Biden gave 80 full pardons. The other 4165 were commutations.
The difference is that a full pardon effectively negates the conviction (or prevents conviction if granted to someone not yet convicted). Any rights lost due to the felony conviction such as voting rights, firearm rights, holding some public offices, and such are restored.
A commutation merely reduces the sentence, sometimes to time already served so that the person is immediately released, and sometimes to a lesser sentence but not on that will result in earlier release (e.g., a President could commute a death sentence to life without parole). It does not restore any rights that were lost due to the felony conviction.
Most of Biden's commutations were for non-violent drug possession, with a large fraction of those being for marijuana. Many of these were for cases that nowadays would not even have been prosecuted.
Compare to Trump. Almost 1600 of his were full pardons for January 6 people. Only 14 of them were commutations, which were to time served.
Right, in the grand tradition of Bill Clinton pardoning Marc Rich in exchange for large donations. I'm not attempting to defend Trump's pardons but abuse of that power is clearly a persistent bipartisan problem.
Biden and Obama pardons were done by setting criteria (non-violent drug offenders mainly who got caught up in three strikes nonsense, serving huge sentences) and applying the criteria broadly. Trump is targeting specific folks who are contributing to his cause. Tai Lopez has very little chance under a Democratic presidency, per hard data. He has a decent chance under Trump if he can buy enough trump coin and say some flattering things about Trump, per hard data.
> Didn't Biden pardon his own son for Gun and tax evasion charges? In fact, James and Frank Biden got them too
He pardoned several family members. It should be noted that Hunter is the only one who had actually been charged or convicted of a crime.
The others were all preemptive with the stated reason being that Trump was promising to go after the families of basically anyone he saw as an enemy.
Biden had earlier said he would not pardon Hunter, but that was before Trump won. He pardoned Hunter because he didn't think Hunter would be treated the same as the other prisoners in federal prison with Trump in charge. If Harris had won it is very likely Hunter would not have been pardoned and would have went to prison for the maybe 3 years that most experts predict he would have received.
Considering that a decade from now if you tell someone that the origin of the phrase "trumped up charges" comes from a 300+ year old meaning of the verb "trump" related to an Old French word for deceive and a Middle English word for fabricate they will probably will think you are making it up and the "trump" in the phrase means Donald Trump, it is hard to argue that Biden was wrong.
If those numbers are accurate, Trump is already averaging more than Biden per year. That could obviously fluctuate but he's on course to double Biden's Pardons/Month numbers
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