A couple of weeks ago, in a middle-of-the-night missive published to his social media platform, Donald Trump wrote that he was unilaterally invalidating Joe Biden’s pardons for Jan. 6 committee members.
The assertion — without precedent in American history — was apparently based in part on the Republican’s belief that his Democratic predecessor suffered from mental deterioration to such a horrific degree that he wasn’t aware of his own policies and preferences.
In keeping with his usual m.o., the incumbent president offered no evidence to substantiate any of his claims. What’s more, my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin explained in a great piece that Trump’s pitch has no real basis in law.
What we did not know until this week, however, is that a Trump-aligned prosecutor decided to take all of this rather seriously. The New York Times reported:
Ed Martin, the ardent Trump loyalist serving as interim U.S. attorney in Washington, is pursuing an inquiry into whether former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was competent to pardon his family members and others during his final days in office. The inquiry, which includes previously unreported letters to Mr. Biden’s family and former White House staff members, uses the levers of federal law enforcement to try to harass Mr. Biden’s family and allies and undermine his decisions as president, while scoring political points with President Trump.
The Times’ report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that the Republican lawyer has sent “provocative” correspondence to the former president’s aides and relatives, in addition to sending letters to some of the beneficiaries of Biden’s pardons.
The efforts, the Times added, “highlight Mr. Martin’s hands-on approach and willingness to use one of the most important U.S. attorneys’ offices in the country to seek retribution against Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies.”
Time will tell what, if anything, comes of this bizarre effort, but when it comes to the hyper-partisan prosecutor and his apparent willingness to use his office as a political tool, what’s striking is how unsurprising his Biden-related effort is.
Indeed, the former “Stop the Steal” organizer’s interest in Biden dovetails with a lengthy series of similar efforts launched by the Republican lawyer, who has no prosecutorial experience.








