‘Lost its soul’: Pulitzer winner blasts Washington Post’s ‘unconscionable’ op-ed on Joe Biden vs Donald Trump pardons

David Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who worked at the Washington Post for 48 years, criticised the newspaper for an op-ed it published on Tuesday about pardons signed by US President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden.

Maraniss expressed his frustration on the social media platform BlueSky, saying, “The Washington Post editorial this morning essentially equating Biden’s questionable pardons with Trump’s outrageous Jan. 6 pardons was unconscionable. The newspaper I’ve been part of for 48 years has utterly lost its soul."

The op-ed written by Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post was titled "Biden’s pardons were disappointing. Trump’s are worse". It was published on January 21, just a day after Trump was sworn in as the US president. On the same day, the newspaper published another opinion piece (Editorial Board) titled “Pardons from Biden and Trump flout the rule of law”.

But Maraniss' criticism was associated with an op-ed by Jason Willick, “The Biden-Trump pardons show collapsing executive restraint”. According to the Daily Guardian, the op-ed compared how Trump and Biden used their pardon powers as president.

“It’s debatable which president’s abuse of the pardon power on Monday — Joe Biden’s or Donald Trump’s — was more damaging,” Willick wrote, adding, “The root of the problem isn’t the scope of the pardon power; it’s the collapse of restraint on the exercise of executive power in general.”

David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post. He is a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and won the Pulitzer for national reporting in 1993 for his newspaper coverage of then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton.

Biden Vs Trump pardons

After taking over as the 47th US president, Trump issued pardons to 23 anti-abortion protesters who blockaded clinic entrances. He also granted pardons and commutations to the convicts charged in relation to the events that occurred at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, according to a statement from the White House.

Meanwhile, outgoing President Joe Biden pardoned his siblings and their spouses on his way out of the White House, saying Monday that his family had been “subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me — the worst kind of partisan politics.”