PBS News live coverage of Donald Trump’s second inauguration featured PBS News Hour co-anchors Geoff Bennett and Amna Nawaz and included Laura Barron-Lopez, stationed at the White House.
Barron-Lopez, as always, was a reliable defender of the Democrat president, adopting a partisan double standard on the last-minute pre-emptive family pardons issued by Joe Biden, an abuse of presidential power rejected by other members of the mainstream press, including Chris Cillizza and Jake Tapper, and even Senate Democrat leader Chuck Schumer (at least regarding possible Trump pardons back in 2020). Barron-Lopez was copacetic in her 1:16 p.m., post-inauguration report:
Laura Barron-Lopez: Amna, in the final minutes of his presidency, before he was heading to the Capitol with now sworn-in President Trump, President Biden issued some very last-minute pardons, preemptive pardons, to his family members, specifically a number of his siblings: James Biden, Valerie Biden Owens, as well as their spouses. [She left out the president's brother Frank Biden.]
And then President-Biden said it was because of the fact that they were under threats, attacks, and he was referencing past promises made by Donald Trump to go after not just Joe Biden, but also his entire family. Trump had said that repeatedly on the campaign trail as well as his allies had said that, that they would go after Joe Biden and his family. In this preemptive pardon issuing Biden said it wasn’t because his family did anything wrong or anything illegal, but that this was because he had no guarantee his family would not be prosecuted and so he decided to issue these preemptive pardons just minutes before his presidency ended.
When prompted by co-host Geoff Bennett to discuss Biden’s “notable act of clemency for an indigenous activist, tell us about that,” Barron-Lopez admitted she hadn’t heard about the clemency of Leonard Peltier, a member of the American Indian Movement, convicted of murdering two FBI agents in 1975 (back when the phrase “indigenous activist” would have meant nothing to viewers).
Barron-Lopez: That's right, Geoff, I don't have that one just in front of me. But those were other pardons the president made, adding on to his clemencies and commutations that he’s issued, a historic number, more than any president to date, Geoff.
(Side note: Host Bennett had himself previously drawn a blank by not recognizing Dan Quayle and his wife Marilyn entering the Capitol Rotunda, and had to be helped out by his co-host Amna Nawaz.)
Barron-Lopez then showed why she’s considered the most biased reporter at PBS, showing a double standard between how Donald Trump and Joe Biden are allowed to interpret the constitution.
Barron-Lopez: If I could, I’d like to highlight a few things that stood out to me from now-President Donald Trump's speech, and significantly the significant focus on immigration. And in this speech he was talking and saying all illegal entry to the United States will immediately be halted and that he will direct migrants to be returned back to their countries of origin. That’s going to require some agreements, it’s a lot easier said than done. They will have to have agreements with countries saying that they're willing to take migrants back to the country of origin.
And I was also talking to some legal experts about the executive order that is coming on ending birthright citizenship. And immigration lawyers that I was talking to today, Geoff, said that that would be in violation of the 14th Amendment, that the interpretation that the incoming Trump Administration is viewing the 14th amendment, saying that it would allow them to stop automatic birthright citizenship for children of undocumented migrants, immigration lawyers say that is not the correct interpretation of the 14th Amendment and could likely very quickly be halted by judges.
So while Trump’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment was dismissed by PBS's Barron-Lopez -- via her sources of lefty immigration lawyers -- as incorrect, Biden’s twisted “pre-emptive” interpretation of the presidential pardon power, to cover possible crimes committed by his family, wasn’t a bit controversial?
