So I have mixed feeling on this.

I'm thinking of Carter fulfilling a campaign pledge to pardon draft dodgers. Whether you support that or not, he did what he said he was going to do and I'm sure only some of them had actually been charged in any way. I think that's a perfectly fine use for the pardon power.

Some will point to the Hunter Biden pardon. So two things can be true at once here: it was absolutely political prosecution AND Joe Biden was completely selfish with his action. At least do something for the people by, say, pardoning a whole bunch of low level drug offenders and decriminalize cannabis at the Federal level. But no, it was completely self-serving but his brain was pretty much gone by this point.

Here's the problem: Federal prosecutors have a ton of power. Conviction rates are 98-99%. But it goes beyond that. Federal prosecutors will intentionally bankrupt you to force you to take a plea. They might charge you with 15 felonies, 12 of which are basically bogus. You still have to defend those bogus felonies and that costs you money. And as soon as you run out of money, they'll offer you a plea where you're looking at 25 years on the 3 remaining felonies or you can just take 10.

The power imbalance is insane and the wealthy are essentially immune. If a US attorney decides to make an example of you, you're going to have a bad time, regardless of the facts.

Millions were spent dredging up some crimes for Hunter Biden and pretty much all they could come up with was doing crack and filling out a form incorrectly. Do you think anyone else would get that level of attention?

A very recent example of this is the Karen Read trial or, as I call it, the most expensive DUI prosecution in history. If you didn't follow the case, don't worry, there'll be any number of true crime documentaries. Millions were spent prosecuting Karen Read for killing JOhn O'Keefe with a completely ridiculous theory of the case and all sorts of evidence that went missing (including police officers disposing of their cell phones on a military base the day before an electronics preservation order was issued).

I don't know what we do about this power imbalance and selective prosecution.