The GOP doesn’t really care how the pardons were signed

President Joe Biden at the White House on Jan. 10. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

If you want to know the reasoning undergirding the pardons issued late in President Joe Biden’s administration, you can simply see what he said about them.

In an interview with USA Today in early January, for example, he explained why he changed his mind about issuing a pardon for his son Hunter. A few days later, he told reporters that he was considering additional pardons, looking at what his successor Donald Trump was saying about potentially targeting those Trump saw as political opponents. (There was “still consideration of some folks,” Biden said, but no decisions at that point.) On Jan. 17, shortly before he left office, Biden touted that he’d “issued more individual pardons and commutations