Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley sat down with bestselling author Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, to discuss outgoing President Joe Biden’s eleventh-hour pardons of six family members for the “Morning Wire” podcast.

Schweizer, who has written several books about the Biden family, including Secret Empires (2018) and Profiles in Corruption (2020), as well as in Red-Handed (2022) began the conversation by stating flatly, “These sort of preemptive pardons are really unprecedented.”

Schweizer believes the pardons offer a big clue why Joe Biden agreed to drop out of the 2024 presidential race, the Daily Wire reported.

The pardons cover an entire decade, from January 1, 2014, to December 2024, making the time frame even more suspicious. This leads Schweizer to speculate that Joe Biden may have cut some kind of backdoor deal before he bowed out of the presidential race in July, 2024.

“I think one of the unanswered questions about the Biden family — and again, if you look at the pardons that were issued to Hunter Biden and the family, they run up specifically through December of last year. So any crimes that would have been committed in 2024 would be covered as well. And you wonder, well, what does that mean? Well, that could be the Hunter Biden art deals that were very controversial,” Schweizer told Bickley.

“But I also think it’s worth looking at this period when Joe Biden had that disastrous debate performance with Donald Trump, and he spent about four or five weeks refusing to get out of the race, and Hunter Biden moved into the White House,” he added. “I believe – I don’t have evidence to confirm this – I believe that the Biden family negotiated financial deals to secure his exit from that race. Whether that crosses the legal line and is illegal, I don’t know, but I think that is worth looking into as well. It certainly fits their pattern of monetizing things. It certainly makes sense that Hunter Biden was at the center of it – that’s where a lot of this money would flow through. And that would, of course, raise questions about what they might be doing in the post-presidential years and the money they might be living off of in this case.”

Schweizer also argued that Biden’s sweeping pardons of his family members could come back to bite the former president, highlighting a point made by attorney Alan Dershowitz earlier this week. Dershowitz said that while Biden’s pardons protect his family from criminal charges, they take away their ability to plead the Fifth Amendment if they are subpoenaed by Congress, The Daily Caller reported.

Schweizer acknowledged the critical role Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, Pam Bondi, may play in any new investigations into the Biden family business. He told “Morning Wire” that it’s important for Trump’s DOJ to continue looking into the Biden family’s business deals, saying it’s “not about retribution” or “being vindictive.”

“It’s simply trying to get clarification and facts of what actually transpired and what these Chinese, Russian, and Ukrainian entities actually got in exchange for sending millions of dollars to Joe Biden’s family,” he said.