President Biden said he wouldn’t pardon Hunter.
But things change, and he did just that on Sunday, December 1, 2024, a few days before his son’s sentencing for tax cheating and lying on a gun purchase form.
Trump and Republicans in Congress are crying foul, but this reeks of hypocrisy a day after Trump gave an ambassadorship to his son-in-law, a convicted felon Trump pardoned (see story here).
Trump also has talked about pardoning the Jan. 6 rioters who attacked police and threatened to kill his vice president in their attempt to violently overthrow the 2020 election. And he himself has cheated on taxes and lied on business forms. So his faux outrage can be dismissed out of hand.
But the so-called “liberal” media also are crying foul. The Atlantic decried “Biden’s Unpardonable Hypocrisy,” complaining he “vowed not to pardon his son Hunter—and then did so anyway” (see story here).
CNN said, “The president has now reneged on a promise he made repeatedly” (see story here). NBC News called the pardon “a reversal for the president, who repeatedly said he would not use his authority to pardon his son or commute his sentence” (see story here).
There are more such stories, all of the same gist, including (as you’d expect) Fox News. But Fox added something interesting: “Hunter Biden says his mistakes were ‘exploited’ for political sport” (see their story here). That’s not wrong. Anyone not living under a rock is aware of the ceaseless personal attacks against him by the GOP camp.
It’s true Biden went back on his word, but before anyone gets too judgmental, we should ask ourselves: What caused him to change his mind?
Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel for FBI director changed everything.
The FBI director is supposed to be a competent, impartial, and nonpartisan law enforcer. Patel is none of those things. He has no law enforcement background, and is “a MAGA combatant … who has championed January 6 rioters as patriots” and is “a fervent promoter of conspiracy theories” such as QAnon (see story here).
Moreover, Patel has been publicly outspoken and public in his animus toward Hunter Biden, and is a loud proponent of “seeking retribution” against people on Trump’s “enemies list,” which is why he was picked for this job. Trump has promised to seek revenge, and Patel is the man to do his dirty work.
That there’s a direct cause-and-effect connection between Patel’s nomination and Hunter’s pardon is evident both from the timing of the pardon and its wording. It’s not limited to Hunter’s convictions; it “covers all ‘offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in’ from Jan. 1 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024,” mimicking the sweeping Nixon pardon of 50 years ago (see story here).
There’s every reason to believe Patel would have gone after Hunter, justified or not, and this pardon clearly is designed to prevent that. President Biden reneged on his word, but Trump and Patel forced his hand. The justification for the pardon is clear and simple: They can’t be trusted with law enforcement power.
It also should not be lost on readers of the media articles cited above that Trump apologists are calling for Biden to pardon Trump in the name of “healing the country,” which was President Ford’s rationale for pardoning Nixon (see story here).
In any case, the Hunter pardon is a distraction. The public’s real concern should be whether the federal government’s law enforcement power will be exercised in the public interest, or misused for political purposes.
The golden rule of baseball is, “Keep your eye on the ball.” Let’s stay focused on what matters, which is whether this new administration runs federal law enforcement to protect us, or turns it into the partisan circus Trump has promised to make it. That’s a promise we should want broken.
