Biden Pardons His Family—and Grants Clemency to One Prominent Activist

With just minutes left as president, Joe Biden on Monday pardoned his entire immediate family—and gave clemency to prominent Native American activist Leonard Peltier.

Biden pardoned his younger brother James Biden, his sister-in-law Sarah Biden, his younger sister Valerie Biden Owens, his brother-in-law John Owens, and his younger brother Francis Biden “FOR ANY NONVIOLENT OFFENSES against the United States which they may have committed or taken part in during the period from January I, 2014, through the date of this pardon.”

Biden also commuted the sentence of Peltier. While he did not receive a pardon, he will be serving the rest of his life sentence in home confinement. Peltier is an indigenous activist affiliated with the American Indian Movement, which sought to address police brutality against Native people. He was sentenced in 1975 for the murder of two FBI agents during a shooting on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Peltier is now 80 years old, in ailing health, and has maintained his innocence throughout his nearly 50 years behind bars. Even one of the former federal prosecutors who put Peltier behind bars, James Reynolds, thinks that he’s innocent.

“We were not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense on the reservation. As a result to Mr. Peltier’s conviction, now arrest, is that he was guilty of a murder simply because he was present on the reservation that day,” Reynolds wrote in a letter to Biden. “He has served time for more than 46 years on the hands of minimal evidence, a result I strongly doubt would be upheld in any court today.”

This story has been updated.

Melania Trump’s meme cryptocurrency launched Sunday night, skyrocketing in value and netting her a tidy profit only hours before she returns to the White House as first lady.

In an X post, Trump posted a photo of herself with the caption “The Official Melania Meme is live! You can buy $MELANIA now.” The price of the coin went to $12 in a matter of hours, with a market cap of more than $12 billion.

At the same time, Donald Trump’s meme coin, $TRUMP, launched on Friday, plummeted more than 40 percent. His coin had a very auspicious start, becoming the second-largest meme coin based on market cap. But right after his wife’s coin launch, the president-elect’s coin lost more than $7.5 billion in value.

The windfall for both Trumps, coming right before the inauguration, is a sign that profiteering from the president and first lady will occur unabated by ethical concerns or worries about the Constitution’s emoluments clause. The new president has said he plans to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet,” and his cryptocurrency ventures are taking in millions from shady sources.

Many of Trump’s appointees are a nod to the crypto industry, including David Sacks as A.I. and crypto czar and Paul Atkins as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Crypto investors spent millions of dollars getting Trump elected—and billions of dollars will flow into the cryptocurrency for the next four years.

Any cryptocurrency regulations will likely be ones that appease crypto investors and ensure that the money continues flooding into the pockets of the president, first lady, and their friends and supporters. The grift is now official policy.

Yet another Republican lawmaker resigned Monday to join Donald Trump’s incoming administration, drawing into sharp relief the state of uncertainty and discord which has overtaken the House GOP.

Representative Michael Waltz left his seat to serve as Trump’s national security adviser—making the House Republicans’ slim majority over the Democrats even tighter at 218-215. 

This presents a major problem for House Speaker Mike Johnson, who struggled to unite his party last month around passing a bill to keep the government open. The party’s next moves to execute Trump’s agenda on the debt ceiling, border, energy, and tax policy are still up in the air, according to Politico—and the margin of error for getting everyone on the same page is shrinking by the day. 

Even Johnson’s most accelerated timeline predicts that a bill on these policies won’t land on Trump’s desk until March. Republicans have been waiting with bated breath for a set of marching orders from Trump, and they’re reportedly growing impatient. 

“Everybody is feeling the pressure now of time,” Representative Ralph Norman told Politico. “In a short period, we’ve got to make something happen.”

House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole was another fretting Republican who had been waiting on the party’s top-line discretionary spending targets. “We’re running out of time,” Cole told Politico. 

And on the horizon, there is another looming problem for Republicans: a March 14 government funding deadline, which is set to be another contentious bout as Republicans will have to foster bipartisan support. 

Waltz, who resigned Monday,  previously declared his intention to oust all non-political appointees and career intelligence officials from Trump’s National Security Council, saying that “everybody is going to resign at 12:01 on January 20.”

Trump is eager and ready to destroy something etched into the Constitution: birthright citizenship. 

The concept is held in the 14th Amendment: Anyone born in the United States of America is a U.S. citizen, regardless of where their parents are from. Trump has floated eliminating this simple privilege for some time, telling Meet the Press last month that “we have to end” the bedrock policy. But now, he has a plan to make it a reality via executive order targeting children of undocumented immigrants.

“The federal government will not recognize automatic birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens born in the United States,” a Trump official said Monday. “We are also going to enhance vetting and screening of illegal aliens.”

There were few details on the scope of the expected order, which is expected to kick off a legal battle in the courts.

Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, seems ready to support the president-elect tirelessly in this endeavor. When asked directly at her congressional hearing last week if she thought birthright citizenship was “the law of the land” (it very much is), Bondi refused to answer. “I will study birthright citizenship,” she said.  

Whether Trump can actually end birthright citizenship is unknown. He’d need either the Supreme Court to defend his order, or a two-thirds majority in the House and Senate to repeal the Amendment (along with ratification by three-quarters of the states). But this wouldn’t be the first time the courts have reinterpreted the law in his favor.

Vivek Ramaswamy’s time as the potential co-chair of the not-yet-real Department of Government Efficiency appears to be coming to an end.

The biotech executive has reportedly been clashing with the “rank and file” of the cost-cutting department, CBS reported Sunday, just hours before Donald Trump’s inauguration. Reporter Jennifer Jacobs noted that Ramswamy is being encouraged to exit the agency.

“Vivek has worn out his welcome,” one person close to Trump told CBS.

People around the other co-chair of the department, world’s-richest-man and major Trump donor Elon Musk, have expressed frustration with Ramaswamy’s lack of involvement in the massive undertaking. Despite the fact that both appointees spent considerable time at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort during the transition, the pair have reportedly not worked together for a while. Ramaswamy had no comment for the network.

Last week, Trump personally implored Ramaswamy to consider taking Ohio’s Senate seat, recently vacated by Vice President-elect JD Vance, if it was offered to him by Governor Mike DeWine. Ramaswamy had publicly backed out of the race to replace Vance in November after Trump announced him as a potential DOGE co-chair. Ramaswamy seemingly changed his mind over the last week, however, meeting with DeWine to discuss the appointment.

But Ramaswamy didn’t get the job—instead, the gig went to Ohio Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted. Moments before DeWine’s announcement, an anonymous source close to Ramaswamy told Reuters that the biotech executive is planning to launch a run to replace a term-limited DeWine as Ohio’s governor in 2026, a move that would further solidify his exit out of Trump’s inner circle. Ramaswamy is expected to formally announce the bid by the end of the month, according to Fox News.

Still, Ramaswamy isn’t totally on the outs. The multimillionaire was spotted Monday morning arriving at the Capitol ahead of Trump’s inauguration.