Receipts Fly After 'Journalist' Frets Over Donald Trump's Pardon Power

After the stunts former President Joe Biden pulled in the last couple of months of his sole term in office, one would think that the mainstream media would be able to put the whole pardon/sentence commutation issue into better perspective in terms of historical context and precedent.

But because the Orange Man Bad narratives must persist - and because they literally learned nothing from the November elections, the corporate press are doing what they do best: making it sound like Donald Trump is taking the country down a dangerous path because some of his pardons are "going to his supporters and political allies."

That was the hot take from ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jon Karl, who wrote on his Twitter/X page that "Donald Trump is using his pardon power early and often — And there's a clear trend: many of his pardons are going to his supporters and political allies." He also included a news clip of himself talking about the issue during a "Good Morning America" segment on Thursday.

My RedState colleague Brad Slager was among the many who provided Karl, who has written three anti-Trump books, with some inconvenient reminders:

Behold @JonKarl, displaying the memory of a goldfish.

4 months ago this was not a problem, even though these were sweeping, preemptive pardons covering over a decade. https://t.co/tcCnVr6g9A pic.twitter.com/cudiRie8Gm
— Brad Slager: CNN+ Lifetime Subscriber (@MartiniShark) May 29, 2025

Did you have anything to say about this, Jon? pic.twitter.com/Fv7NLWmMTp
— Snarknado ⚓️ 🇺🇸 (@ZannSuz) May 30, 2025

And let us not forget the "full and unconditional" pardon of his son, convicted felon Hunter Biden, in early December 2024, something that happened after Hunter Biden - through his legal team - wrote a 52-page public plea begging him to, and despite Joe Biden's previous pledges that he wouldn't:

No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.

For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: just tell the American people the truth. They’ll be fair-minded. Here’s the truth: I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice – and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.

For Democrats and the mainstream media, "no one is above the law" - except for Democrats and any other political ally willing to go down with the sinking ship as long as they can try taking a bite out of Trump and the rule of law on the way down.

But, hey, I guess if Trump had waited to do these pardons as he was leaving office rather than at the beginning of it, maybe it would have sort of been okay for the likes of Jon Karl, right?

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