In his last official act before leaving the White House, president Joe Biden issued sweeping preemptive pardons to members of his family who’ve long been the target of attacks from President-elect Donald Trump and his allies and commuted the sentence of a Native American activist who has spent a half-century in prison for the death of an FBI agent.
In a statement released as Biden arrived at the US Capitol for the inauguration of his successor, Biden said he was commuting the life sentence of American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier and allowing him to live out the remainder of his sentence in home confinement under Department of Justice supervision.
Peltier, who has been imprisoned since 1976, was convicted by a federal jury in Fargo, North Dakota for his role in a shootout that claimed the lives of FBI special agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler.
The decision to commute Peltier’s sentence ends years of calls for his freedom from criminal justice reform advocates who’ve said he deserved to be freed because of misconduct by the FBI during the prosecution of the case against him.
But Biden also said he was granting unconditional pardons to multiple members of his family, including his brother James Biden and sister-in-law Sara Biden, his brother Frank Biden, his sister Valerie Biden Owens, and her husband John Owens.
Biden said they, along with the rest of his family, had been “subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me—the worst kind of partisan politics” during his term as president and lamented that he had “no reason to believe these attacks will end”.
“I believe in the rule of law, and I am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics. But baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage their reputations and finances,” Biden said.
He added that the pardons “should not be mistaken as an acknowledgement that they engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense”.
Biden also announced he was pardoning a pair of Democratic politicians who’d found themselves in legal trouble in recent years, former Kentucky state legislator Gerald Lundergan and ex-Columbia, South Carolina city councilman Ernest Cromartie.
Biden’s final pardons came just hours after he also granted pre-emptive pardons to Dr Anthony Fauci, General Mark Milley, and the members of Congress who served on the House committee that investigated the attempted insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6 2021, as well as police officers who testified before the panel and staff members who worked on the committee’s investigation.
