Chapter 1: Broken Scales CHAPTER 1 BROKEN SCALES In his final minutes as president, Joe Biden gave blanket pardons to five of his family members. The list included three siblings and their respective spouses: James "Jim" Biden and his wife, Sara Biden; Valerie Biden Owens and her husband, John T. Owens; and Francis "Frank" Biden. All three siblings have been suspected of potential crimes. For years reports have indicated that Joe's brothers Jim and Frank Biden used the family name to bag foreign cash and engage in questionable business dealings. Valerie, Joe's sister, leveraged her last name to nab lucrative consulting gigs stateside. Sara Biden, Jim's wife, was accused of laundering money for her husband and brother-in-law when Jim admitted to lending Joe $200,000 without a repayment plan. 1 Controversial as the Biden family pardons were, the uproar was a fraction of what had come before. These were not the first Biden family pardons. Just a few weeks earlier, Joe had granted his son Hunter a full and unconditional pardon dating back more than ten years for any crimes of which he might be accused in the future. America had largely grown numb to Biden family antics, but this news was jarring, especially since Hunter had been investigated for several crimes during Joe's presidency. In June 2024, Hunter was convicted of three felony charges related to a gun offense. Reports of Hunter's criminal misdoings had circulated for years, amplified by a leak of the contents of his laptop in the run-up to the 2020 election. The fact that he was convicted on a gun charge and only a gun charge was notable, as it was Hunter's only alleged crime (to my knowledge) that did not implicate Joe. Hunter got away with any impropriety in his extensive business ties to oligarchs around the world, especially in China and Ukraine. He never registered as a foreign agent even though he clearly took money from influential people and businesses with close connections to foreign governments. The pardons extended all the way back to 2014, right before Hunter's career as an international businessman took off. Anyone who thinks this is a coincidence isn't paying attention. Pardon recipients extended beyond the Biden family. Biden made wide use of preemptive pardons that granted high-profile political allies amnesty from future prosecution. Recipients included Dr. Anthony Fauci (who had overseen the mismanagement of funds that were used for gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and then lied about it in a Senate hearing), Congresswoman Liz Cheney (who appeared to tamper with at least one witness on the January 6th Committee), and General Mark Milley (who had told the Chinese Communist Party that he would warn them if President Trump had planned to attack). Most if not all of Biden's high-profile pardons extended back to January 1, 2014, a period spanning ten years. The stunning breadth of these pardons all but guarantees that many crimes will go uncovered and uninvestigated. We will probably never learn the full truth of Hunter's influence-peddling, since he was pardoned of all potential wrongdoing before anyone investigated his actions. It was the most far-reaching use of the pardon power in American history, a gross act of hypocrisy--even for an administration that traded in doublespeak and propaganda. But there are only two creatures that never forget a thing: elephants and the Internet. And the internet soon took Joe Biden to task for his about-face regarding the rule of law. Clips quickly flooded social media of Biden and his media allies criticizing Trump for even contemplating granting preemptive pardons on his way out in 2020. Biden and his surrogates repeatedly stated that he would not pardon his son. This, like so many of Biden's utterances over the years, was bullshit. "You sit there and go, if you haven't done anything wrong, then what do you need a preemptive pardon for?" asked lawfare poohbah and Mueller Report henchman Andrew Weissmann on MSNBC. At that time, Biden responded with emphatic bullshit: "It concerns me in terms of what kind of precedent it sets and how the rest of the world looks at us as a nation of laws and justice. You're not going to see in our administration that approach to pardons." 2 In his first administration, President Trump never issued the preemptive pardons liberals had fixated on, not even one. Joe Biden, on the other hand, dished them out like dollar bills at an erotic club. It was ironic, infuriating, and darkly hilarious--the perfect way for Joe Biden to end his failed presidency. His last act confirmed what we already knew: The man who standardized the modern practice of lawfare (more on this momentarily), proved once and for all that two systems of justice exist in the country. I saw it coming, of course. We weren't being entirely tongue-in-cheek at Breitbart News when we began calling them "The Biden Crime Family." I knew from my extensive research into the Bidens that Joe would never let his family members go to jail, so long as he could help it, nor would he let protracted legal entanglements bankrupt them. Unending lawsuits, expensive legal bills, and judicial harassment from your political opponents? That was for the Trump family! For those MAGAts who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th! No Biden was ever going to rot in a cell. Throughout the Biden administration, Democrats tried to bankrupt Trump by filing civil cases against him in liberal districts. Judges and juries who hated Trump awarded absurd penalties to accusers in flimsy cases. And when that failed to alienate Trump from the American public, Biden's DOJ, together with some suspiciously recent DOJ alumni, tried to throw him in jail. Yet, luckily, they all failed. In the end, Trump fought off his most malicious detractors and proved they were powerless against him. At least for the time being. Despite Trump's victory, however, it's still important to consider the damage the left has done to our legal system. Lawfare is a multifaceted tool. The left deploys it at the court to enact change and tarnish their adversaries. They use it at the White House to circumvent constitutional roadblocks. They use it at the ballot box so they don't leave a single close election to chance. Joe Biden, a famously lousy law student (as thoroughly documented in Breaking Biden ), had introduced modern lawfare decades earlier with the "borking" of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and the unsuccessful high-tech lynching of nominee Clarence Thomas. In the intervening years, the Democrats built a lawfare superstructure that remains one of their most potent political weapons. The Democrats always had long odds for the 2024 election. They had a weak candidate at the top of the ticket, then swapped him out for a candidate who was even worse. Republicans had both political and cultural tailwinds and a candidate so strong it looked at times like God himself willed Trump to take back the presidency. The Democrats should have known they were in a losing battle. They should have stood down and lain low. But they are fighters, and they fought to the bitter end. This was a fateful choice because it meant they didn't just lose in November, they exposed their playbook in the process. Now it's on us to identify its elements, dismantle what we can, and prepare for the battles ahead. If we fail, the machine will only get stronger. The left plans to use lawfare to expand voter eligibility to include illegal aliens, eliminate voter ID requirements, and widen the time window in which people can vote. They want to rig the deck so they can't lose. They will game campaign finance laws so that they always have a fundraising advantage. They will pack courts to limit the power of conservative and originalist judges. They will add new left-leaning states, grant mass amnesty to illegal aliens, and more. Scariest of all, they will try to declare the conservative movement an existential threat to "democracy" itself with no legitimate right to exist. If they had their way, 2024 would have been the last real election. Under a second Biden or Kamala Harris administration, the political left would have used their power to cement their gains and guarantee that no sane Republican would ever test the lawfare machine again. Anyone who challenged them would have been subjected to the Trump treatment. It would have been the end of democracy as we know it. In November 2024, we got a stay of execution, but we still have much to fear. The left believes that America is not an exceptional place and that our core institutions are not worthy of respect. Once you understand this fundamental outlook, you can begin to understand how easily they are willing to bend the system to their will. They don't believe in precedent, tradition, and principle: their only pursuit is power. THE LEFT HATES LAW AND ORDER The left has never regarded the rule of law as essential. They consider it a means to an end, and when it doesn't work in their favor, it's viewed as an obstacle on the way to their progressive utopia that can be swept aside. That attitude made the prosecutions of Trump possible. My first conscious experience with the left's anti-law and order culture concerned immigration, and illegal immigration specifically. Our open border was a national disgrace, and I dedicated much of my career to bringing attention to that fact. The left has waged war on immigration enforcement to boost their long-term electoral prospects. They want as many illegal immigrants to come as possible, even though that means violating the law. Growing up in California, I didn't have to be particularly observant to notice the disastrous effects of illegal immigration on our quality of life. The influx of people hurt everything from schools and hospitals to crime and everyday safety. When I got older, I realized that our illegal immigration crisis is fundamentally an issue of lawfare. It reveals the left's contempt for the firm standards that law and order demand. People from around the world sought to enter America by any means necessary to seek work and gain access to the American economy. And Democrats let them. The illegal immigrant population doubled from 1995 to 2005. 3 From 2005 to 2015, for example, chain migration, the process where family and community members follow another immigrant to settle in a new country, added as many new people to the USA as any two years of American births during that decade. 4 Our southern border was abandoned for decades. Until Donald Trump came down that escalator on June 16, 2015, to announce his campaign for president, both political parties seemed comfortable with massive demographic change, mostly for political reasons. Democrats thought they benefited from a new influx of families that would eventually support Democrats once they gained the right to vote, and Republicans feared being branded "racist" if they dared to speak out against lawlessness. Migrants crossed our border without even offering the courtesy of signing the proverbial guest book. One party considered it, in essence, not not legal. The other political party was too afraid to address the problem because they feared political fallout. For the elite on both sides, the flow of migrants lowered the cost of their gardeners, nannies, and an assortment of other laborers. The Democrats saw their path to a permanent majority, and they moved to try to secure it by manipulating the language to end any debate on the issue. "Illegal aliens" were rebranded "undocumented workers." Illegal alien children became "Dreamers," named after the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act of 1991. When I was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2005 to 2008, it was popular to say that "no human being is illegal," because the literal and accurate term illegal alien was deemed dehumanizing. These euphemisms were designed to mask the reality of the situation. The term illegal alien refers to their immigration status, not their humanity. Duh. Illegal immigrants were "undocumented" because they had broken the law to get here. It was that simple. And as to the term "Dreamer," President Trump said it best in his 2020 State of the Union speech: "Americans are dreamers too." America had the most idiotic immigration policy in the world. We left our border open for years. And until Trump, not a single mainstream political figure with the power to change things was willing to address the issue. It was madness. From the day he took office in 2016, Donald Trump's administration provided a brief moment of sanity in an otherwise insane sixty-year period, implementing policies such as "Remain in Mexico," Title 42, and building new sections of border wall. However, Joe Biden undid all that the moment he got into power. Biden's decision to deliberately undo Trump's efforts to secure our border made clear to the rest of the world what most of them already knew: America's southern border was a lawless place. The whole border mess started when Senator Ted Kennedy shepherded the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 through congress. The bill prioritized chain-migrants and capped legal immigrants from our hemisphere, thus leading to widespread illegal immigration. This proved to be a political benefit for Demorats. Half a century later, Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden refused to enforce our laws, again to benefit Democrats. Changing the law and refusing to enforce it were both considered viable options so long as it helped Democrats win. But Democrats weren't the only ones who benefited. The Mexican cartels that smuggle drugs and human beings into our country benefited too, while American communities suffered as crime and fentanyl flooded our streets. The debasing of our immigration system is perhaps lawfare's greatest triumph to date. One major political party, the Democrats, has gone to great lengths to not enforce a set of laws because they believed that would help them electorally. And until recently, establishment and globalist Republicans were comfortable with this lawlessness because the influx in people lowered the cost of blue-collar labor, which could potentially save them money. (Plus, the left has successfully framed the debate so that for many years, if you raised the issue of illegal immigration, you were likely to be called a racist and a xenophobe in the press. Republicans have not traditionally had a strong enough stomach to handle bogus charges of racism.) The scope of the immigration laws that the left openly violated is immense. As I wrote in Breaking Biden , our refusal to enforce a border "sends a message to foreigners that if you violate our rules, you might get prioritized ahead of those who abide by them." Not only does an open border broadcast to the rest of the world that we don't even have respect for our own laws, but it also leads to humanitarian crises downstream. It created a black market for fentanyl, which has been trafficked over our border in quantities large enough to kill every American, devastating countless American communities. What's more, the conditions for the migrants themselves are often dangerous and always filthy and degrading. Families are separated. Females are raped and assaulted. And when they arrive, they often work for wages that are below our minimum wage, some of which must be sent to their cartel traffickers. It's all horrific and a stain on our country. Yet the Democrats will go to terrific lengths to keep things exactly as they are. In President Trump's first term, Democrats harped on the "kids in cages," referring to unaccompanied alien minors who were sometimes housed in fenced-off warehouses while they were processed. They paid no mind to the fact that these facilities were often built during the Obama-Biden administration, a story we broke at Breitbart News in 2014. 5 Yet once the Democrats saw an opportunity to weaponize the use of the "cages" against Trump and his supporters, they took it, framing it as white nationalism. 6 It's all dishonest. A disgrace, frankly. But as a practical matter, these lies are pernicious because they lead to more lawlessness, which is exactly what the institutional left wants. Our lack of a wall and inadequate border enforcement are the beginning of the lawlessness. Our asylum system is routinely abused with the "catch and release" policy that was in place both before and after Trump's first term. In essence, if a border crosser encounters law enforcement, all they need to do is claim that they are seeking asylum and they are welcomed to stay until they are given a hearing, which is likely years off. What's more, the asylum claimant almost certainly had passed through another country that has similar asylum rules as the USA, so they don't need to be here; they simply want to be here. Joe Biden expanded the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) programs during his presidency, which allowed foreign nationals from countries like Nicaragua and Venezuela to be paroled into the country with little or no vetting. He even had a smartphone app, CBP One, that made the process go smoother for the illegal alien . Donald Trump had cut aid to the "Northern Triangle" countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) for allowing migrant caravans to head toward the U.S. unabated. He also put Title 42 in place, which allowed for the swift removal of any alien who had recently been in a country with a contagious disease (which in the post-COVID era was all of them). Joe Biden canceled all of those upon taking office. These basic details are probably familiar to anyone reading this book, but it is nonetheless important to identify what it represents: The mainstream viewpoint among Democrat policy makers is that padding their voter rolls is more important than living in a society that respects its own laws. They believed an open border was their path to a permanent majority, and that is reason enough for the lawlessness. They had the choice between the rule of law and chaos, and they chose chaos. Excerpted from Breaking the Law: Exposing the Weaponization of America's Legal System Against Donald Trump by Alex Marlow All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
