‘An Extraordinary Step’: White House Mulls ‘Preemptive’ Pardon for Fauci
Senior aides to President Joe Biden are “conducting a vigorous internal debate” on whether to grant preemptive pardons to Dr. Anthony Fauci and other current and former public officials whom they fear the incoming administration might target, according to news reports.
DECEMBER 6, 2024
Senior aides to President Joe Biden are “conducting a vigorous internal debate” on whether to grant preemptive pardons to Dr. Anthony Fauci and other current and former public officials whom they fear the incoming administration might target, Politico reported Wednesday.
CNN described the proposed pardons as “an extraordinary step” that would immunize people who have not been formally accused of a crime.
According to Politico, fears that current and former government officials may face inquiries or indictments “accelerated” after President-elect Donald Trump last week nominated Kash Patel to head the FBI. Patel has publicly stated he will pursue Trump’s critics.
Fauci, who according to Politico “became a lightning rod for criticism from the right during the Covid-19 pandemic,” did not respond to the outlet’s requests for comment.
Politico reported that White House counsel Ed Siskel is leading deliberations on the matter, and Chief of Staff Jeff Zients is also playing a key role in the discussions.
Zients, formerly the Biden administration’s COVID-19 “czar,” publicly promoted universal COVID-19 vaccination. In 2021, he spoke about “the winter of illness and death for the unvaccinated.”
Attorney Greg Glaser told The Defender, “The U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 2, confirms the President’s power ‘to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States.’”
The Huffington Post reported that preemptive presidential pardons “are rare but not unprecedented.”
Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told The Defender, “A blanket pardon by President Biden to Fauci would cover his gross violations [of] federal statutes that are too numerous to list” but “could not cover his crimes committed under the criminal laws of the 50 U.S. states.”
“Biden’s ‘get out of jail free’ card only applies to federal prison, not state prison,” Glaser said.
Joseph Sansone, Ph.D., who proposed legislation to ban COVID-19 and mRNA vaccines in Florida, told The Defender, “The use of preemptive pardons appears to be a violation of the Separation of Powers inherent in the U.S. Constitution.”
“The purpose of a pardon is to correct a judicial error or miscarriage of justice, not to preempt judicial action,” Sansone said. “Unless a coconspirator, no president could know the scope of the crimes being pardoned if the person has not been convicted or even charged.”
But according to Glaser, “A federal pardon by Biden cannot be overturned by President Trump or even reversed by Congress without a constitutional amendment to Article II, Section 2 or upon proof that Biden’s pardon was itself unlawful.”
Fauci pardon may help conceal ‘massive scale of criminal wrongdoing’
What would a preemptive pardon for Fauci cover? Criminal defense attorney Rick Jaffe told The Defender that if he were Fauci’s lawyer, he would seek a pardon that “covers all testimony provided to Congress since at least the start of the pandemic.”
The pardon could also include all actions relating to the U.S. government’s funding of gain-of-function research and all actions in which Fauci is alleged to be part of a conspiracy to mislead government officials and the public,” Jaffe said.
“I’d throw in immunity from any action by the federal government to terminate his pension or his royalty payments from pharma, because trying to do that will probably be very high on the new government’s list,” Jaffe added.
Journalist Paul Thacker, formerly a U.S. Senate investigator, told The Defender “Sen. Rand Paul has sent two separate referrals to the Department of Justice to prosecute Fauci” for “lying and/or misleading Congress. Fauci was also caught lying to Congress about his use of private email to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests, something that I have reported on, as has The New York Post,” Thacker said.
Brianne Dressen, a participant in AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials who was injured by the shot, later took part in a National Institutes of Health (NIH) study of vaccine-injured people “that got shot down and hidden.” Dressen told The Defender pardoning Fauci would silence vaccine injury victims. She said:
“The Biden administration silenced true stories of COVID vaccine injuries online at the same time that Fauci was flying COVID vaccine-injured to NIH headquarters to be studied. It’s no surprise Biden may close the loop to protect him.
“This pardon isn’t just about protecting him. Discovery alone would shine a light on things we still don’t know about that happened at the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.”
“How better to circumvent a process likely to reveal a massive scale of criminal wrongdoing — not just by Dr. Fauci but by layers and layers of his allies in both the government and the private sector — than by preemptively pardoning him?” asked Naomi Wolf, CEO of Daily Clout and author of “The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity.”
Fauci pardon would show public health decisions ‘beyond the reach of justice’
According to Politico, some congressional Democrats — “though not those seeking pardons themselves” — have engaged in “quiet lobbying” recently in an effort to convince Biden to issue the preemptive pardons.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has come out in favor of Biden issuing preemptive pardons. In an interview with Boston Public Radio last week, Markey cited the precedent of former President Gerald Ford, who granted a preemptive pardon to Richard Nixon before any charges were filed against him following his impeachment.
However, the proposed preemptive pardons have “caused a stir” among other Democrats, “with some saying the move erodes Americans’ faith in the justice system,” the Huffington Post reported. According to Politico, some Democrats are concerned the pardons “could suggest impropriety, only fueling Trump’s criticisms.”
“I just haven’t heard a good case to be made for pardoning behavior that hasn’t yet been committed or hasn’t yet been defined,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told USA Today. Referencing his term as Virginia’s governor, Kaine said he used pardon power “in individual cases to grant pardons to people who have been convicted.”
“The idea of just kind of general vague, pardon for unknown activities that haven’t been charged. That is so susceptible to abuse,” Kaine said.
According to CNN, “Attorneys across the political spectrum” have also “raised concerns about blanket pardons.”
“You would create the beginning of a tit for tat where, when any administration is over, you just pardon everybody,” Neil Eggleston, former White House counsel to President Barack Obama, told CNN.
According to The Washington Post, “The notion of sweeping preemptive pardons for offenses that have not yet been charged, and may never be, is largely untested.”
Jeffrey Crouch, J.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of politics at American University and expert on presidential pardon powers, told USA Today that a president can grant a pardon as soon as a federal crime is committed, without waiting until someone is charged, tried or convicted.
Crouch said it is unclear whether beneficiaries of such pardons would be admitting guilt by accepting the pardon. Crouch said the Biden administration would be in “uncharted waters” and warned that preemptive pardons “could weaponize clemency” and stray far beyond the intended constitutional use of pardon power.
Sayer Ji, founder of GreenMedInfo, was named one of the “The Disinformation Dozen” by the Center for Countering Digital Hate in 2021 — a list subsequently used by the White House to pressure social media platforms to censor those individuals. He told The Defender preemptively pardoning Fauci would be an abuse of power.
He said:
“These were not mere administrative decisions, but profound exercises of authority that reached into the sanctum of personal liberty, that redefined the boundaries of state power and touched the very foundations of how citizens relate to their government.
“A preemptive pardon for Dr. Fauci would pierce the sacred covenant between those who govern and those who consent to be governed — a bond as old as democracy itself. Such an extraordinary shield … would signal that the architects of our most consequential public health decisions stand beyond the reach of justice.”
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