President Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son isn’t sitting well with two top Democratic allies.
Over the weekend, Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) both wondered if the president was ignoring America’s best interest when he issued an eleventh-hour pardon for his son, Hunter Biden, earlier this month.
During a Sunday appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sanders worried that President Biden may have set a “dangerous” precedent by overriding his son’s criminal convictions and offering sweeping protection against future prosecutions with his decree.
“I think two things: When you have his opponents going after his family, as a father, as a parent, I think we can all understand Biden trying to protect his son and his family,” Sanders told host Kristen Welker.
“On the other hand, I think the precedent being set is kind of a dangerous one,” he continued. “It was a very wide-open pardon which could, under different circumstances, lead to problems in terms of future presidents.”
Sanders told Welker he did not think the controversial pardon would be enough to tarnish Biden’s “strong legacy,” however.
Klobuchar had broader concerns about Biden’s loose last-minute use of his executive power while stopping by “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
The Minnesota senator told host Margaret Brennan that she disagreed with both Biden’s decision to pardon his son and his Friday move to issue a record number of commutations for 1,500 other Americans.
Advocating for more oversight, Klobuchar said she thinks pardons and commutations should have to go past a board of outside advisers instead of people in the White House “just doing it in the middle of the night.”
“This makes no sense to me,” she added.
Sanders and Klobuchar are now among the most prominent members of the Democratic coalition to criticize the Hunter Biden pardon.
Though a number of critics have focused on the precedent set by the president’s decision, defenders have brought up how Donald Trump issued several controversial pardons right before leaving office in 2021.
At the tail end of his first term, Trump offered legal reprieve for high-profile allies like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, as well as Charles Kushner, the father of the incoming president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.