The left-leaning press are calling President Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son ‘heartfelt’, while others see it as a sickening act of nepotism.
‘Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter…’
Hunter Biden was facing possible jail time following an embarrassing list of convictions – and that’s setting aside the concerning contents of a certain famous laptop.
The pardon was not meant to happen. Joe Biden, and those on the White House staff tasked with speaking on his behalf, repeatedly denied that a pardon was on the table. The appearance of trust in the justice system propped up the mostly decrepit Biden Presidency, but the President’s word doesn’t count for much.
When Joe Biden thought he was running for a re-election, he walked the ‘justice’ line and appeared to leave his son to the mercy of the law. After the Democrats were shown the door, and with Biden’s political career nearing the end, he broke his promise.
It wasn’t an ordinary pardon either – it was a buffet pardon that forgave Hunter for ‘offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through to December 1, 2024’ which effectively gives him immunity for a period of time containing many unanswered questions. It will also keep Hunter safe from any Trump-era excavation work that might have been planned.
‘This time frame, importantly, covers his entire tenure on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma and much of his other overseas work, including in China.’
‘I believe in the justice system,’ said President Joe Biden, ‘but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice – and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further.’
So much for ‘restoring the norms’ and ‘respect’ to justice and the rule of law.
Most serious people have scoffed at Joe Biden’s argument that a miscarriage of justice took place. If anything, were Hunter the son of anyone else, he would not have limped through legal hoops for so long.
‘I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.’
More than likely, most people will see this as an act of elitism where no other father in the country can make such a choice. It is justice for everyone except the President’s son. This might feel like compassion to Joe Biden, but it feels like hypocrisy to voters.
Politico added ‘Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’ elaborating that ‘experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations’.
This is because Hunter was not only pardoned for his convictions, which still would have made a liar out of the President but it would have been part-way sympathetic, instead he pardoned him for unspecified potential crimes over a decade – which is a strange thing to do, unless you suspect there are more things likely to surface under a Trump Presidency armed with a shovel.
Ultimately, the problem is not (although it should be) that the President issued a pardon for his son, it’s that he lied about his intention to do so in the hope he could win an election.
Would Joe Biden have pardoned his son if he had continued to run and won the last election? Probably. Would he have pardoned his son if Kamala Harris had safely won? Probably.
Indeed, no matter what the outcome of the election, it’s hard to imagine Hunter going to jail. What he should have done is tell the truth and let America decide if it accepted his argument – or not.
