Politics
Biden pardon, Patel FBI nomination fuel debate over politics and justice
Democrats have warned for months that Donald Trump, if elected again, would bend the Justice Department to his own political will. But President Biden’s announcement Sunday that he had issued a sweeping pardon for his son Hunter — for any crimes he may have committed over a decade — suddenly left the president’s allies on the defensive.
Biden said he did it, after promising he wouldn’t, because he felt his own Justice Department had treated his son unfairly — that “raw politics” had “infected” Hunter Biden’s prosecution on gun and tax evasion offenses and “led to a miscarriage of justice.”
Trump, who during his first term pardoned a slate of political allies and who has long condemned the Justice Department as politicized and in need of an overhaul, blasted the decision, suggesting the pardon was an “abuse and miscarriage of Justice” itself.
The pardon immediately fed into an already roiling debate nationally around justice and politics and whether the two can adequately be held separate — particularly in the months ahead, as Trump takes office and stands up his next administration.
Outside political and legal experts said the episode is a stark reflection of the perilous moment that the American justice system faces as Trump takes office after escaping multiple criminal cases against him — and with both a long list of political enemies and a short list of law enforcement nominees who have vocally backed his plans to retaliate.
Prior to the pardon, Democrats had been busy denouncing Trump’s nominees as threats to the intended firewall between politics and prosecutions. They had blasted his first attorney general nominee, former Rep. Matt Gaetz, and his second attorney general nominee, former Florida Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, as well as his nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, all as loyalists who would be willing to break legal boundaries on behalf of Trump.
After the pardon, some Democrats defended Biden’s decision, while others acknowledged that it was a bad look, if not a horrible decision.
Former U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., who served during the Obama administration, said no U.S. attorney would have charged Hunter Biden based on the facts of his case and the results of a years-long investigation into his actions — making the pardon “warranted.”
Holder said people should be focused on Trump and Patel instead.
“Ask yourself a vastly more important question. Do you really think Kash Patel is qualified to lead the world’s preeminent law enforcement investigative organization?” he wrote on X. “Obvious answer: hell no.”
Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.), who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, said on CNN that there is “legitimate concern” on the president’s part about Trump exacting retribution on his political enemies — including Biden’s own family. And he said Trump’s selection of Patel for FBI director was “a bad omen” of how Trump intends to use the Justice Department to attack his opponents.
But a pardon for Hunter Biden doesn’t do Democrats arguing against such retribution any favors, Ivey said.
“This sort of gives [Trump] ground to argue that, you know, both sides are doing the same thing,” he said. “This is going to be used against us when we are fighting the misuses that are coming from the Trump administration.”
Bernadette Meyler, a constitutional law professor at Stanford University who has written extensively about the use of pardons, called it “a disturbing moment for American justice,” in that the leaders of both major American political parties have now argued that the system is politically biased — so much so that they have had to utilize their executive power to essentially overrule it.
It “suggests that there is just widespread distrust in the system and how the law is being applied,” Meyler said, “and I think that’s quite worrisome.”
Meyler said the most worrisome part of Biden’s pardon of his son was his explanation for it — which she said “seemed in keeping” with Trump’s own approach to pardons during his first term.
Trump used pardons then “for very political aims, in particular to criticize certain laws that he felt were not right or targeted certain kinds of malfeasance that he thought shouldn’t be criminalized, and also to do favors for those he felt were friends and political allies,” Meyler said. Trump “really highlighted” his use of the pardon power “as a way of criticizing the legal system,” she said.
Now, Biden has done much the same, she said.
Pardoning his son could have been viewed as a purely “pragmatic decision” — and “more defensible” — if Biden had merely cited Trump’s stated intentions to exact political revenge on his enemies, or if he had simply granted the pardon without commentary, Meyler said.
Instead, however, he issued an adjoining statement calling the entire Justice Department into question — which Meyler said played right into “Trump’s claims of a really biased system” and “echoes what Trump has been saying about politicized prosecutions.”
Trump during his first term pardoned various members of his own campaign and administration, including for crimes associated with their work for him. They included advisor Stephen K. Bannon, former campaign manager Paul Manafort and former national security advisor Michael Flynn. He also pardoned his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner.
In his second term, Trump has promised to pardon many if not all of the people charged in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — whom he called “hostages” in a post condemning Biden’s pardon on Sunday.
Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to tax charges in Los Angeles, and was convicted by a jury of illegally purchasing a handgun in Delaware. Republicans have long suggested he also acted corruptly in dealings with foreign corporations, peddling his family’s influence for cash.
Meyler said the president’s rationale for pardoning his son bolsters the argument Trump has been making for years that the various federal charges brought against him — for trying to steal the 2020 election, for hiding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago — were the result of a politicized Justice Department, while undermining the opposing argument by Democrats that those cases were the outcome of an unbiased prosecution by an independent counsel.
Biden’s statement “just makes it very hard to turn around and say there is no bias in these other cases,” she said, and even calls into question the very nature of special counsels — which Trump has long criticized.
Mark Geragos, Hunter Biden’s attorney, raised similar concerns about special counsels in response to questions about the pardon. He said that after Trump’s classified documents case was tossed out in part over the appointment of a special counsel, Hunter Biden’s indictment should have been tossed as well.
He said Justice Department officials had passed on charging Hunter Biden before special counsel David Weiss decided otherwise — which he said “smacks of politics.”
Weiss in a court filing Monday argued against the dismissal of Hunter Biden’s case based on the pardon, saying he was not unfairly targeted.
Jessica A. Levinson, director of the Public Service Institute at Loyola Law School, said Biden’s pardon of his son may provide Trump with additional political cover to pardon his own allies moving forward, allowing him to say, “Look, everybody does it.” It also bolsters his argument that the Justice Department has been politicized and needs overhauling, she said, allowing him to say, “Even Joe Biden says there’s a problem.”
However, the effect of Biden’s pardon on Trump’s actions ahead should not be overstated, she said, as Trump had already made clear — including during his first term — that he would politicize the Justice Department and use the pardon power to protect his allies.
“I just don’t feel like this now opens the floodgates for Trump to act in a way that he otherwise might not have,” Levinson said.
Levinson said Biden’s actions do muddy the political message of Democrats arguing that Trump is uniquely lawless, comparing it to the discovery of classified documents in the home or offices of both Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence after Trump was charged for having — and allegedly hiding — such documents at Mar-a-Lago.
The existence of documents in Biden and Pence’s possession allowed Trump to say, “See, everybody does it,” Levinson said, even though his underlying actions with the documents in his possession were distinctly different than Biden’s and Pence’s.
Biden’s pardon of his son similarly allows for headlines that put him and Trump on a level playing field in terms of their use of pardons, Levinson said — even if the underlying relevance of those pardons to the proper functioning of the criminal justice system are starkly different.
At such an intensely polarized time in the country politically, that likely means that Americans will come away with two very different versions of the truth based on which politicians or political party they trust, Levinson said.
“It’s so hard because these moments force us to go below the headline and the first paragraph and to really dig in and figure out where there are similarities and where there are differences,” she said, “and it’s very hard to do when we live in a society that tends to be us-versus-them.”
Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, said the sweeping nature of Hunter Biden’s pardon is unique, too, in that it preemptively clears him of offenses he has not even been charged with. In that way, it could be challenged — if Trump wants to question the limits of the presidential pardon power.
In that sense, it could bring about positive change, she said — because the system of pardoning individuals has devolved in recent years into a muddled process, rather than the clear and orderly one it should be under the pardon attorney’s office.
“I hope at least this will provide an occasion for talking about how the president — how the pardon power — operates in our system of justice,” Love said. That conversation, she said, is overdue.
Times staff writer Stacy Perman contributed to this report.
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The city of San Diego sued the federal government to stop the construction of razor wire fencing on city-owned land near the U.S.-Mexico border, accusing federal agencies of trespassing and causing environmental damage.
The city filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court for Southern California on Monday. The complaint named Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth among the defendants.
The city accused the federal government of acting without legal authority when they entered city property in Marron Valley and began installing razor wire fencing.
“The City of San Diego will not allow federal agencies to disregard the law and damage City property,” said City Attorney Heather Ferbert in a news release. She said the lawsuit aims to protect sensitive habitats and ensure environmental commitments are upheld.
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San Diego is suing the federal government to stop the construction of razor wire fencing on city property in Marron Valley. (Justin Hamel/Bloomberg via Getty Images, File)
According to the lawsuit, federal personnel including U.S. Marines accessed the land without the city’s consent, and damaged environmentally sensitive areas protected under long-standing conservation agreements.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth were among the federal officials named in San Diego’s lawsuit. (Reuters/Brian Snyder; AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
San Diego argues the fencing has blocked the city’s ability to manage and assess its own property and could jeopardize compliance with environmental obligations.
An American flag can be seen through the barbed wire surrounding the CoreCivic Otay Mesa Detention Center on October 4, 2025 in San Diego, California. (Kevin Carter/Getty Images)
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The lawsuit also accuses the federal government of trespassing and beginning construction without proper authority or environmental review, and unconstitutionally taking the land in violation of the Fifth Amendment.
Fox News Digital reached out to DHS and the Pentagon for comment.
Former vice presidential contender and current aw-shucks Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz announced this week that he won’t run for a third term, dogged by a scandal over child care funds that may or may not be going to fraudsters.
It’s a politically driven mess that not coincidentally focuses on a Black immigrant community, tying the real problem of scammers stealing government funds to the growing MAGA frenzy around an imaginary version of America that thrives on whiteness and Christianity.
Despite the ugliness of current racial politics in America, the fraud remains real, and not just in Minnesota. California has lost billions to cheats in the last few years, leaving our own governor, who also harbors D.C. dreams, vulnerable to the same sort of attack that has taken down Walz.
As we edge closer to the 2028 presidential election, Republicans and Democrats alike will probably come at Gavin Newsom with critiques of the state’s handling of COVID-19 funds, unemployment insurance and community college financial aid to name a few of the honeypots that have been successfully swiped by thieves during his tenure.
In fact, President Trump said as much on his social media barf-fest this week.
“California, under Governor Gavin Newscum, is more corrupt than Minnesota, if that’s possible??? The Fraud Investigation of California has begun,” he wrote.
Right-wing commentator Benny Johnson also said he’s conducting his own “investigation.” And Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton is claiming his fraud tip line has turned up “(c)orruption, fraud and abuse on an epic scale.”
Just to bring home that this vulnerability is serious and bipartisan, Rep. Ro Khanna, the Silicon Valley congressman rumored to have his own interest in the Oval Office, is also circling the fraud feast like a vulture eyeing his next meal.
“I want to hear from residents in my district and across the state about waste, mismanagement, inefficiencies, or fraud that we must tackle,” Khanna wrote on social media.
Newsom’s spokesman Izzy Gardon questioned the validity of many fraud claims.
“In the actual world where adults govern,” Gardon said, “Gavin Newsom has been cleaning house. Since taking office, he’s blocked over $125 BILLION in fraud, arrested criminal parasites leaching off of taxpayers, and protected taxpayers from the exact kind of scam artists Trump celebrates, excuses, and pardons.”
What exactly are we talking about here? Well, it’s a pick-your-scandal type of thing. Even before the federal government dumped billions in aid into the states during the pandemic, California’s unemployment system was plagued by inefficiencies and yes, scammers. But when the world shut down and folks needed that government cash to survive, malfeasance skyrocketed.
Every thief with a half-baked plan — including CEOs, prisoners behind bars and overseas organized crime rackets — came for California’s cash, and seemingly got it. The sad part is these weren’t criminal geniuses. More often than not, they were low-level swindlers looking at a system full of holes because it was trying to do too much too fast.
In a matter of months, billions had been siphoned away. A state audit in 2021 found that at least $10 billion had been paid out on suspicious unemployment claims — never mind small business loans or other types of aid. An investigation by CalMatters in 2023 suggested the final figure may be up to triple that amount for unemployment. In truth, no one knows exactly how much was stolen — in California, or across the country.
It hasn’t entirely stopped. California is still paying out fraudulent unemployment claims at too high a rate, totaling up to $1.5 billion over the last few years — more than $500 million in 2024 alone, according to the state auditor.
But that’s not all. Enterprising thieves looked elsewhere when COVID-19 money largely dried up. Recently, that has been our community colleges, where millions in federal student aid has been lost to grifters who use bots to sign up for classes, receive government money to help with school, then disappear. Another CalMatters investigation using data obtained from a public records request found that up to 34% of community college applications in 2024 may have been false — though that number represents fraudulent admissions that were flagged and blocked, Gardon points out.
Still, community college fraud will probably be a bigger issue for Newsom because it’s fresher, and can be tied (albeit disingenuously) to immigrants and progressive policies.
California allows undocumented residents to enroll in community colleges, and it made those classes free — two terrific policies that have been exploited by the unscrupulous. For a while, community colleges didn’t do enough to ensure that students were real people, because they didn’t require enough proof of identity. This was in part to accommodate vulnerable students such as foster kids, homeless people and undocumented folks who lacked papers.
With no up-front costs for attempting to enroll, phonies threw thousands of identities at the system’s 116 schools, which were technologically unprepared for the assaults. These “ghost” students were often accepted and given grants and loans.
My former colleague Kaitlyn Huamani reported that in 2024, scammers stole roughly $8.4 million in federal financial aid and more than $2.7 million in state aid from our community colleges. That‘s a pittance compared with the tens of billions that was handed out in state and federal financial aid, but more than enough for a political fiasco.
As Walz would probably explain if nuanced policy conversations were still a thing, it’s both a fair and unfair criticism to blame these robberies on a governor alone — state government should be careful of its cash and aggressive in protecting it, and the buck stops with the governor, but crises and technology have collided to create opportunities for swindlers that frankly few governmental leaders, from the feds on down, have handled with any skill or luck.
The crooks have simply been smarter and faster than the rest of us to capitalize first on the pandemic, then on evolving technology including AI that makes scamming easier and scalable to levels our institutions were unprepared to handle.
Since being so roundly fleeced during the pandemic, multiple state and federal agencies have taken steps in combating fraud — including community colleges using their own AI tools to stop fake students before they get in.
And the state is holding thieves accountable. Newsom hired a former Trump-appointed federal prosecutor, McGregor Scott, to go after scam artists on unemployment. And other county, state and federal prosecutors have also dedicated resources to clawing back some of the lost money.
With the slow pace of our courts (burdened by their own aging technology), many of those cases are still ongoing or just winding up. For example, 24 L.A. County employees were charged in recent months with allegedly stealing more than $740,000 in unemployment benefits, which really is chump change in this whole mess.
Another California man recently pleaded guilty to allegedly cheating his way into $15.9 million in federal loans through the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loan programs.
And in one of the most colorful schemes, four Californians with nicknames including “Red boy” and “Scooby” allegedly ran a scam that boosted nearly $250 million in federal tax refunds before three of them attempted to murder the fourth to keep him from ratting them out to the feds.
There are literally hundreds of cases across the country of pandemic fraud. And these schemes are just the tip of the cash-berg. Fraudsters are also targeting fire relief funds, food benefits — really, any pot of public money is fair game to them. And the truth is, the majority of that stolen money is gone for good.
So it’s hard to hear the numbers and not be shocked and angry, especially as the Golden State is faced with a budget shortfall that may be as much as $18 billion.
Whether you blame Newsom personally or not for all this fraud, it’s hard to be forgiving of so much public money being handed to scoundrels when our schools are in need, our healthcare in jeopardy and our bills on an upward trajectory.
The failure is going to stick to somebody, and it doesn’t take a criminal mastermind to figure out who it’s going to be.
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The Wyoming Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that a pair of laws restricting abortion access violate the state constitution, including the country’s first explicit ban on abortion pills.
The court, in a 4-1 ruling, sided with the state’s only abortion clinic and others who had sued over the abortion bans passed since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, which returned the power to make laws on abortion back to the states.
Despite Wyoming being one of the most conservative states, the ruling handed down by justices who were all appointed by Republican governors upheld every previous lower court ruling that the abortion bans violated the state constitution.
Wellspring Health Access in Casper, the abortion access advocacy group Chelsea’s Fund and four women, including two obstetricians, argued that the laws violated a state constitutional amendment affirming that competent adults have the right to make their own health care decisions.
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The Wyoming Supreme Court ruled that a pair of laws restricting abortion access violate the state constitution. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Voters approved the constitutional amendment in 2012 in response to the federal Affordable Care Act, which is also known as Obamacare.
The justices in Wyoming found that the amendment was not written to apply to abortion but noted that it is not their job to “add words” to the state constitution.
“But lawmakers could ask Wyoming voters to consider a constitutional amendment that would more clearly address this issue,” the justices wrote.
Wellspring Health Access President Julie Burkhart said in a statement that the ruling upholds abortion as “essential health care” that should not be met with government interference.
“Our clinic will remain open and ready to provide compassionate reproductive health care, including abortions, and our patients in Wyoming will be able to obtain this care without having to travel out of state,” Burkhart said.
Wellspring Health Access opened as the only clinic in the state to offer surgical abortions in 2023, a year after a firebombing stopped construction and delayed its opening. A woman is serving a five-year prison sentence after she admitted to breaking in and lighting gasoline that she poured over the clinic floors.
Wellspring Health Access opened as the only clinic in the state to offer surgical abortions in 2023, a year after a firebombing stopped construction. (AP)
Attorneys representing the state had argued that abortion cannot violate the Wyoming constitution because it is not a form of health care.
Republican Gov. Mark Gordon expressed disappointment in the ruling and called on state lawmakers meeting later this winter to pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion that residents could vote on this fall.
An amendment like that would require a two-thirds vote to be introduced as a nonbudget matter in the monthlong legislative session that will primarily address the state budget, although it would have significant support in the Republican-dominated legislature.
“This ruling may settle, for now, a legal question, but it does not settle the moral one, nor does it reflect where many Wyoming citizens stand, including myself. It is time for this issue to go before the people for a vote,” Gordon said in a statement.
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Gov. Mark Gordon expressed disappointment in the ruling. (Getty Images)
One of the laws overturned by the state’s high court attempted to ban abortion, but with exceptions in cases where it is needed to protect a pregnant woman’s life or in cases of rape or incest. The other law would have made Wyoming the only state to explicitly ban abortion pills, although other states have implemented de facto bans on abortion medication by broadly restricting abortion.
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Abortion has remained legal in the state since Teton County District Judge Melissa Owens blocked the bans while the lawsuit challenging the restrictions moved forward. Owens struck down the laws as unconstitutional in 2024.
Last year, Wyoming passed additional laws requiring abortion clinics to be licensed surgical centers and women to receive ultrasounds before having medication abortions. A judge in a separate lawsuit blocked those laws from taking effect while that case moves forward.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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