DIGGING DEEPER: Follow-up to presidential pardons following Biden’s exit
WASHINGTON, D.C. (KTTC) – In December, following then-President Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter, from a possible prison sentence for federal felony gun and tax convictions, KTTC reviewed pardons made by other past presidents. Now that Biden is no longer in the White House, there is updated data to share.
Total pardons granted by President Biden, during his four years in office, is recorded at 80. That’s according to the Office of the Pardon Attorney, which is part of the U.S. Justice Department.
Those 80 pardons include those made during Biden’s final day in office, with his siblings and their spouses among those on the list. These are preemptive pardons to ward off possible targeting by the new Trump Administration.
To put Biden’s pardons in perspective, during President Trump’s first four years in office, he issued 144 pardons. That’s nearly twice as many as Biden during his four years as commander-in-chief.
By definition, a pardon is an act of forgiveness, removing any remaining punishments and preventing any new prosecution from taking place.
There are also presidential commutations. A commutation keeps the conviction but changes the punishment.
Biden reportedly granted 4,165 commutations, according to the latest numbers available.
That number was 94 when Trump left Washington in 2021.
Biden’s actions in this category outnumber Trump’s, during his initial term, by more than 4,000.
Based on the presidential records available, Biden, by far, leads the presidential pack with commutations. No president, going back to William McKinley in 1900, issued close to Biden’s total.
As for pardons, using the same timeframe, the most came during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s tenure, with 2,819 pardons made while in office. It’s important to note, FDR served 12 years in the White House, before Congress passed the 22nd Amendment that limited presidents to two terms.
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