NEW: Powerful Longtime Democrat Calls On Biden To Pardon Trump, Squash Jack Smith’s Cases

The ante is being upped on President Joe Biden to extend his pardoning powers past his son and to his former rival, with one longtime Democrat calling on the incumbent to pardon President-elect Donald Trump from federal charges during his final months in office.

Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV), who left the Democratic Party earlier this year, will be out of office for the first time in decades after deciding against seeking reelection in deep red West Virginia. In an interview on Monday, he urged Biden to follow up on a pardon for Hunter Biden with one for Trump, saying the move would strike an important tone of unity before his successor takes office. “What I would have done differently, and my recommendation as a counsel would’ve been, ‘Why don’t you go ahead and pardon Donald Trump, for all his charges?’” Manchin said on CNN. He suggested he wouldn’t have done things differently from Biden, adding he doesn’t “know of a father that [wouldn’t have] done the same thing,” according to The Hill.

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The White House, which did not comment on Manchin’s suggestion, is in crisis mode two days after President Biden issued a “complete and unconditional” pardon to Hunter Biden for the past 11 years, exonerating him in two federal cases and making it impossible for him to be tried on any possible crime that occurred during that time. Special counsel David Weiss was in the middle of prosecuting the embattled first son for defrauding the IRS by concealing millions of dollars in income while Hunter was set to be sentenced later this month after a jury found him guilty of lying about being an active drug user while applying for a handgun.

In announcing the pardon, President Biden declared, “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong.” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre echoed that statement while aboard Air Force One on Monday where she decried the “war politics” which contributed to Hunter’s prosecution. She insisted that her months of promising no pardon for Hunter were accurate until this weekend when President Biden made his decision. “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution,” Biden added in his statement. “In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

President-elect Trump reacted to the pardon in a stinging denouncement on Truth Social, writing that liberals shouldn’t have any qualms about his commitment to pardoning J6 prisoners in light of Hunter Biden’s pardon. “Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!” he wrote Monday.

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