By Peter Baker and Erica L. Green

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s staff is debating whether he should issue blanket pardons for a swath of President-elect Donald Trump’s perceived enemies to protect them from the “retribution” he has threatened after he takes office, according to people familiar with the discussion.

The idea would be to pre-emptively extend executive clemency to a list of current and former government officials for any possible crimes over a period of years, effectively short-circuiting the next president’s promised campaign of reprisals.

White House officials do not believe the potential recipients have actually committed crimes, but they have grown increasingly worried that Trump’s selections for top Justice Department positions indicate that he will follow through on his repeated vows to seek revenge. Even an investigation that results in no charges could drag on for months or years, costing those people hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and crippling their career prospects.

The discussion of blanket pardons, reported earlier by Politico, remains primarily at a staff level, although Biden has talked about it with senior members of the team, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations. It comes after Biden pardoned his son Hunter to spare him from prison on gun and tax charges. The White House declined to comment on Thursday (5).

Biden in effect previewed the approach with his son’s pardon, wiping away not just the counts he was actually convicted of but any crimes he “may have committed or taken part in” since 2014. That presumably will forestall Trump’s Justice Department from going after Hunter Biden on any allegations that did not merit charges by the prosecutor who has investigated him since Trump’s first term.

Such a sweeping act of clemency covering even theoretical crimes over the course of a decade went beyond the scope of any since at least the Watergate era, when President Gerald Ford pardoned his disgraced predecessor, Richard Nixon, for any crimes even though he had not been charged. Never before has a president issued mass pardons of government officials for fear that a successor would seek to prosecute them out of partisan vindictiveness.

But the choices of Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general and Trump surrogate, to run the Justice Department and Kash Patel, a former Trump aide and far-right provocateur, to be director of the FBI have put the issue front and centre. Patel has vowed to “come after” Trump’s critics and even published a list of about 60 people he considered “members of the executive branch deep state” as the appendix to a 2023 book.

Democrats on Capitol Hill have been pressing Biden to do what he can to protect targets of Trump. Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, one of the president’s closest allies, urged the White House to consider pre-emptive pardons shortly after Trump’s election last month and likewise recommended that the president pardon his son.

“I think there are a lot of people who are coming into this next administration who are telling us who they are,” Clyburn said in an interview Thursday. “I’ve seen Kash Patel saying who he’s going after, and so why should we not believe them? And that’s what I said to the president’s staff: You all got to believe these people.”

He added: “I think it will be less than an honourable thing to do to leave this office and not do what you can to protect the integrity of their decision-making, especially when they were carrying out these responsibilities as patriots to this country, doing the things that are necessary for the pursuit of a more perfect union.”

Ed Siskel, the White House counsel, is leading the discussions as part of a broader plan to issue pardons and commutations to more traditional recipients, including those convicted of nonviolent drug offences, as is customary in a president’s final days. Among other aides participating in the discussions is Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House chief of staff.

But as White House officials weigh the matter, they are concerned that such a move would fuel the impression spread in conservative media that the recipients had actually done something wrong. At least some of those who would be obvious candidates for such pardons have said privately that they would not want one because of such an implication. Others who are concerned about retribution have lobbied for their own pardons.

Among those whose names have been floated are former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who was vice chair of the bipartisan committee that investigated Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol; Dr Anthony Fauci, the former top infectious disease expert for the government whose advice on COVID-19 made him a target of far-right attacks; Jack Smith, the outgoing special counsel who prosecuted Trump; and Sen.-elect Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif., who was a lead House prosecutor at Trump’s first impeachment trial.

Cheney and Fauci did not respond to requests for comment. Schiff said he did not think blanket pardons would be a good idea. “I would urge the president not to do that,” he told NPR recently. “I think it would seem defensive and unnecessary.”

Others said they were torn. Olivia Troye, a former adviser to Vice President Mike Pence who has been a leading critic of the president-elect, was threatened by a lawyer for Patel just this week in a letter saying that “litigation will be filed against you” if she did not retract her criticism of him during a television interview.

“I haven’t committed a crime,” she said in an interview. But “these are very different times. Is it something that we’ve considered and are concerned about? Yes. But all I’ve done is tell the truth. I’ve not done anything wrong, and I haven’t committed any crimes, and that’s where it’s a complicated issue. These are unprecedented times. That’s what makes this so hard.”

Trump, who has argued that the many criminal and civil cases against him are part of a sweeping “witch hunt” that has “weaponized” the justice system, has done little to disguise his desire to use the law enforcement system to get back at his foes. He has threatened to prosecute Democrats, election workers, law enforcement officials, intelligence officials, reporters, former members of his own staff and Republicans who do not support him.

He has said on social media that Cheney “should be prosecuted for what she has done to our country” and that the whole Jan. 6 committee “should be prosecuted for their lies and, quite frankly, TREASON!” He said that Vice President Kamala Harris “should be impeached and prosecuted.” He has promised to “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after” Biden and his family. He has suggested that Gen. Mark A. Milley, the retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserved execution.

He has said that Letitia James, the attorney general of New York who won a $450 million judgment against him for business fraud, and Justice Arthur F. Engoron, who presided over the trial, “should be arrested and punished accordingly”. He shared a post saying that the police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 “should be charged and the protesters should be freed”. He has said that if Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, does anything deemed illegal, “he will spend the rest of his life in prison”.

Patel’s own list of “deep state” enemies includes not just Democrats but former Trump appointees who broke with him or were seen as obstacles, including John Bolton, the former national security adviser; William Barr, the former attorney general; Mark Esper, the former defence secretary; Pat Cipollone, the former White House counsel; Gina Haspel, the former CIA director; and Christopher Wray, the current FBI director.

“Trump and Patel’s threats of prosecution are real,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a homeland security official under President George W. Bush and a senior counsel to the independent counsel Ken Starr in his investigation of President Bill Clinton. “Biden has a moral obligation to defend all of those who risked their livelihoods for him and protect them, as best he can, from Trump’s authoritarian impulses. He should issue a pardon to anyone on Trump or Patel’s enemies list. It’s the least he can do.”

Some Democrats have echoed the argument. “The people they’re targeting include law enforcement officers, military personnel and others who have spent their lives protecting this country,” Rep. Brendan F. Boyle of Pennsylvania said in a statement. “These patriots shouldn’t have to live in fear of political retribution for doing what’s right.”

But other Democrats said it would reflect badly on the party, making it look as though it were only protecting its own rather than the most powerless in society.

“The Democrats should be for reforming and curtailing the pardon power,” Rep. Ro Khanna of California said in an interview. “Black and brown individuals incarcerated because of marijuana possession have faced and continue to face far more injustice than some of the most privileged individuals who have served in the Congress or Senate.”

-New York Times