As Republicans renew their offensive against Joe Biden, it’s not unreasonable to wonder about the underlying point of their partisan crusade. The former Democratic president won’t seek elected office again; he can’t be impeached; and even if GOP officials were eventually to concoct something damaging, he can’t be criminally charged. So why bother investing so much time, energy and resources into smearing him? What does the Republican Party hope to gain?
The answer is increasingly obvious.
Comer: "All those pardons from Fauci to the Biden family to Adam Schiff, the J6 committee, every one of those pardons signed with an autopen with no evidence of Joe Biden was involved, I think every one can be declared null & void by the DOJ & our evidence will make that decision hold up in court."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-10-29T12:59:53.620Z
During a recent appearance on Fox Business, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer claimed there’s “no evidence” that Biden was “involved” in signing pardons, leading the Kentucky Republican to conclude that the Justice Department can declare all of the former president’s pardons “null and void.”
To the extent that reality has any bearing on the debate, Comer’s claims are absurd. The idea that Biden was so cognitively impaired that he was unaware of his own presidential pardons is belied by the Democrat’s own assessments and defenses of his work.
But that hasn’t stopped many of the GOP’s leading voices from obsessing over this specific goal. The day before Comer’s on-air comments, House Speaker Mike Johnson not only said that every Biden pardon should be “voided,” he added that he considers the former president’s pardons to be “invalid on their face.”
Around the same time, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the Justice Department had already begun a review of Biden’s pardons.
This comes on the heels of Donald Trump claiming that Biden’s pardons were “illegal” (the incumbent president didn’t say which law was broken), which followed related rhetoric from a month earlier, when the Republican said Biden’s pardons are “worthless” because, according to Trump, the Democrat was not aware of his own existence during his White House tenure. (In March, the president said he’d invalidated his predecessor’s pardons, exercising a power he does not have, though nothing came of the weird announcement.)
Around the same time, Vice President JD Vance also publicly questioned whether the pardons are “actually legitimate.”
What’s more, in June, the Justice Department’s Ed Martin, the Trump-appointed pardon attorney, declared that he’s also investigating Biden’s clemency actions.
The motivation, in other words, isn’t exactly hard to piece together: Biden preemptively protected a variety of people on Trump’s enemies list with pardons. Republicans want to strip them of those protections so that they can be targeted by the White House and the Justice Department.
The goal, in other words, is less about smearing a retired president and more about empowering Trump while endangering his political foes.
