Chief and I had a nice debate Tuesday morning on Stocks-n-Jocks related to Trump's and Biden's pardon flurry.

There are those who have argued that the offenses of January 6th are "unreasonable" to pardon and that Trump's pardon and commutations for persons prosecuted due to January 6th 2020's actions are outrageous.

That assertion is false.

The issuance of a pardon imputes guilt and acceptance of one, which is voluntary, confesses guilt (Burdick .v. United States, 1915.)  The reason you must voluntarily accept a pardon is that once pardoned you cannot assert 5th Amendment protections as the risk of criminal sanction has been removed.  Thus you must accept it voluntarily in that you are giving up Constitutional Rights, but in doing so you also confess to the truth of the offense(s) in question.

There is no means to expunge a federal offense.  Once convicted the only way to remove it from your record is to prevail on appeal in which case the offense itself is voided.  Many states have a process for expungement, which is a formal and legal removal of a conviction; no such thing exists for federal crimes.

A pardon does not erase an offense -- that is, the offense of "parading" or whatever have you that a person was convicted of from Jan 6 is not "gone", however, it is undisputed, because Biden pardoned all of the Jan 6 committee members, that the government and members of Congress obstructed justice which was used to deny said persons a fair trial.  That issuance of the pardon by Joe Biden imputed said guilt and the acceptance thereof confessed to same by the committee members.

That doesn't make the actions of those who paraded (or stole and destroyed, for that matter) into "not occurred."  They did take those actions, and they were charged or convicted as the case may be.  But the trials were not fair as justice was obstructed so whether the original sentences were reasonable (or whether, for example, probation or a modest fine under misdemeanor penalties was a more-appropriate penalty in the case of someone who's crime was mere presence in the Capitol building) was never lawfully and fairly adjudicated.

Trump's pardons and commutations thus might objectively be considered "wrong" except for Biden's action on the way out of office, in which he pardoned obstruction of justice, witness tampering and willful destruction of evidence by persons who led to those prosecutions, all of which were part and parcel of the original charges and trials and due to the acceptance of Biden's pardons by those committee members is in fact a confession of guilt to those federal offenses.

As a direct result Biden's preemptive pardons make the Jan 6 pardons by Trump not only objectively reasonable they became, at the moment Biden issued them, mandatory.

One can't believe justice should be served on an even-handed basis and yet a prosecutor who deliberately destroys evidence gets to keep the penalties imposed on those adjudicated guilty under that circumstance after the persons who destroyed the evidence and committed obstruction of said discovery confess to their offenses -- and prior to Trump signing those pardons they did!

PS: Don't believe for a second I've ignored the plethora of other E/Os and related actions, including the "AI" thing.  All in good time; there certainly is no shortage of material to report and opine upon now!