Bill Clinton On Joe Biden’s Hunter Pardon — “I Wish He Hadn’t Said He Wouldn’t Do It”

deadline.com:

Bill Clinton says he understands why President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter and that “you can’t take the politics out of pardons.” The sitting president “did have reasons to believe that the nature of the offenses involved were likely to produce far, far worse consequences for his son” than for the average person, Clinton said today in a wide-ranging conversation at the New York Times’ DealBook Conference.

But the recent firestorm “may speak more to the current broken state of the pardon system.” “I wish he hadn’t said he wasn’t going to do it.

I think it does weaken his case, and it makes people freer to dump on him,” he added. “But there is also a reason that the founding fathers gave this pardon power to the president, because all kinds of things are always happening that you can’t reconcile in terms of this, that and the other thing, and you can’t figure out how to solve it.” “When it was toward the end of my term, I looked around and I was absolutely astonished at the backlog of applications that had been sent to the Justice Department, and there had been no action.” Asked why that was, Clinton said, “Because you never get in trouble for saying no.” Asked about the idea that Biden should now pardon Trump as a way to make the process “balanced,” or about calls for Trump to pardon Biden, Clinton said, “Well, I do think we should stop trying to criminalize politics…both of them.

And the people like it when they are not going along with it from right to left. On the other hand, you have to ask yourself, if you do this as a blanket thing, is there anything a president could do that he or she would someday get in trouble for?” Clinton did distinguish his pardon of his brother, Roger, from Biden’s pardon of his