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Bill Clinton says he understands why President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter and that “you can’t take the politics out of pardons.”
The sitting president “did have reasons to believe that the nature of the offenses involved were likely to produce far, far worse consequences for his son” than for the average person, Clinton said today in a wide-ranging conversation at the New York Times’ DealBook Conference. But the recent firestorm “may speak more to the current broken state of the pardon system.”
“I wish he hadn’t said he wasn’t going to do. I think it does weaken his case,” he added. “But there is also a reason that the founding fathers gave this pardon power to the president. Because there are all kinds of things that you can’t reconcile and you can’t figure out.”
“The question is, does the pardon system we have work?”
“When it was towards the end of my term, I looked around and I was absolutely astonished at the backlog of applications that had been sent to the Justice Department, and there had been no action.”
Asked why that was, Clinton said, “Because you never get in trouble for saying no.”
Opining on the recent election, he said the Democrats’ message needed to be clearer and focused on inflation and that a primary wasn’t an option after Joe Biden decided not to run again — something that could have been done sooner, he said, calling Biden “a stubborn old Irishman.”
“Nobody had a plan,” he said. People [Biden] trusted went to him and made a case that it would be better for the country and his legacy if he stepped aside, so eventually that is what happened and by the time it happened it was only 107 days to the election, no time for a primary. We couldn’t have organized a primary that would have had a meaningful impact. It would have been chaos. And the same [GOP critics] who said we should have had a primary, would have said, ‘These people can’t organize their way out of a paper bag’.”
The NYT’s Andrew Ross Sorkin touched on the delicate issues of “character” given controversy over Trump’s cabinet appointments and his checkered past as well as Clinton’s previous indiscretions for which he was impeached but not removed from office.
“I think that in ways that matter character does matter. But the voters have a deep-seated suspicious of letting anybody, including members of the press, tell them how to define character and what matters. Because there is no such thing as a perfect person. Nobody has lived a perfect life. Do I think character matters? I do. But I bet my definition wouldn’t be the same as a lot of other people’s.”
He said he’d been very friendly at one point with Trump, who told him “‘I think the way the press has treated you is disgraceful and want you to come play at my golf course.”
Separately, he opined on Elon Musk, who continues to come up at the confab where, last year, he famously directed a “f-ck you” to advertisers who avoided X.
Musk at one time supported Biden until the president failed to invite him to a meeting of electric vehicle makers in D.C. That’s because, Clinton said, Biden wanted to appease the unions. Tesla is not unionized. Tesla’s founder was understandably miffed.
President Biden “was trying to reset the relationship between the unions and the federal government and didn’t want a union buster” Clinton said. “It might be worth taking a little heat from the unions” given Tesla’s significant contribution to the industry.”
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