Many Democrats on Capitol Hill roundly panned President Joe Biden’s decision to give a sweeping pardon to his son Hunter Biden, but some clemency groups and progressives are taking the opportunity to ramp up pressure on the outgoing president to issue as many pardons as he can with 48 days left in office.
Biden currently has the lowest presidential pardon record of any president in modern history, with a total of 25 pardons granted, according to the Justice Department. While it is normal for presidents to wait until the end of their administrations to grant clemency to larger — or more controversial — groups, Biden’s numbers are still lower than previous Democratic presidents at similar periods, the data shows.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who has been leading congressional efforts for Biden to use his clemency powers more broadly, told NOTUS in a statement that since Biden was using his pardon authority for Hunter “in response to what he saw as an injustice of the legal system,” he should now extend that further.
In the remaining days of his presidency, Biden “has the opportunity to cement his legacy as one of the most compassionate and impactful presidents of our time,” Pressley added. “For the families harmed by mass incarceration, he must act.”
A former White House staffer put it more succinctly: “If I worked at the White House today, I’d want us to be ready to announce pardons of regular Americans who should go free.”
Zöe Towns, executive director of FWD.us, told NOTUS that her organization is “encouraged” by the White House’s comments on Monday that Biden would issue more pardons while still in office, and they are “going to be hard at work trying to lift up the stories of people who this would impact,” but added that clemency powers should not be something that’s left for a president’s final stretch.
“Clemency should be the everyday work of governing,” Towns added. “This is a behemoth of a system with just like, untold number of problems, and we need to be rolling up our sleeves all of the time.”
President Barack Obama commuted Danielle Metz’s life sentence in 2016. She now works as director of clemency for the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls and as a community health worker for the Formerly Incarcerated Transition Clinic in New Orleans.
She told NOTUS that Biden’s pardon of his son comes at a time of great anxiety and uncertainty among the nearly 10,000 people with pending cases for clemency. People are losing hope, and according to a friend of hers who is incarcerated, “everybody’s on edge.”
While Metz understands why Biden felt the need to pardon his son — she said she would do the same for her child — she doesn’t understand why the same can’t be done for others, many of whom, like Hunter Biden, are nonviolent offenders.
“There are all these people who have pending clemencies or pardons and nothing has come of it,” she said. “I could see if he signed a bunch of papers and his son was one of them, but he just separated his son. And that’s OK, that’s what parents do. We love our kids in spite of these shortcomings. But I think everyone deserves the same opportunity he’s just given his son.”
When asked about Hunter Biden’s pardon on Monday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre brought up the possibility of further pardons, saying that the president is “thinking through that process very thoroughly.”
“There’s a process in place, obviously,” Jean-Pierre said. “I’m not going to get ahead of the president on this, but you could expect more announcements, more pardons, clemency at the end of this term.”
Biden’s decision to pardon Hunter Biden — after repeated pledges he would not — has enraged Republicans and split Democrats. Some in the Democratic Party have backed Biden for the pardon, arguing Donald Trump has made clear he intends to punish his political rivals. Others, like Rep. Greg Landsman, said they empathized with Biden’s plight as a father, but a pardon is a “setback.”
Jean-Pierre said the lame-duck president made the decision over the weekend.
A senior Democrat familiar with the conversations said multiple people in his political orbit began speaking to Biden after the election about the potential of a pardon for Hunter, effectively telling the president that he should do whatever is best for himself.
The conversations were about “making him feel like it was OK,” the Democrat said. “That ultimately no one would fault a father for pardoning his son.”
(A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.)
But the White House was still preparing for the certain backlash. One Democratic staffer told NOTUS that the White House began to circle the wagons, making sure allies were prepared to defend the president and his decision.
Following the pardon, however, questions have swirled among Democrats as to whether they ceded the moral high ground to Republicans, greasing the wheels of bad behavior and mudding the Democrats’ arguments against their rivals.
Fundamentally, three Democrats told NOTUS, is that if there’s one message the election should have burrowed into Democrats is that the high ground is gone. “The moral high ground doesn’t exist anymore. We elected a convict. America doesn’t care,” one said.
Renee Bracey Sherman, a prominent abortion rights advocate, told NOTUS that Biden’s pardon of his son showed that those with connections — particularly white men, in her view — “get away with whatever they want, while the rest of us fear for our futures.”
“He’s handed Trump the precedent he needs to commit as many crimes as he and his family and cronies want and then will pardon them. Where is the bottom? What happened to the ‘law and order’ Biden pretended to support?” she added. “What a sham of a president Biden is.”
Jamal Simmons, Kamala Harris’ former communications director, argued that Democrats should focus on the bigger picture and not antiquated ideas of precedence.
“Democrats need to be arguing about how to change institutions, not defending institutions for their own sake,” Simmons told NOTUS. “Anyone who thinks that Democrats are going to win any election on how much the Trump administration adheres to norms and values of the last 100 years has not been paying attention to American politics recently.”
The Center for Popular Democracy sent a letter to Biden shortly after the November election urging him to “pardon and commute the sentences of all 10,000 pending clemency petitions before your presidency ends,” per a copy obtained by NOTUS.
“As the lead author of the 1994 Crime Bill and a major supporter of a number of bills in the 1980s, all of which have severely harmed Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poorly-resourced communities around the country for a generation, you have a moral and social obligation to repair these harms inflicted on our communities,” the letter reads.
Analilia Mejia, the group’s co-executive director, told NOTUS that Biden should “use his power to offer clemency to individuals on death row so that … they are less vulnerable to rush decisions under a Trump presidency.” (Trump has said he intends to expand the death penalty and restart executions.)
Biden has taken some action to mass pardon individuals. In the last two years, he made proclamations to pardon the thousands of people who were convicted of possessing or using marijuana (the DOJ’s data does not count pardons by proclamation). While advocates point to those actions as a good start, they say he should go further.
“I think he may believe that that was, you know, something that was really powerful and meaningful, when, in reality, zero people were actually released from prison,” said Jason Ortiz, director of strategic initiatives at Last Prisoner Project, an organization focused on securing the release of people convicted on nonviolent cannabis offenses. “It’s unfortunate that we’ve seen sort of half measures on this issue.”
Advocates know that Biden is running out of time to go through the thousands of petitions he has on his desk.
“Right now, Joe Biden’s legacy is shaped by staying in a race too long, by countless flubs, by beating Trump once for sure and some policing and sentencing policies that communities are still paying for two, three, four generations out,” Mejia told NOTUS. “And so the right thing for Joe Biden to do for his legacy, for the person that he expresses himself to be … is to pardon people.”
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Oriana González and Jasmine Wright are reporters at NOTUS. Violet Jira is a reporter at NOTUS and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.