Democratic Sen. John Fetterman said Thursday that the federal cases against President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden and the New York hush money case against President-elect Donald Trump were both “politically motivated” and deserving of pardons.
Biden issued a broad pardon for his son Hunter over the weekend. Trump was convicted by a New York state jury earlier this year on charges of falsifying business records related to payments to Stormy Daniels, an adult film performer, ahead of the 2016 election. Pardons in state cases like that one are handled at the stat level, not the presidential level.
Fetterman told a small group of reporters in the Capitol that the tax and gun cases against Hunter Biden were “politically motivated” and “weaponized for political gain,” comparing them to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump.
“The same thing was done with Trump with the New York case. And that was bulls--- too,” the Pennsylvania senator said. “And that was weaponized for political gain.”
“Now, collectively, I think it’s appropriate for both sides to receive a pardon,” Fetterman continued, adding that process “has degraded” the justice system in the eyes of the American people.
Fetterman didn’t directly answer when asked if he’s calling on Biden to pardon Trump.
“I’m saying that that we cannot allow our nation to become — our institutions to be weaponized against our political enemy or a political side,” he said. “It’s crazy.”
Fetterman compared it to a prosecutor in a red state trying to put former President Barack Obama “on trial for some simple, crazy kind of case.”
Fetterman is only one of a few Democratic senators to have publicly commented on Biden’s pardon for his son, following criticism from Sens. Michael Bennet and Gary Peters. Fetterman also said in an appearance on ABC’s “The View” Thursday that he does not think pardons should be issued for cases related to violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and he insisted only Trump’s New York case, where he was found guilty of 34 felony counts of fraud, was politically driven.
“I’m talking about the New York trial, and now the Democrats on our side, there were some that were gleeful calling, ‘Now he’s a convicted felon,’ and those things. And now for our party, we were talking about criminal justice, and we are now talking about second chances and now, all of a sudden, now you’re like, ‘Well, he’s a convicted felon and all these things,’” Fetterman said.
Fetterman echoed Biden’s sentiment that “raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice,” which the president wrote in his official statement announcing Hunter Biden’s pardon on Sunday.
