BIDEN PARDONS SON

Washinton Post Editorial Board

https://wapo.st/4eWQebA

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Opinion Hunter Biden pardon undermines Democrats’ defense of justice system
Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter gives cover to President-elect Donald Trump.
December 2, 2024 at 2:13 p.m. EST

President-elect Donald Trump is selecting radical MAGA loyalists for top national security positions, signaling his intention to upend the professionalism and independence of institutions that wield some of the federal government’s most awesome powers. Political opponents, journalists and others could be victims. And President Joe Biden just gave him cover.

To be clear: Mr. Biden had an unquestionable legal right to pardon his son Hunter. But in so doing on Sunday, he maligned the Justice Department and invited Mr. Trump to draw equivalence between the Hunter Biden pardon and any future moves Mr. Trump might take against the impartial administration of justice. He risks deepening many Americans’ suspicion that the justice system is two-tiered, justifying Mr. Trump’s drive to reshape it — or, because turnabout is fair play, to use it to benefit his own side.

Mr. Biden, of course, argues that pardoning his son strikes a blow for fairness in law enforcement. His statement on the pardon — in which he uses the words, “I believe in the justice system, but …” — claims that “no reasonable person” could “reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son.” Yet such considerations were apparently not so compelling when he pledged previously not to pardon Hunter. And his son clearly broke the law. A federal jury of Hunter Biden’s peers found him guilty of three firearm-related felonies in Delaware. Hunter also pleaded guilty to tax evasion charges that carry a penalty of up to 17 years in prison. The gun charges, essentially that the younger Mr. Biden lied on a purchase application form when he denied using drugs, is particularly hard to ignore. Such laws, however rarely enforced, are on the books to help keep firearms out of the hands of those who might pose a danger to themselves or others.

By implication, Mr. Biden casually impugns investigators at the IRS and the FBI, career prosecutors, Attorney General Merrick Garland and a federal judge in Delaware. Before Mr. Garland became attorney general, Mr. Biden himself chose to keep David C. Weiss as U.S. attorney for Delaware so as not to interfere with Mr. Weiss’s ongoing investigation of the president’s son. In his statement, Mr. Biden complains that a plea deal fell apart in court last summer. In fact, the judge did her job by questioning its irregular structure — highly favorable to Hunter Biden — and the degree to which the defendant believed it would immunize him from future prosecution for unrelated crimes.

The president’s sweeping pardon covered any and all federal crimes his son might have committed over the past 10 years, including those that have not been charged, without going through the traditional Justice Department process. This covers potential illegal behavior by Hunter Biden going back to 2014, six years before Mr. Biden became president.

Mr. Biden rushed out this pardon on Sunday night to short-circuit the sentencing process in both cases in the coming weeks. This averts a meaningful part of the accountability process, in which judges would have decided whether Hunter Biden deserved to serve time in prison. Justice Department guidelines say a pardon shouldn’t be issued until five years after a sentence is served. That was the case when Bill Clinton pardoned Roger Clinton after the president’s brother had served time for cocaine trafficking.

Yes, Mr. Trump egregiously misused the pardon power during his first term, granting clemency to Stephen K. Bannon, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn and Charles Kushner, his son-in-law’s father, whom he just tapped to be ambassador to France. These sent the message that Mr. Trump will get his cronies off the hook, at the risk of encouraging further unlawful behavior. Yet, no matter the distinctions that one can draw between these cases and Hunter Biden’s, the president — and the Democrats — are the ones trying to defend the system; they damage their worthy cause if they are seen to be exploiting it for their own gain.

Any Democrat who refuses this week to condemn Mr. Biden’s pardon will have less credibility to criticize Mr. Trump, his meddling at the Justice Department and his choices for key positions in that agency. No one should be surprised if Mr. Trump invokes the Hunter Biden pardon to justify clemency for many more of his allies, potentially including Jan. 6 insurrectionists. With this one intemperate, selfish act, the president has undermined, in hindsight, the lofty rationales he offered for seeking the presidency four years ago and indelibly marred the final chapter of his political career.
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The extraordinary breadth of Hunter Biden’s pardon
President Joe Biden’s pardon of son Hunter for any offenses over a nearly 11-year period doesn’t have many, if any, direct historical parallels.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/12/02/hunter-biden-presidential-pardon-comparisons/

excerpt:

It’s one thing for a president to pardon his son. It’s another to do it like this.

President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, on Sunday is exceptional not just because of the pardon’s recipient — the closest family member to receive a pardon in history — but also for its sheer breadth, according to experts on presidential pardons.

Biden didn’t just pardon his son for his convictions on tax and gun charges, but for any “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 December 1, 2024.”

That’s a nearly 11-year period during which any federal crime Hunter Biden might have committed — and there are none we are aware of beyond what has already been adjudicated — can’t be prosecuted. It notably covers when he was appointed to the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma in 2014 all the way through Sunday, well after the crimes for which he was prosecuted.

Hunter Biden hasn’t been charged for his activities with regard to Burisma or anything beyond his convictions, and nothing in the public record suggests criminal charges could be around the bend. Congressional Republicans have probed the Burisma matter and Hunter Biden extensively and could seemingly have uncovered chargeable crimes if they existed, but haven’t done so.

Even still, the scope of the pardon is remarkable. Experts say there is little to no precedent for a pardon covering such a wide range of activity over such a long period, with the closest being Gerald Ford’s 1974 pardon of Richard M. Nixon after Nixon resigned post-Watergate.

Hunter Biden’s pardon “isn’t tied to any special counsel investigation or charging document,” Sam Morison, who spent 13 years working for the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, said via email. “The only pardon grant that comes close is Ford’s pardon of Nixon for any crimes he may have committed from 1969 to 1974, which on its face would have included crimes (if any) unrelated to Watergate.”
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more at the link

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Sen. Joe Manchin calls on Biden to pardon Trump too after prez’s shocking Hunter move: ‘Clean that slate up’

https://nypost.com/2024/12/02/us-ne...ezs-shocking-hunter-move-clean-that-slate-up/

 

link will work for everyone

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/joe-bid...c?st=6L3zGD&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Pardon Me, Dad: The Hunter Biden Story
The President tries to rewrite the facts about his son’s prosecutions to justify breaking norms.
By The Editorial Board
Dec. 2, 2024 at 5:49 pm ET

How many times did President Biden or one of his press minders tell the voting public that he wouldn’t pardon his son Hunter? Now we can see how seriously the President takes his “word as a Biden,” as he likes to say. On Sunday Mr. Biden saved his son a likely prison term, and he did it in sweeping language that provides Hunter an immunity almost without precedent.

Mr. Biden’s change of heart after the November election was predictable, and neither political party has clean hands on questionable clemency. If Hunter is now on the straight and narrow, good for him. Many people have enough experience of addiction to sympathize with what the Biden family went through. But we can’t let the President explain away the political ramifications of his pardon by rewriting what actually happened.

“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,” Mr. Biden said in a statement. He added that “raw politics has infected this process.” He cited the no-jail plea agreement that Hunter was offered last year by prosecutor David Weiss, before it fell apart in court. Those terms “would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases,” the President said.

That might arguably be true about the gun charges, though the context matters. In June a jury convicted Hunter of three firearm crimes, including lying about his illegal-drug use when he bought a Colt revolver. Rarely is this prosecuted. On the other hand, most people don’t write memoirs all but confessing, as Hunter did. He owned the gun for 11 days before his then-girlfriend threw it in the trash at a grocery store across from a high school.

As for the tax charges, two IRS whistleblowers testified that Hunter was singled out—for favorable treatment. The handling of his investigation “was very different from any other case in my 14 years at the IRS,” Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley told Congress. “At every stage, decisions were made that benefited the subject.” Special Agent Joseph Ziegler cited evidence of willfulness, saying Hunter approved alleged false business deductions in 2020, after he was supposedly sober.

What killed Hunter’s plea deal wasn’t politics but federal Judge Maryellen Noreika. When the two sides got to her courtroom, they didn’t agree on whether the terms would immunize Hunter from other possible charges. They also wanted to insulate Hunter by putting Judge Noreika in the position of determining whether a future prosecutor could charge Hunter for failing to comply with the deal. The judge wasn’t sure if that was constitutional.

President Dad has now granted Hunter the broad protection he wanted. The unconditional pardon covers any and all offenses Hunter may have committed from Jan. 1, 2014, through this past weekend. This is an effort to shield Hunter from prosecution under President Trump. The 2014 date is significant because it’s about when Hunter went into business with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that paid him money he failed to pay taxes on.

Legal experts are saying they’ve never seen a pardon so open-ended, other than maybe Gerald Ford’s for Richard Nixon. Add this to the list of democratic norms broken by Mr. Biden, who claims to stand up for them.

Mr. Trump is already citing it to justify the next bad precedent. He has pledged clemency for the crowd that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. This is an awful idea, especially if Mr. Trump includes anybody who hit a cop that day. But get ready for the MAGA mantra: What about Hunter? Already Mr. Trump is linking this pardon with leniency for “the J-6 Hostages,” as he put it on Truth Social.

“I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision,” Mr. Biden said. As a father? Yes. But what a pitiful end to his Presidency.

In 2020 he promised a return to normalcy, defended Hunter’s influence hustling, and claimed Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation. Then he tried to be FDR, encouraged the prosecution of Mr. Trump, and gave his son a “get out of jail free” card. The history books will not be kind.

Appeared in the December 3, 2024, print edition as 'Pardon Me, Dad: The Hunter Biden Story'.


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