Plain Talk With Rob Port

McLean County State's Attorney Ladd Erickson has not been mincing words in his reaction to some of President Joe Biden's pardons that impact our region. He's called them "ridiculous" and "despicable," though he wants to be clear that this didn't have anything to do with politics. "Some of the stuff that President Trump said he's going to pardon is despicable," he said on this episode of Plain Talk. But at least one of Biden's pardons is very, very personal to him. Erickson was involved in bringing Hunter Hanson to justice. Hanson defrauded dozens of people to the tune of about $11 million, but as Erickson explained to us on the show, his victim pool is larger than that. Whole businesses, some of which were the pillars of their small, rural communities, collapsed as a result of Hanson's actions. And President Biden commuted his sentence. Why? "I have no idea," Erickson told us, "and that's one of the frustrations." Also on this episode, Sen. Dale Patten, a Republican from Watford City, weighs in on the contro