Hunter Biden was set to be sentenced and probably put in jail this week on a trumped up charge that was brought solely because he was Joe Biden’s son. He lied on a form about being on drugs and he paid his taxes late. He entered into a plea deal in which he would admit guilt and get probation, a fair sentence, and the prosecution blew it up in court. He could have faced years in jail for crimes that no one who hadn’t also committed much more serious crimes would have ever been prosecuted.
Biden pardoned Hunter tonight and he did the right thing.
There is a lot of discussion over on BlueSky decrying this saying that Biden has destroyed the argument that presidents shouldn’t use abuse the pardon power and Trump will now be able to say he can pardon all the J6ers.
First of all, Trump doesn’t need any excuse to pardon his henchmen. He already pardoned Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and Jared Kushner’s father whom he just named to be the Ambassador to France! Even Dinesh D’Souza and Joe Arpaio! Roger Stone is his best friend. The others are close political allies and in laws.
Trump also pardoned every manner of criminal, some of whom gave his friends money for the privilege, many of whom have gone on to commit crimes again. It’s utter nonsense to think that pardoning Hunter changes anything when it comes to Trump.
In any case, if you want a precedent that Trump could use if he wanted to (he sees no need for such things) this is the one that is the most analagous:
President Joe Biden pardoned thousands of people who were convicted of use and simple possession of marijuana on federal lands and in the District of Columbia, the White House said Friday, in his latest round of executive clemencies meant to rectify racial disparities in the justice system.
The categorical pardon builds on a similar round issued just before the 2022 midterm elections that pardoned thousands convicted of simple possession on federal lands eligible. Friday’s action broadens the criminal offenses covered by the pardon. Biden is also granting clemency to 11 people serving what the White House called “disproportionately long” sentences for nonviolent drug offenses.
Biden, in a statement, said his actions would help make the “promise of equal justice a reality.”
Should Biden not have done it so that no one could say that it set a precedent for Trump?
The reason they brought the charges against Hunter was to break Biden, just as he said in the pardon statement:
No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.
I wrote about this a while back:
The right has attempted to turn Joe Biden’s care and concern for a son who was going through a major life crisis, which included substance abuse, wild partying and a range of self-destructive behavior, into a corruption scandal. No one can possibly read the emails from father to son that have been extracted from Hunter Biden’s laptop and see anything but compassion and love. In fact, I’m sure Republicans understand that: What they are really trying to do is push Joe Biden to break down and cry in public.
Seriously: It’s an old ratfucking trick from the Nixon years whose dastardly crew famously goaded Sen. Edmund Muskie, the Democratic frontrunner early in the 1972 campaign, into getting emotional over a fake letter impugning his wife. I have no doubt that the right-wing dirty tricksters of today are believing their own propaganda that Biden is a feeble old man who is overly sentimental about his family, and they think they can push him into doing the same thing.
We are a long way from 1972 and I suspect that even if Biden did cry about his son, the country would feel kinship with him, not disdain. There is hardly a family in America that is not touched by similar trauma.
He didn’t break. As Dave Weigel quipped on BlueSky:
Biden, wanting to Uphold the Norms, agreed to keep on a Trump-appointed prosecutor who was probing his son. Created a special counsel to probe his own post-VP document retention. Kept on Durham so he could finish a Trump-ordered probe of 2016.
What did he get? Nothing.
He got nothing. Nobody cared. It changed nothing. He realized that sacrificing his son to prison on the alter of the same “norms” that have been and will again be shat upon by Donald Trump and his henchmen at every turn would have been meaningless.
By the way, before anyone gets too excited about pardon “norm breaking” it pays to recall that George Bush Senior pardoned half the Reagan administration on Christmas eve before he left office on Iran Contra charges — they were culpable in selling arms to Iran in exchange for hostages and using the money to circumvent congress by sending it to the Nicaraguan contras in secret. Not THAT was a norm buster.
And then there’s this from one of our favorite Democrats, Jimmy Carter:
Everyone needs to get a grip. There have been political pardons since the beginning of the country and Trump would have pardoned his cronies and cult members no matter what Joe Biden did. He’s already proved that! All of our remonstrating about how Biden was pure and he is evil would have meant absolutely nothing unless we all want to see Hunter martyred over this nonsense just to prove a point (which woulodn’t be proven anyway.) Meanwhile, Kash Patel and Pam Bondi are on record saying they would go after Hunter Biden and the rest of the “Biden Crime Family” with everything they have. It’s probably a good idea to take that seriously right now.