The organization was set up expressly to apply for the GGRF grant. It had only received $100 in funding during the 2023 tax year. Yet somehow, it managed to retain the services of a major law firm to file its return. //

I have some experience in grant writing, and the idea of a non-profit with $100 in the bank getting a $2 billion grant is about √-1 without shenanigans involved. The common theme seems to be Abrams. She was general counsel for one coalition partner, founder of two partners, and on the national advisory board of yet another partner.

Tuesday, a top DC prosecutor resigned rather than open an investigation into some part of the $20 billion GGRF grift; Top DOJ Prosecutor Walks Out Rather Than Investigate Biden 'New Green Deal' Grant for Criminal Behavior – RedState. It would be interesting to know which grant was under examination.

Mayor Pete failed for four years to address the air traffic controller shortage and upgrade our outdated, World War II-era air traffic control system. In less than four weeks, we have already begun the process and are engaging the smartest minds in the entire world.

Here’s the truth: the FAA alone has a staggering 45,000 employees. Less than 400 were let go, and they were all probationary, meaning they had been hired less than a year ago. Zero air traffic controllers and critical safety personnel were let go.

Mayor Pete chose to use this amazing department—that is so critical to America’s success—as a slush fund for the green new scam and environmental justice nonsense. Not to mention that over 90% of the workforce under his leadership were working from home - including him. The building was empty!

When we finally get a full accounting of his mismanagement, I look forward to hearing from him.In the meantime, I will not rest until I return the Department of Transportation and its incredible employees to its mission of efficiency and safety. //

jri500
8 hours ago
For 2 years during the Idiot Biden administration, the FAA DID NOT HAVE one single training classes for new Air Traffic Controllers (ATC). In the meantime, Biden's FAA refused to hire 1,000 newly qualified ATC graduates because they were WHITE.

When training finally resumed, FAA couldn't fill training classes because they couldn't find enough woke, minority, physically or psychologically challenged (WTF???) candidates to fill them. ANYTHING BUT WHITE. FAA is currently short about four (4) thousand ATCs. Add to that, the mandatory retirement age is 54!

The tower in DC called for a full staff of 30 ATCs. They had about half that. And the night the crash happened, 1 controller was doing the job of 2. Every airport in the country is short staffed. And democRATS are trying to blame Trump? He's been in office less than a month.

The head of the criminal division of the US Attorney's office in DC has resigned rather than investigate a Biden-sponsored New Green Deal grant network for possible criminal behavior. Denise Cheung announced her departure to staff with an email saying, “This office is a special place. I took an oath of office to support and defend the Constitution, and I have executed this duty faithfully.” //

The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was to funnel about $26 billion to the United Climate Fund and Climate Justice Alliance. This grant was funded in August 2024 to the tune of $20.3 billion, again in October for $4.3 billion, with the final tranche of $2 billion landing in December 2024/January 2025; see the details here. These were all part of the Biden "throwing gold bars off the Titanic" (see EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin Finds the $20 Billion 'Gold Bars' the Biden Administration Tried to Jettison – RedState) plan where immense amounts of grant funding would be "parked" in leftist 501(c)3 corporations that were supposed to continue to run beneath the radar even after Trump had taken office.

stickdude90
9 hours ago
Remind me again why we spend so much blood and treasure to protect these blowhards...

jri500 anon-fv7m
6 hours ago
Bill Clinton and his buddy, Bernard Schwartz (LORAL Space) GAVE China our ballistic missile gyroscope guidance technology. Just gave it to them because liberals couldn't stand the fact that the US was the world's lone super power at the time. China's missiles couldn't reach orbit. Clinton moved the gyro technology from Defense to the Commerce department, and put a CIA satellite on a Chinese rocket. And when that rocket crashed, the Chi Coms sifted the wreckage and reverse engineered our gyros. When Clinton took office, China had zero (0) nuclear missiles capable of hitting the US mainland. When he left office, they had 20. //

Dieter Schultz stickdude90
6 hours ago edited
Remind me again why we spend so much blood and treasure to protect these blowhards...
I think you might be looking at the US being forward deployed and allied with nations around the world... through the wrong lens.

Yes we're spending money stationing forces around the world and, yes, some... maybe a lot of these countries... don't appreciate or deserve our protection but... look at it from the point of view of avoided costs.

But, we can't understand avoided costs unless we consider what isolationism might really cost us in the bigger scheme of things.

We were, mostly, isolationists between 1910 and 1940... not spending money with alliances and forward deploying our forces. Because of that the bad guys in the world didn't believe we'd respond as they gobbled up other countries. What they did believe, and what Churchill said so elegantly in some of his writing, was that if the US allowed its natural allies to fall, the position that the US would be in, strategically, would be difficult in the extreme.

So we stayed out of the areas but, when we were finally forced to act the costs in treasure and lives of our youth was great... far, far greater than they would have been if the Germans and Japanese really believed we would fight to stop them.

Since the end of WWII we've made a lot of mistakes and many of those mistakes have cost us 10s of thousands of our youth and untold treasures but, even with Russia's aggressive moves in the world, we haven't had a repeat of the carnage, loss of life, and expenditures of the country's treasures.

But, we should ask ourselves, even if we've helped protect people that didn't seem to appreciate and value our sacrifice, if, like happened to us leading up to WWI and WWII, would we have likely gotten sucked into another one of the continent's or world's battles and cost ourselves 10 or 100 times the loss of carnage, loss of life, and expenditures of our treasure anyway?

I see the discussions about forward deploying our forces around the world much like the Chesterton's Fence and we should ask ourselves, why that fence was needed in the first place?

Many in this country just want to tear down that fence but, as Chesterton might see it: "If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”

Note that the spy balloon transited Alaska, flying just north of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, possibly over Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, then proceeded to fly over the missile silo complexes in the Dakotas and over several military bases in the central and southern United States before being shot down off the South Carolina coast. While a balloon is at the mercy of the winds, prevailing winds very conveniently will take such a balloon on this route if it is launched in the right place.

The inclusion of American technology not only demonstrates a considerable degree of planning and forethought, but it also shows that China is easily capable of obtaining superior American technology — and using it against us. This was a serious intelligence-gathering exercise by a country that is growing increasingly bellicose towards the United States — and our allies. //

Hank Reardon
7 hours ago
Quoting Professor Victor Davis Hanson from a recent opinion piece published in The Epoch TImes:

“(China’s) entire 20th-century ascendance was based on stealing U.S. technology, dumping its products on the U.S. market below the cost of production to capture market share, and forcing American corporations to relocate, offshore, and outsource—leaving our industrial hinterland a “rust belt.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/are-trumps-tariffs-really-tariffs-5808723. //

bk
7 hours ago
By coincidence, I just read the old Buzz Patterson book Dereliction of Duty about what a disaster Clinton was for our country re China. This episode with the balloon seems reminiscent of how Clinton allowed his bog donors at Loral and Hughes to provide all sorts of satellite and nuclear technology to China. No doubt Clinton - oops I mean the charitable Clinton Global Foundation - made some big bundles of cash.

Hank Reardon bk
7 hours ago
If you want another reason to despise Slick and his abuse of our technology, read Never Mind We’ll Do It Ourselves. The book that details how Slick demanded a new method for finding UBL for his handoff to Al Gore in advance of election day, 2020. And once the nascent Predator program did just that, by September, 2020, Slick refused to take the shot.

Now we have another example. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner has formed a DOGE task force to work with the larger effort to comb through HUD's books, and one of the first things they found was $1.9 billion - that's "billion" as in a "b" followed by an "illion" - that had been "misplaced" by the Biden administration.

How, for the luvva Pete, do you "misplace" almost two billion taxpayer dollars? //

There has to be more to this story than a huge block of money confiscated by force of law from American taxpayers just being "misplaced." Remember that the Biden administration was marked by corruption and incompetence, from the very top down, and it's hard to credit that this money was just "misplaced."

When the charges against Adams were revealed, he was accused of big stuff...like taking airline upgrades and helping the Turkish embassy navigate NYC's byzantine building code system; see BREAKING: We Now Know the Charges Against New York Mayor Eric Adams – RedState. The charges were framed to look big time, but they were eerily reminiscent of the hit jobs done on Alaska Senator Ted Stevens and former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, where normal activities were mutated into federal felonies by lawyers out to get a scalp.

A sea change happened when Adams defended Trump at a press conference in the last days of the election: NYC Mayor Eric Adams Breaks With Dems Over Despicable Rhetoric: Trump Not a 'Fascist,' 'This Is America' – RedState. //

There was some speculation that Trump might pardon Adams; that didn't happen, but Trump did order DOJ to dismiss the charges against him; New: Trump Justice Dept. Directs Prosecutors to Dismiss Federal Corruption Charges Against Eric Adams – RedState. That's when the fun started. //

This shootout is nowhere near over. Bondi and Bove are still surrounded by disloyal and hostile staff. The judge in NYC is bound to do something other than accept the filing; otherwise, he'll be a social pariah. Ultimately, a judge can't force the government to prosecute a case it wants to dismiss.

It is good that this first battle came this early and over a fairly trivial issue. A lot of unreliable staff have been identified and are no longer employed. The attorneys who came to work for DOJ as a government service and not as a political commissar should now feel more comfortable knowing they have the support of the DOJ leadership team.

Pam Bondi wrote to DOJ on her first day in office, “Any attorney who because of their personal political views or judgments declines to sign a brief or appear in court, refuses to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the administration, or otherwise delays or impedes the department’s mission will be subject to discipline and potentially termination, consistent with applicable law.” There is no doubt she is serious. //

Skibum
a day ago edited
If you want to know if the prosecution of Mayor Adams was political, ask yourself whether the DOJ would have prosecuted Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago under the same circumstances?

The answer is "NO"! Johnson just got caught with a closet full of bribes with more to come and DOJ prosecutors are nowhere in sight.

Adams went off the Democrat reservation when it came to illegal immigration and Johnson did not. Adams was prosecuted.

The Biden administration had asked the State Department to explore interests by private companies to make armored EVs, leading to a public Request for Information to find interested EV-makers, a department spokesperson said, adding that only one company responded at the time.

An official solicitation for EV manufacturers to bid on making armored EVs is on hold with no current plans to use it, the spokesperson said, adding that the government has not awarded any contracts. [....]

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) ramped up grants for migrants from 2020 to 2024 — which included cash assistance to buy cars, homes and even build credit for startup businesses, according to a shocking watchdog report that found taxpayers were left on the hook for $22.6 billion. //

Non-governmental groups bilked taxpayers for up to $1.7 billion in services including dollar-for-dollar matching savings plans for cars, homes, college educations or startups; small-business loans of up to $15,000; loans to repair credit history of up to $1,500; “cultural orientation,” “emergency housing support,” legal assistance and Medicaid care. //

Dieter Schultz NavyVet
15 minutes ago edited
We have an audit trail. This is theft from American taxpayers.

Follow the audit trail. Confiscate the cars, homes, or businesses purchased with our dollars. Deport the thieves - they are compact in theft. Auction off confiscated items to American citizens.
For the big items that might work, I'm not sure I'd put money on it but... I watched the press event with Musk in the WH and one of the things that struck me from his audit was that he mentioned the lack of standard accountability, traceability, fields in treasury's payment system. Things like requirements to enter information in the 'notes' field, or forcing the data entry person to reference a payment authorization number, and more... were all things Musk noted was common to private/public companies were all not required or not used.

Musk noted that the system as it was being used was designed to minimize challenges to a payment, and therefore minimize the work associated with the authorizing/managing payment the payment process, were all, by design, making it nearly impossible to audit and/or account for the money that was being spent.

The Biden-Harris administration paid POLITICO for subscriptions, and the outlet performed their propaganda PR work well, proudly announcing this $20 billion Biden-Harris EPA partnership in April 2024.

The Biden administration announced recipients of the climate law’s biggest grant program Thursday, kicking off a $20 billion effort to transform community lending and green the U.S. economy.

EPA will award eight initial grants under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, ranging in size from $400 million to almost $7 billion. The largest award will go to Climate United, a partnership that includes a nonprofit impact investment firm and two affordable housing lenders.

"The bipartisan FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 directs the Administration to hire the maximum number of air traffic controllers. That’s what the law says, so the Administration must rescind this ridiculous executive order,” Ranking Member Larsen said. “Hiring air traffic controllers is the number one safety issue according to the entire aviation industry. Instead of working to improve aviation safety and lower costs for hardworking American families, the Administration is choosing to spread bogus DEI claims to justify this decision. I'm not surprised by the President’s dangerous and divisive actions, but the Administration must reverse course. Let’s get back to aviation safety and allow the FAA to do its job protecting the flying public.”

Staffing at the air traffic control tower at Ronald Reagan National Airport was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” according to an internal preliminary Federal Aviation Administration safety report about the collision that was reviewed by The New York Times.

The controller who was handling helicopters in the airport’s vicinity Wednesday night was also instructing planes that were landing and departing from its runways. Those jobs typically are assigned to two controllers, rather than one.

...

The tower [at Reagan] was nearly a third below targeted staff levels, with 19 fully certified controllers as of September 2023, according to the most recent Air Traffic Controller Workforce Plan, an annual report to Congress that contains target and actual staffing levels. The targets set by the F.A.A. and the controllers’ union call for 30. //

This shocking event follows problematic and likely illegal decisions during the Obama and Biden Administrations that minimized merit and competence in the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The Obama Administration implemented a biographical questionnaire at the FAA to shift the hiring focus away from objective aptitude. During my first term, my Administration raised standards to achieve the highest standards of safety and excellence. But the Biden Administration egregiously rejected merit-based hiring, requiring all executive departments and agencies to implement dangerous "diversity equity and inclusion" tactics, and specifically recruiting individuals with "severe intellectual" disabilities in the FAA.

On my second day in office, I ordered an immediate return to merit-based recruitment, hiring, and promotion, elevating safety and ability as the paramount standard. Yesterday's devastating accident tragically underscores the need to elevate safety and competence as the priority of the FAA.

Is there an ATC shortage? Yes, there is, and we'll get to that. Was it caused by any action of the Trump administration instituted eight days ago? There's no planet on which that's true. You don't train to be an air traffic controller in eight days, much less would you be assigned to what is one of the most senior sectors in the country.

But if Democrats want to go down this road, we can. What caused the current ATC shortage? The Biden administration, which took its cues from diversity programs created by the Obama administration, rejected over 3,000 qualified applicants who didn't meet DEI standards. How do we know this? Because it led to a major class action lawsuit that is still ongoing. //

In other words, Democrat presidents put DEI above safety, purging thousands of people who could have solved the shortage because their skin color didn't match up with the left's political wants. That's what the Trump administration is trying to fix by eliminating diversity quotas at the FAA. So again, if Democrats would like to go down this road of trying to place blame, Republicans should be happy to do so. It won't work out well for the former.

With that said, it does not appear that ATC was primarily at fault here. There may be questions about how much separation was allowed to begin with, and an investigation will figure all that out. In the meantime, these attempts to blame a presidential administration that's been in office for eight days are laughable. Not only that, they are ghoulish and disgusting.

With the Electoral College votes now cast, here is a recap of how Americans voted in 2024. //

Trump won 77,284,118 votes, or 49.8 percent of the votes cast for president. That is the second highest vote total in U.S. history, trailing only the 81,284,666 votes that Joe Biden won in 2020. Trump won 3,059,799 more popular votes in 2024 than he won in 2020 and 14,299,293 more than he won in 2016. He now holds the record for the most cumulative popular votes won by any presidential candidate in U.S. history, surpassing Barack Obama. Running three times for the White House obviously helps.

Kamala Harris won 74,999,166 votes or 48.3 percent of the votes cast. That was 6,285,500 fewer popular votes than Biden won in 2020, but 774,847 more than Trump won in 2020.

More than 155 million Americans voted in 2024: 156,302,318 to be exact. That’s the second largest total voter turnout in U.S. history in absolute terms. It is also just the second time that more than 140 million people voted in a presidential election.

In relative terms, voter turnout nationally in 2024 was 63.9 percent. That is below the 66.6 percent voter turnout recorded in 2020, which was the highest voter turnout rate in a U.S. presidential election since 1900. Nonetheless, turnout in 2024 was still high by modern standards. The 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon (63.8 percent) is the only other election in the last 112 years to exceed 63 percent voter turnout. If you are wondering, the election of 1876 holds the record for the highest percentage voter turnout: 82.6 percent. That was one of America’s most controversial and consequential elections—and not in a good way. It was also an election in which more than half the adult-age population was ineligible to vote.

Wisconsin holds the place of pride as the state with the highest voter turnout in 2024—76.93 percent of eligible voters in the Badger State voted. Five of the six battleground states that switched from Biden to Trump saw their turnout exceed the national average; only Arizona (63.6 percent) was below, and then just barely. Hawaii holds the distinction of being the state with the lowest voter turnout. Just 50 percent of Hawaiians voted.

A Landslide Election or Not?

Early election coverage described Trump’s victory as a landslide. But whether you go by the Electoral College vote or the popular vote, it was anything but. The 312 Electoral College votes that Trump won are just six more than Joe Biden won in 2020, twenty less than Barack Obama won in 2012, and fifty-three less than Obama won in 2008. Trump’s Electoral College performance pales in comparison to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s landslide victory in 1936 (523 electoral votes), Lyndon Johnson’s in 1964 (486), Richard Nixon’s in 1972 (520), or Ronald Reagan’s in 1984 (525). In terms of the popular vote, more people voted for someone not named Trump for president than voted for Trump in 2024, and his margin of victory over Harris was 1.5 percentage points. That is the fifth smallest margin of victory in the thirty-two presidential races held since 1900. //

The 2024 election was the tenth presidential election in a row in which the margin of victory in the popular vote was in the single digits. That is a record. The longest prior streak began in 1876, when seven consecutive elections were decided by single digits. The last person to win the presidency by a double-digit margin was Ronald Reagan in 1984. He won by eighteen percentage points. The last time someone won the presidency by more than five percentage points was Barack Obama in 2008. He won by seven percentage points. The bottom line is that whatever one makes of the mandate that Trump did or did not win last month, the United States remains deeply divided politically.

Bill Melugin @BillMelugin_
·
NEW: Per sources, Border Patrol recorded just 582 illegal crossings at the southern border yesterday, with not a single one of the nine sectors hitting 200.
I’ve never seen anything this low in all of my border coverage. The numbers were already flat/low in Biden’s final week,… The numbers were already flat/low in Biden’s final week, bouncing between 1,200-1,400 illegal crossings daily, but the numbers have been falling off a cliff since Trump took office.
6:03 PM · Jan 27, 2025

Bill Melugin @BillMelugin_
·
Replying to @oldmandierkop
Got to a point where we wouldn't even get the camera out for a group of 500 it was so routine.
11:53 PM · Jan 27, 2025

Bonchie
@bonchieredstate
·
Follow
Jake Tapper has found time to post about an 18th-century composer in the last couple of hours.

He has not found time to post about Joe Biden pardoning a drug lord who mu*dered a child and his mother.
9:41 AM · Jan 27, 2025

Bonchie
@bonchieredstate
·
Follow
Jim Acosta has found time to post about the January 6th pardons (again) in the last 24 hours.

He has not found time to post about Joe Biden pardoning a drug lord who mu*dered a child and his mother.
9:43 AM · Jan 27, 2025

Returning to Biden's culpability, isn't it a pretty big scandal that the only excuse one can come up with is that the then-president was so mentally incompetent that he didn't even know what he was signing? I get that the guy is out of office and there's a desire to look toward the future, but I think Republicans can't let this stuff lie. If they do, it just incentivizes more bad behavior from Democrats.

We need to know who drew up these pardons, who vetted the list of names, and why Adrian Peeler was included. Was it truly an "accident?" Or was this another act of "social justice" by one of the former president's handlers? Biden's mental incapacity remains the biggest scandal in presidential history. Every person involved in the cover-up needs to be exposed. Letting bygones by bygones isn't an option.

The Department of Education announced Friday that it had eliminated the Biden-created office of "book ban coordinator" and the supporting office. This office was created in June 2023 in response to many school districts removing age-inappropriate and sexually explicit books from school libraries. //

The director of the "book ban coordinator" office, a gay progressive activist, solicited complaints from activists and threatened school districts with lawsuits by the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights. That all ended on Friday.

HOMAN: We're gonna take a lot of hate, we're going to be sued. Every day, numerous times.

I think you'll see the left try to control the media. They're going to show the first crying female, the first crying child. Say how inhumane we are. But, they won't talk about the 340,000 children that they've failed to take care of. They're not gonna talk about the young women who've been murdered in this country at the hands of criminal cartels.

Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that Facebook pushed back on the Biden regime’s censorship demands. The Facebook Files say otherwise. //

Zuckerberg purported in his JRE [Joe Rogan Experience] appearance that Facebook resisted Biden administration bids like these. Instead, the Big Tech company’s censors fulfilled Flaherty’s dreams that it would “play ball” by “demoting” posts casting doubts on the Covid-19 jab. Covid content that couldn’t be easily or justifiably removed under Facebook’s terms and conditions would be “contained” and sent to the company’s third-party “fact-checkers” for further false impugnment.

Zuckerberg wants the millions of people who tuned into his conversation with Rogan to believe that Facebook was a heroic middle-man who told off the government when it tried to throttle dissenters. In reality, Facebook was a willing accomplice in the Democrat-fueled war on free speech. No amount of Zuckerberg’s revisionist retelling can erase the evidence that Facebook eagerly participated in the Biden administration’s scheme to silence its political enemies, dissenters, and publications like The Federalist.

On inauguration day, President Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of the approximately 1,550 defendants convicted for their involvement with the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. He also ordered DOJ to dismiss all other pending indictments. Most of them, about 900, were for non-violent misdemeanors such as trespass and disorderly conduct. He granted the clemency all at once, and did not begin with pardoning the non-violent misdemeanor defendants first and then examining the remaining defendants on a case-by-case basis as he and others previously had suggested.

Meanwhile, on the very same day, just 15 minutes before he left office, President Biden issued the last set of his own pardons. He granted them to members of his family, most notably his brothers, sister, and in-laws, as well as to members of his administration such as Dr. Anthony Fauci and General Mark Milley, and even to political supporters like the congressional January 6 committee members. Biden's pardons followed thousands of pardons he issued this month to what he claimed were non-violent federal offenders and commutations of virtually all federal death penalties.

Many Democrats and media outlets have criticized Trump's mass clemency for the January 6 defendants, even as they casually ignored President Biden's. But let's put aside the hypocrisy for a moment to examine the real differences between the two sets of pardons, regardless of one's views of their merits.

First, Biden granted pardons and commutations to more than 8,000 individuals, which is more than any other modern president. Thousands of Biden's clemency grants were to serious criminals, including murderers, child killers, child abusers, and the biggest municipal embezzler in history, Rita Crundwell. Several of the grants benefitted well-connected Democrats. In both 2022 and 2024, Biden abused his pardon power to achieve mass sentencing reductions that Congress refused to pass by law. President Obama did the same thing when he issued mass commutations of drug sentences. //

Second, it's obviously not principle but politics that drove Biden's pardons; Biden's post-election mass death row commutations did not follow his self-proclaimed opposition to the death penalty. He left three men on death row whose commutations would have politically harmed Democrats. He did not commute the sentences of Dzhokar Tsarnaev (Boston Marathon bomber), Dylann Roof (murderer of nine black churchgoers in Charleston), and Robert Bowers (murderer of 11 worshippers a synagogue in Squirrel Hill, PA). Biden's alleged opposition to the death penalty also did not prevent DOJ from filing capital murder charges against Luigi Mangione.

Third, President Biden needs to pardon his family, officials, and allies only because he fears the very lawfare that he invented. Biden's DOJ broke more than two centuries of history to prosecute a former president and the candidate of the major opposition political party. He is like an arsonist who demands more spending on fire departments. Because of his stated fear of retaliation, Biden pardoned his family and associates before prosecutors ever launched investigations. These pardons were to Biden's own benefit, as their reciipients are much less likely to disclose any information that directly implicate President Biden to the family's alleged "pay to play, 10 percent for the Big Guy" schemes.

Contrast that with Trump's clemency, which did not directly benefit him or his family, and covered defendants who were actually convicted or charged, unlike Biden's preemptive pardons that covered up to 10 years' worth of potential and actual criminal activity for his family and allies. //

Democrats have resorted to pardons because they appear to expect lawfare to continue. DOJ released Jack Smith's special counsel J6 report even though Trump had won the election and DOJ could no longer pursue charges. It is even trying to release the special counsel report about the Florida classified documents case, even though Trump's co-defendants are entitled to a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Both President Trump and Attorney General–designate Pam Bondi are positioned to stop the lawfare, but only if the Democrats abjure their politicization of criminal justice. Lawfare can descend on Democrats as easily as on Republicans.