In their latest email, our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, which has become an indispensable daily source of valuable information and sharp commentary, included a chart of presidential pardons going back to Harry S. Truman.

Until Joe Biden, pardons were almost entirely reserved for people who had actually been convicted of crimes, but even without those pre-crime pardons, Biden leads the pack by an eye-popping margin, with 8,064 in his four years. Nobody comes anywhere close. Trump pardoned just 237 in his first term.

Given that Biden barely knew what day it was, we suspect that the tsunami of pardons reflects the ability of Democrats to slip them on Biden’s desk knowing he’d sign whatever was put in front of him.

But take a closer look at the chart, and what do you see?

Even without Biden’s epic record, Democratic presidents consistently pardoned more criminals than Republican ones.

Truman pardoned nearly twice as many people as Eisenhower. Carter pardoned more criminal friends in four years than Reagan did in eight. Clinton more than twice the number pardoned by George W. Bush.

Even if you take out the 6,500 Biden pardoned for drug possession, he is still the champ when it comes to the average number of pardons per year in office.

We ran our own calculation of the data used in the Unleash Prosperity chart, and came up with this ranking of presidents by average pardons per year.

The left will look at the chart above and probably say that it merely indicates that Democrats are more forgiving than cold-hearted Republicans.

To us, it simply shows that Democrats have way more criminal friends than Republicans.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board