON!” He has suggested that General Milley, who was Mr. Trump’s chosen chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserved execution because General Milley called a Chinese counterpart after Jan. 6 to warn Beijing against taking advantage of the crisis in Washington.
Dr. Fauci, who served in government for half a century and as the nation’s top infectious disease expert for 38 years under presidents from Ronald Reagan to Mr. Biden, was targeted by Mr. Trump’s far-right allies for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former strategist, has said that Dr. Fauci, General Milley and others should be prosecuted. “You deserve what we call a rough Roman justice, and we’re prepared to give it to you,” Mr. Bannon said on election night.
Some of those who received the pardons offered public gratitude.
“After forty-three years of faithful service in uniform to our Nation, protecting and defending the Constitution, I do not wish to spend whatever remaining time the Lord grants me fighting those who unjustly might seek retribution for perceived slights,” General Milley said in a statement. “I do not want to put my family, my friends, and those with whom I served through the resulting distraction, expense, and anxiety.”
Dr. Fauci likewise pointed to his long career in public service and noted that he had been the subject of politically motivated threats of prosecution. “There is absolutely no basis for these threats,” he said in his own statement. “Let me be perfectly clear: I have committed no crime and there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation or prosecution of me.
“The fact is, however, that the mere articulation of these baseless threats, and the potential that they will be acted upon, create immeasurable and intolerable distress for me and my family,” he added.
In recent days, some of those covered by the pardons had said they did not want them, including former Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, and Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, both of whom served on the Jan. 6 committee with Ms. Cheney.
“As soon as you take a pardon, it looks like you are guilty of something,” Mr. Kinzinger said on CNN this month. Mr. Schiff said in a separate CNN interview that it would set a bad precedent. “I don’t want to see each president hereafter on their way out the door giving a broad category of pardons to members of their administration,” he said.
But since the pardon for the committee members was issued to a category of people rather than to named individuals, it did not require recipients to accept them. The committee members issued a statement in the name of their chairman, Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, thanking Mr. Biden. “We have been pardoned today not for breaking the law but for upholding it,” Thompson said.
Other members of the Jan. 6 committee covered by Mr. Biden’s pardon include Representatives Zoe Lofgren and Pete Aguilar of California and former Representatives Stephanie Murphy of Florida and Elaine Luria of Virginia, all Democrats.
Michael Fanone, one of the police officers covered by the pardon, said he did not want a pardon and never spoke with anyone from the White House about it, but expressed anger and dismay that Mr. Biden felt compelled to grant him clemency.
Mr. Fanone, who engaged in hand-to-hand combat with rioters on Jan. 6, said it was “insane that we live in a country where the president of the United States feels the need to offer a pre-emptive pardon to American citizens who testified in an investigation regarding an insurrection which was incited by the incoming president because he’s promised to enact, or exact, vengeance on those participants and the body that investigated them.”
Lawyers for Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonnell, two police officers who have been outspoken about the Jan. 6 attack, said the pardons for them “were never sought, nor was there any consultation with the White House.”
Their lawyers, Mark S. Zaid and David H. Laufman, called it “disturbing” that the “continuing threats and attacks by the extreme right, along with the rewriting of the truth surrounding that day’s events, sadly justifies the decision.”
Of the Biden relatives who were pardoned, James Biden has attracted the most scrutiny from Republicans. In June, congressional Republicans formally requested that the Biden Justice Department charge James Biden and Hunter Biden with lying to Congress in sworn testimony delivered as part of the Republican impeachment inquiry into President Biden.
Last week, Representative James R. Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, requested that Mr. Trump’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi, take up the matter. James Biden was involved in some of Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, which were a subject of the impeachment inquiry and were scrutinized by the F.B.I. and the I.R.S. But he has not been charged with any crimes.
Mr. Biden’s pardons did not extend to a variety of other potential Trump targets, including the federal and state prosecutors who indicted the incoming president for trying to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents and convicted him for covering up hush money payment to an adult film star who claimed she had a fling with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Biden also commuted the life sentence for Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist who was convicted of killing two F.B.I. agents in 1975 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Mr. Biden said Mr. Peltier, who is 80 years old, could serve the remainder of his time in home confinement.
The outgoing president also pardoned two Democratic politicians, Ernest William Cromartie, a former city councilman in South Carolina, and Gerald G. Lundergan, a state legislator from Kentucky.
Helene Cooper, Michael S. Schmidt, Devlin Barrett, Kenneth P. Vogel and Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework.
Michael D. Shear is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Biden and his administration. He has reported on politics for more than 30 years.
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