“I believe in the rule of law,” President Biden announced Monday morning, but “these are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing” — and so he detonated the rule of law on his last morning in the White House by pardoning every Biden kinfolk with sticky fingers for foreign windfalls, any member of Congress who demagogued on the Jan. 6 committee and retired Gen. Mark Milley.

The family pardons — for his brother James Biden and his wife, his brother Frank Biden, his sister Valerie Biden Owens and her husband — are beyond ripe: The exiting prez declared that his relatives have been “subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me — the worst kind of partisan politics.”

“Solely”?!? The US Treasury Department has received at least 150 Suspicious Activity Reports on Biden kinfolk’s dubious dealings. The term “Biden Crime Family” is redundant.    

But the most shocking pardon went to Anthony Fauci.

Fauci has been widely accused of giving false testimony on Capitol Hill, and it would have been no stunner if Biden gave him a “Get Out of Congressional Lies Free” pass.  

But the now ex-president went further, giving a blanket 10-plus-year whitewash to rival Hunter Biden’s — “full and unconditional pardon for any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the periods form January 1, 2014, through the date of his pardon arising from or in any manner related to his service as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force or the White House COVID-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President.”

That presumably covers any funding, licit or illicit, that Fauci helped deliver to the Wuhan Institute of Virology or other laboratories that engaged in risky gain-of-function or bioweapons research — which the Obama administration banned in 2014.

So Dr. “I Represent Science” Fauci is off the hook for bankrolling reckless research in China, which, thanks to a lab leak, may have resulted in 7 million dead around the world.

Commented Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): “If there was ever any doubt as to who bears responsibility for the COVID pandemic, Biden’s pardon of Fauci forever seals the deal.”

Yes, Biden on Monday declared that acceptance should not “be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.”

Yet his own Justice Department last month announced that any Jan. 6 defendant who accepts a pardon will be making “a confession of guilt.”

Fauci is continuing his weasel ways, justifying taking the pardon because the possibility of prosecution “creates immeasurable and intolerable distress on me and my family.”

What of the distress suffered by the survivors of the millions who died thanks to the reckless research Fauci bankrolled in China?

Or those who suffered thanks to policies he supported, from an illegal vaccine mandate and the wrongful firing of scores of thousands of people who chose not to get vaxxed, to school shutdowns that blighted millions of childhoods, to the  pointless lockdowns that led to soaring rates of suicide, alcoholism and drug abuse? Not to mention the pervasive coverups of other COVID frauds and follies.

Though Biden subverted justice with his pre-emptive pardon, his decree could pave a path to truth.

As Politico writers noted, Biden’s pardon recipients “will actually be more vulnerable to being compelled to testify to Congress” since they now can’t plead the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination when they face no criminal peril.

“Implication is that they needed the pardons,” commented Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), “So, let’s call them all before Congress and demand the truth.”

With the Fauci pardon, Biden bolstered an Impunity Democracy in which government officials pay no price for their crimes. Trump officials and congressional investigators should speedily and ruthlessly open the files to expose any and all of Fauci’s abuses of power.

Fauci may be legally untouchable, but that can’t and shouldn’t prevent damning revelations that could obliterate Fauci’s legacy.

In December 2020, shortly before he was sworn in as president, Joe Biden scorned the idea of preemptive pardons because of the “kind of precedent it sets, and how the rest of the world looks at us as a nation of laws and justice.”

Has any president in history done more than Joe Biden to destroy America’s reputation as a nation of laws?