There is no other way to put it: Joe Biden lied. Over and over.
After repeatedly promising, pledging, vowing not to pardon his son Hunter, the President of the United States did exactly that.
The move amounted to a devastating vote of no confidence in his own Justice Department, matching Donald Trump’s own denunciations of that very department.
Trump, who also pardoned several political allies during his first term, was quick to react on Truth Social:
“Does the pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!”
And prominent Republicans are calling Biden a liar, with ample justification.
I think most people assumed that a father wouldn’t let his son go to jail. And if the president had explained it in those terms, he might have garnered some public sympathy. But he did not.
You know how the president often talks about “my word as a Biden”? I mistakenly assumed that he wouldn’t promise again and again not to pardon his son or commute his sentence if he had thought there was any possibility he would get Hunter off the legal hook.
But what is anyone going to do? He leaves office next month, his political career is over and the story will quickly fade.
Biden sounded very much like Trump as he accused the DOJ, which he had long defended, of treating his son unfairly – swinging the political door wide open for the president-elect to retaliate against Justice, in part by naming longtime confidant Kash Patel to run the FBI.
Biden said his son had been “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,” and he blamed political pressure on the special counsel named in the case.
“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 5-1/2 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.”
But that bolsters the Trump argument that he too was singled out for selective prosecution by the DOJ – and will be in a position to do something about it.
Hunter put out his own statement after the Sunday pardon: “I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction — mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport.”
The feeble attempts by some in the media and in Democratic politics to defend Biden are just sad, because they only tell half the story.
Let’s say Hunter Biden was in fact singled out for prosecution, that the case would have been routinely disposed of if his last name was Jones. (Hunter had already been convicted in one case and pleaded guilty in another to tax and gun-related charges.)
But as Hunter admitted in one email, it was his last name, when his father was vice president, that enabled him to land all those buckraking contracts from around the world. It’s why the Ukrainian energy giant Burisma hired him, why he was able to get money from China.
Hunter had no expertise in any of these areas. What he had was a connection to a powerful father.
The pardon is so sweeping that it covers everything Hunter may have done from Jan. 1, 2004 through Sunday – which could be a way of his father protecting himself as well.
Karine Jean-Pierre also told reporters on several occasions that Biden would not pardon Hunter.
Hunter Biden on Sunday night released a statement noting his recovery from addiction and his sobriety:
“I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction — mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport.”
Mark Halperin argues that Biden put his son in jeopardy by running for president, knowing the full range of Hunter’s addiction problems – and lied about Hunter not getting money from China and not helping his business clients (even if he just made small talk at a couple of group meetings).
Meanwhile, Trump’s choice of Kash Patel for the FBI (who would replace his own appointee, Chris Wray, who replaced the fired Jim Comey) has sparked a media backlash.
One thing no one can argue is that Patel lacks experience. He has been chief of staff at the Pentagon and a deputy assistant to the president. In fact, he was a national security prosecutor in the Obama Justice Department, before Trump got into politics.
But on Steve Bannon’s podcast last year, Patel said: “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.”
Patel has also said that on day one he’d shut down the FBI headquarters in Washington – ironically named for J. Edgar Hoover – and turn it into a museum on the “deep state.” Its 7,000 employees would be dispersed around the country.
One thing Biden never did was put any family members on the government payroll, as Trump did in naming Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, to top White House positions in the first term.
Now Trump is continuing that tradition by naming Charles Kushner, Jared’s father, as ambassador to France.
The elder Kushner had already served a couple of years in prison for a scheme that involved hiring a prostitute and sending the tape to his sister. But at least he had paid his dues when Trump later pardoned him, sparking Jared’s interest in prison reform.
Trump also picked Massad Boulos – the father of Tiffany Trump’s husband – as White House adviser on Arab and Middle East affairs. All in the family.
One thing the press does is refer to Trump nominees as “loyalists,” as if that’s a dirty word. Sunday’s Washington Post had a headline describing “loyalist Kash Patel.”
But while Biden named an inner circle of aides who had been with him as long as four decades, they were not dismissed as loyalists. That’s because the media agree that these were the good guys. And who can forget former AG Eric Holder describing himself as Barack Obama’s “wingman.”
The Hunter pardon has set in motion a potential cycle of both presidents using the DOJ and FBI for purely partisan ends, and Joe Biden bears full responsibility for that.
