Is Joe Biden really in charge any longer? He was barely involved in the budget debate that just happened, and once he was done pardoning his son, the White House announced that he pardoned or commuted the sentences of a whole lot of bad people.

And yes – the people who got mercy via Joe Biden were NOT good people. The White House bragged that Biden smashed the record for clemency in a single day, handing out 1500 pardons and commutations at once. USA Today would have you believe that these were all “nonviolent” offenders.

The truth is that many people on this list ruined a lot of lives and stole a lot of money, and deserved to see justice, not clemency.

A former judge who sent juveniles to prison in the “Kids for Cash” kickback scandal. A former city official in Illinois who orchestrated the largest municipal embezzlement in state history. A journalist who manufactured a fentanyl-like drug dubbed “the most potent” in the United States.

There is Daniel Fillerup, sentenced to 10 years in prison for selling fentanyl that killed an Albany woman, and Shelinder Aggarwal, an Alabama “pill mill” doctor who the Department of Justice said “directly contributed to the opioid epidemic.” And Biden commuted the 17.5-year prison sentence of former Luzerne County, Pa., judge Michael Conahan, who took $2.1 million in kickbacks from a for-profit prison executive in exchange for sentencing juveniles to those facilities.

Also on the list: Rita Crundwell, former Dixon, Ill., comptroller and treasurer who embezzled more than $53 million from the city in what the DOJ described as “the largest theft of public funds in state history.” Crundwell used the money to breed racing horses. She was sentenced to more than 19 years in prison in 2013. Dixon city officials blasted Biden’s reprieve for Crundwell. “This is a complete travesty of justice and a slap in the face of our entire community,” said city manager Danny Langloss.

Then there’s Wendy Hechtman, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for leading a drug ring that police blamed for a surge of overdoses and deaths in Omaha, Neb., in 2017. Hechtman, a former journalist, and her husband manufactured and distributed carfentanil, which the CDC says is the “most potent fentanyl analog detected in the United States.” Omaha police tracked down the Hechtmans after a spate of overdose deaths from the drug. “People were dying, people were overdosing, families were being destroyed on a daily basis, and then it stopped,” an Omaha investigator told a local news outlet.

Joseph Shereshevsky received clemency for his role in a $255 million real estate Ponzi scheme that authorities said was targeted at Orthodox Jews. He was sentenced to just under 22 years in prison in 2011.

Biden also granted clemency to Jacqueline Mills, who in 2017 was sentenced to 12.5 years in prison for stealing nearly $4 million from a USDA program to feed poor children in eastern Arkansas, a case that prosecutors called “one of the most egregious examples of fraud” they had prosecuted.

Also receiving clemency: Meera Sachdeva, a Mississippi doctor sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2012 for defrauding Medicare by providing diluted chemotherapy drugs and old needles to cancer patients. One patient of Sachdeva’s clinic claimed to have contracted HIV because of old needles.

Biden also granted clemency to William Boyland, a former Democratic New York State assemblyman, who was sentenced to 14 years in prison for bribery, extortion, fraud, conspiracy, and theft charges in 2015.

And at least one murderer is walking free, thanks to Joe Biden.

A Maryland woman dubbed the “Black Widow” for murdering two husbands and a boyfriend for insurance money is now free after President Joe Biden commuted her 40-year prison sentence, undercutting the White House’s claim that Biden released only “non-violent” offenders in a clemency bonanza last week.

Among the 1,500 federal convicts granted clemency was Josephine Virginia Gray, who was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2002 for insurance fraud schemes connected to the murders of three men between 1974 and 1996. Gray was resentenced to the same amount of time again in 2006 following a series of appeals.

Gray, now 78 years old, is the first Biden clemency recipient found so far to have been directly involved in murder or any other violent criminal activity.

According to prosecutors, Gray admitted to a friend in 2000 that she “had killed both her husbands and another gentleman.” Gray told her friend that she shot her first husband, Norman Stribbling, and left his body on the side of a road to make it look like a robbery. Gray confessed that she killed her second husband, Robert Gray, with “help” from her boyfriend. That man, Clarence Goode, would be the Black Widow’s third victim. Gray told her friend “she had to get rid of” Goode because he threatened to blackmail her over Robert Gray’s murder.

Police found Goode’s blood stains at Gray’s house and a 9mm bullet casing that matched the one used in the murder.

According to prosecutors, Gray schemed to have all three of her victims designate her as the beneficiary of their life insurance policies and then murdered them to receive benefits after their deaths. Gray tried to take out an insurance policy on a fourth man, Andre Savoy, whom she promised to buy a Mustang GT with proceeds from the Goode insurance settlement. Savoy testified at Gray’s trial that she admitted to murdering Robert Gray, her second husband, after sneaking into his house dressed as a man.

So much for that “nonviolent” argument, hmmmm? But how did these people make the clemency list? How many people does Joe Biden “owe” after fifty years in politics? How many of his inner circle – the ones who have been protecting him for years now – were connected to these people who got clemency?

The worst part is that we were warned that Biden isn’t done yet.

In announcing the commutations, the White House pledged that there are “more to come” before Biden leaves office next month.

“President Biden will continue to review clemency petitions and deliver criminal justice reform in a manner that advances equity and justice, promotes public safety, supports rehabilitation and reentry, and provides meaningful second chances.”

Soon-to-be-gone Representative Jamaal Bowman (D-Fire Alarm) was pushing for clemency for all inmates on death row in federal prisons – and telling Joe Biden to do it on his way out the door.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) says that President Joe Biden should pardon everyone who is on death row. pic.twitter.com/vpopnwKtGt

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) December 3, 2024

“Don‘t stop at Hunter Biden,” Bowman told a CNN panel Monday. “Pardon the 40 people who are on death row right now to get them off of death row, number one.”

“Number two, pardon the 3,000 people who are in federal jail for trumped-up marijuana charges. Pardon them as well so they can get back to their communities and contribute to their economies,” said the New York Democrat who lost his reelection bid during the primary election. “That‘s what the president should do.”

First of all, let’s not conflate the two issues – people who have been convicted and are on death row, and people who have been convicted for marijuana charges are NOT the same thing. Second, Jamaal Bowman is an idiot, because I am certain that if he was asked about some of these 40 people on death row individually, he may very well balk at the idea of, say, letting Dylann Roof off death row.

But apparently, Joe Biden is reportedly considering doing just that.

Charleston church mass shooter Dylan Roof and Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are both on federal death row. https://t.co/vBmDEzi4E5

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) December 21, 2024

How many times do we have to say this? THESE ARE BAD PEOPLE, and a jury of their peers decided that their actions warranted the death penalty. Disagreeing with the death penalty in principle is one thing, but to take these felons off death row? Has everyone forgotten who these scumbags are?

In addition to a handful of well-known notorious killers, five of the men murdered children, nine butchered fellow inmates and one killed a prison guard with a hammer while serving a life sentence for raping and murdering his wife, a US Marine.

But even Merrick Garland, whose brainchild this reportedly is, apparently knows that some of these cases would be politically unpalatable for Joe Biden’s legacy.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has recommended that Biden, who opposes capital punishment, commute the sentences to life imprisonment for all but a handful of the 40 cases, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

The Journal did not report which prisoners Garland urged Biden not to spare, but they may include Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 people in 2018 at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and Dylann Roof, who massacred nine black parishioners in a racist 2015 attack on the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC.

Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who with his late brother killed three and wounded hundreds in 2013, also is on federal death row.

Advisories from the attorney general often serve as cover for presidents to take controversial actions and the White House told the Journal that a final decision has not been made.

It’s unclear how the clemency would impact pending cases, including federal prosecutors’ request for a death sentence in the looming trial of Payton Gendron, who murdered 10 people in a 2022 mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, NY, allegedly motivated by anti-black racism.

While Merrick Garland may know that Joe Biden can’t just commute all these death penalties without political blowback, it is unknown if Joe Biden himself knows that.

Joe Biden commuting the death sentence of Dylann Roof, the white supremacist neo-Nazi mass murderer of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, would be the most Joe Biden thing Joe Biden has ever done. https://t.co/NGfK0ZoqAy

— Siraj Hashmi (@SirajAHashmi) December 21, 2024

If that Wall Street Journal piece told us anything, Biden is a man in a very thick bubble. Add to that being an “elderly man with a poor memory,” and the odds are good that if some aide simply printed off the clemency forms, Joe Biden would not have the cognitive capacity to look at a name and remember their crime. We may very well be at the point where he is simply signing anything that is put in front of him, because he is just a meat puppet controlled by those around him. These criminals on death row may end up with life imprisonment by default, but that doesn’t mean that they should be given the relief of that clemency in writing.

Brace yourselves, everyone. We probably have yet to see how low Joe Biden will go in the next month before he leaves office.

Featured image: original Victory Girls art by Darleen Click