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.

At almost the last minute, President Biden issued surprising preemptive pardons for some of Donald Trump’s enemies. 

On Monday morning, Biden issued pardons to Anthony Fauci, the infectious diseases expert who took on the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as Mark Milley, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He also pardoned the members and staff of the House January 6 committee, which was led by Democrat Bennie Thompson and Republican Liz Cheney, as well as Washington Metro Police and U.S. Capitol Police officers who testified before the committee. 

The pardon recipients have all been attacked by Trump and his supporters, and many on the right have called for them to be criminally charged. Milley has reportedly told former colleagues that he fears being court-martialled by Trump out of revenge for his actions during Trump’s first term, where he checked some of the then-president’s worst impulses. 

Fauci’s time advising the White House during the Covid-19 pandemic led to frequent clashes with Trump over how to manage public health, with the two parting ways on acrimonious terms. The January 6 pardons stem from various threats they’ve received from Trump and his supporters, as well as from Trump’s appointees, such as Kash Patel, who have vowed to take revenge on the president-elect’s behalf.  

Biden shocked many of his supporters last month when he pardoned his son Hunter from all present and future crimes out of fear that the coming Trump administration would single him out. Monday’s pardons seem to be protecting some of the right’s favorite bogeymen from Trump’s vengeance, which could come soon after he is sworn in later in the day.

Donald Trump’s promise to save TikTok has divided him from a throng of Senate Republicans, sparking disunity in the party just hours before the MAGA leader is scheduled to retake the Oval Office.

Several key Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senators Tom Cotton and Pete Ricketts, have pushed back against Trump’s efforts to keep the popular video-sharing app in the U.S. market.

“I think we will enforce the law,” Johnson told NBC News on Sunday.

In a joint statement, Cotton and Ricketts reiterated their support for the bipartisan legislation banning the platform, praising American companies for suspending their relationships with TikTok and its Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance.

“We commend Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft for following the law and halting operations with ByteDance and TikTok, and we encourage other companies to do the same. The law, after all, risks ruinous bankruptcy for any company who violates it,” Cotton and Ricketts wrote.

“Now that the law has taken effect, there’s no legal basis for any kind of ‘extension’ of its effective date,” they continued. “For TikTok to come back online in the future, ByteDance must agree to a sale that satisfies the law’s qualified-divestiture requirements by severing all ties between TikTok and Communist China.”

TikTok preemptively went dark on Saturday, causing its 170 million American users to lose access to the platform and their accounts before the ban was legally mandated. The platform explicitly blamed Joe Biden for its shutdown, even though Biden had said he would not enforce the law before leaving office.

Trump then claimed he was examining a 90-day pause on TikTok’s ban, stipulating that the company’s divestment from ByteDance would also have to result with the U.S. gaining an ownership stake in the app. Such a pause is technically permitted within the bounds of the law, which allows for such a break so long as a sale of the company is in progress. Failing those specifications would technically see Trump in a position of flouting the two other branches of government, both of whom have supported upholding the national security-oriented restriction.

When TikTok spontaneously resumed operations on Sunday, it returned with a message for users that the company was working with “President Trump on a long-term solution that keeps TikTok in the United States.”

“We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive,” the multibillion dollar company wrote in a statement on its platform. “It’s a strong stand for the First Amendment and against arbitrary censorship.”

On Sunday, far-right political pundit and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk caught flak for backing the president-elect’s decision, with Truth Social users torching the duo for fighting to keep “Chinese spyware alive.”

Donald Trump’s Bible scam nearly hit a new all-time low.

Singer-songwriter Lee Greenwood suggested Sunday night that Trump might be sworn in on a Trump-branded Bible.

“When Donald Trump puts his hand on the Bible and swears the oath to take care of the country, and he’s the 47th president of the United States, I’m hoping it will be this Bible—” Greenwood told Fox News at Trump’s inauguration rally, holding up a special Gold Edition of Trump’s God Bless the USA Bible.

“There are only gonna be 5,000 of these. And I know he’s going to take the oath by putting his hand on several Bibles. He might do this one as well,” Greenwood continued.

It now appears that Greenwood was just trying to sell something during his five minutes on television. It doesn’t seem that Trump ended up using his overpriced Bible for this occasion. And in an incredible twist, it looks like Trump didn’t end up putting his hand on the Bible at all:

Last week, Trump’s inauguration committee announced that the president-elect would use the same two bibles that he used during his first swearing-in in 2017: one that Abraham Lincoln used in 1861 and another that was gifted to Trump by his mother in 1955.

The kitschy copies of the Good Book are a joint venture between Trump and Greenwood, who popularized the song for which it’s named. As of August, the “only Bible endorsed by President Trump,” as the website boasts, had already raked in $300,000 in royalties for the president-elect.

While normal copies of Trump’s Bible usually go for around $60, special editions “commemorating the 45th and 47th president” are available on preorder for $99.99.

What better way to illustrate that for Trump, taking the oath of office has never been anything more than a money-making grift than for him to use it as an opportunity to sell Bibles?

For more of the Trump family’s grifts in action, read up on their new meme coins here.

Donald Trump has a massive lineup of executive orders prepped and ready to sign.

Trump is expected to sign dozens of executive orders after he’s sworn in around noon on Monday. They will focus on immigration, the DEI culture wars, energy, and more. Fox News estimates Trump will sign more than 200 orders, while NBC News reports he will sign at least 50 and perhaps over 100.

A source familiar with the orders told Fox News that he will declare a national emergency at the border, designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, direct the military to focus on the southern border, end Biden-era energy policies, terminate the “Green New Deal” (perhaps a reference to the Inflation Reduction Act), and exit the Paris Climate Accords.

“The president is issuing a historic series of executive orders and actions that will fundamentally reform the American government, including the complete and total restoration of American sovereignty,” the official said to Fox News.

Trump is also expected to sign an executive order ending birthright citizenship, a White House official said Monday. The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino also noted that the orders will pause refugee resettlement for “at least four months” and “end asylum.”

Semafor is reporting that one executive order will be aimed at establishing a version of the Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire Elon Musk and (for now) Vivek Ramaswamy, into every federal agency.

The legal ramifications of these orders—particularly ending birthright citizenship, which is a constitutional amendment—are yet to be seen.

There is no higher premium in Donald Trump’s second administration than loyalty.

The president-elect is reportedly planning to make good on his promise to save some of his most ferocious supporters, with a slew of pardons on the immediate horizon for some January 6 offenders.

Speaking at an inauguration eve rally in Washington, Trump claimed that the forthcoming pardons would make his supporters “very happy,” once again referring to the convictees—who tore through the U.S. Capitol complex in a deadly riot, halting Congress’s certification of votes in delirious support of his failed presidential bid—as “hostages.”

“And tomorrow, everybody in this very large arena will be very happy with my decision on the J-6 hostages,” Trump told the crowd Sunday. “Very happy. I think you will be very, very happy.”

CNN reported that sources familiar with Trump’s plants have claimed that a flurry of pardons are expected as part of a mountain of executive orders that Trump will sign on his first day back in office. The extent of the pardons is unclear, though Trump’s nonviolent supporters would be an easy target for the executive decision.

What’s less obvious is what Trump will do for some 174 January 6 defendants who were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon against Capitol police.

Approximately 1,270 January 6 defendants have been convicted in the years since they stormed the Capitol, though only a couple hundred are actually serving prison time for their involvement.

If Trump does decide to legally forgive those members of his base, he’d be at odds with Vice President-elect JD Vance, who told Fox News last week that Trump’s more violent supporters didn’t deserve pardons.

“I think it’s very simple, look if you protested peacefully on January 6, and you had Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned,” Vance told host Shannon Bream. “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned. And there’s a little bit of a gray area there.”

In Trump’s 2024 “Person of the Year” interview with Time, the incoming president reissued his intentions to focus on his suffering supporters: “I’ll be looking at J6 early on,” Trump told the magazine. “Maybe the first nine minutes.”