Article in The New Republic by Jason Linkins, 1/25/25
Headline: “The Washington Post Commits an Unpardonable January 6 Sin”
Subhead: “Jeff Bezos’s increasingly meretricious newspaper stooped to publish a pathetic “both-sides” defense of the violent mob that stormed the Capitol.”
“Well, I hate to say I told you so. Back in December, I warned that Donald Trump’s plan to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists was going to be greeted by the media with prewritten takes about how President Biden’s own use of the pardon power justified a decision to free a violent mob. Today, The Washington Post’s editorial board, tasked with the mission of obtaining 200 million paying users while simultaneously following owner Jeff Bezos’s directive to make the venerable newspaper substantially more mendacious, made me look prescient.
“ ‘The outgoing and incoming presidents both abused their pardon powers on Monday, undermining the rule of law and setting dangerous precedents that perpetuate America’s divisions,’ they wrote. . .”
“To put it charitably, this is a bungle from the editorial board. In the first place, the editors demonstrate a real inability to follow cause and effect chains; here asserting that the ‘the trouble’ began with Biden’s preemptive pardons, when the use of the term ‘preemptive’ clearly suggests a precipitating event. In this case, somebody forgot the well-documented history of Donald Trump publicly announcing his plans to persecute members of Biden’s family and administration, over and over again. Just this week, Trump intimated in an interview that he might go after Biden specifically because he wasn’t corrupt enough to pardon himself on the way out the door.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/190626/washington-post-january-6-pardon
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