I Beg Your Pardon
Raise your hand if you were surprised that President Joe Biden pardoned his son over the weekend.
Nope, me neither.
No matter how many times it was denied to be under consideration, didn’t we all think that would be the outcome? And far better to do it now, before more time and money was wasted preparing for not one, but two sentencing hearings later this month.
Jimmy Carter pardoned his brother Billy. Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother Roger. Donald Trump pardoned the father of his son-in-law.
So there’s a bit of a pattern, and we all saw it coming.
Two things of note about this one, though. The first is the broad nature of the pardon, for any wrongdoing during a more-than-ten-year-period stretching from this past Sunday all the way back to when Joe Biden was vice-president.
It’s been noted that the broad, non-specific scope of Hunter’s pardon was similar to the language used when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. This doesn’t mean necessarily that there is a lot more wrongdoing that we don’t know about, but it does wipe the slate clean for Hunter—and perhaps also stop any further investigation into the Biden family business, which appears to be focused on trading off of Joe’s name. Is this the first pardon, handed out when it was due to the pending sentencing hearings…with more family members to get a belated Christmas gift just as Joe leaves office in January?
The other thing of note was the explanation President Biden gave. It frankly was not necessary, but curious that he did talk so firmly about these being politically motivated prosecutions, that they only happened because of his last name, etc.
Some have suggested that Donald Trump could copy and paste large amounts of language from that statement and use it to pardon all manner of folks from January 6 defendants—who Trump this past weekend called political prisoners—to Trump’s own children, who were subpoenaed regularly during the first Trump Administration.
Those potential pardons should rise or fall of their own merit, not because Joe wrote that purely political prosecutions should result in pardons—although you sure can see why folks are trying to connect the two.
