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December 2, 2024 - 10:20pm
Joe Biden’s blanket pardon of his son Hunter is so sweeping that it boomerangs all the way back to the Resolute Desk, where the President himself will enjoy protection from his own pardon. Now the elder Biden’s knowledge of and involvement in his family’s sordid foreign lobbying business can fade away quietly. (Although it arguably already was.)
Aaron Blake, hardly a conservative, characterised the Hunter Biden pardon as one of “extraordinary breadth” and “remarkable” scope on Monday. Nothing, not even pardons of Michael Flynn or Iran-Contra or Roger Clinton or Vietnam draft dodgers were quite as sweeping. Even on Watergate, Blake rightfully observes Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon covered a period only half as long as Hunter Biden’s pardon, and Nixon may have been covered by presidential immunity. The precedent, for those who remained concerned with such matters, is staggering. But this is where many analysts are stopping short.
The pardon also means that Biden’s blanket pardon will shield his son from any future charges stemming from felony violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act. As far as we know, much of that work is now beyond the statute of limitations — perhaps intentionally — but that’s also not certain. Hunter Biden quite clearly lobbied on behalf of foreign governments without registering with the Justice Department. Before the Trump era, such errors frequently resulted in slaps on the wrist. But since Paul Manafort and Tony Podesta were implicated in a Ukrainian lobbying scheme, K Street has been on high alert.
The tax and gun charges Hunter Biden was set to be sentenced on this month do not directly implicate his father in significant wrongdoing. FARA charges, on the other hand, involve access peddling which, in Hunter Biden’s case, necessarily involve selling that access to his father.
There is some evidence that Joe Biden knew about Hunter Biden’s foreign lobbying and misled the public about that knowledge. A FARA trial could expose much more about the extent of the president’s deceptions and involvement in the business, along with evidence that Hunter’s foreign lobbying income was intentionally routed to his father for personal financial benefit. As Turley explains about the elder Biden, “He was repeatedly asked if he knew about Hunter’s foreign dealings, including millions in alleged deals with Russians, Ukrainians, Chinese and other clients. President Biden lied and denied such knowledge.”
Joe Biden will be an ailing 82-year-old man in a few weeks’ time. The public has known about his son’s influence-peddling antics for years now, and the President himself clearly misled voters about his own understanding of the business. While the pardon itself isn’t surprising or a game-changer when it comes to Joe Biden’s legacy, it should be understood not merely as an act of fatherly love but also one of personal protection.
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SubscribeAnd with a stroke of his pen, Biden has sent the moral high-horse of the Democrats straight to the knackers yard.
Shameless. And yet delicious; the perfect end to the worst presidency since Obama.
The knackers yard seems to be where American politics lives these days – no reason why Joe Biden shouldn’t do exactly what Trump would have done in the same situation!
Nor now of course the reverse.
Trump has already demonstrated that he will do whatever he feels like and you people are just fine with that – but now you have the vapors because Biden did something a wee bit Trumpy?
Spare us the phony outrage…
You seem to have forgotten the perfect ending to the disastrous first Trump presidency, old chap! Riots in the streets, an attempted coup, runaway inflation and unemployment, and the first president to be impeached twice!
And the sequel is always worse than the original. Smart play, America!
In the vernacular of my nation and generation, no duh. A headline wholeheartedly arguing the sun will rise tomorrow would have produced about as much surprise as the revelation that Biden’s unprecedented pardon was an attempt to protect his own sorry hide.
Unlike most commentators, I’m not so naive as to believe that there was any point in American history where such nepotism and influence peddling was not occurring. There is no mythical time when American government or any other was pure and innocent of all corruption. There was, however, a time when both parties and virtually all politicians refrained from using the criminal justice system to make such backroom dealings public and parade them before the masses in order to score political points. For most of US history, this was avoided, because it made little sense to use a tactic on your opponent that could easily turned on you once someone else gained power. When such scandals were prosecuted at all, it was usually because someone screwed up and the media got wind of it. The scandals of the past were prosecuted halfheartedly because both sides were rightly concerned with politicizing the justice system. There is a delicate balance between maintaining respect for anti-corruption laws and being perceived as persecuting political enemies.
Traditionally, the fear of being perceived as politicizing the justice system tempered any prosecutions of controversies involving major political figures. Alas, the threat of Trumpian populism to the neoliberal globalist project prompted the ruling class to break precedent and try to use the justice system in multiple ways, first by investigating and trying to find some plausible connection between the Trump campaign and so-called Russian election interference, which basically amounted to posting lies on social media, something anybody with a computer is capable of doing. Then, and more importantly, by trying to find something, anything, whether deliberate or inadvertent they could use to imply Trump’s unfitness for further office. This had the predictable effect of creating the appearance of political motivations for criminal prosecutions, the very thing that earlier, more competent, politicians had always feared. This had the effect of galvanizing his supporters who already felt the system was against them, feeding into his anti-elite narrative, and even gave possible credence to his ridiculous assertion that the election had been ‘stolen’. They threw out centuries of precedent and went above and beyond what any political faction or party has attempted in two and a half centuries of American history to stop one man and failed to do so. Of course Biden is worried about protecting his family and himself revenge prosecutions. Given what’s happened over the past eight years, what sane person wouldn’t be worried about revenge prosecutions? They just got through doing it to Trump. Of course they’re afraid he will retaliate in kind. From 2016 up to the present, the elite response to the Trump movement can be summarized in two words, epic fail.
Now, of course, Biden’s unprecedented pardon will give Trump plenty of cover to issue an equally broad pardon of himself and/or his family for whatever prosecutions are ongoing when he leaves office. I fully expect all future presidents to pardon themselves and whoever else might be necessary to cover whatever scandals the other side’s media has managed to unearth over their four or eight year terms. This new precedent will replace the old, and become accepted for about the same reason the old one was. There’s really not much point in pursuing minor white collar crimes perpetrated by politicians because whatever actual merit they may have, there’s no escaping the perceptual trap of prosecuting one’s political opponents. Even if the crimes are real and proven, it’s still political. If a political figure does something obviously wrong and inarguably criminal and it’s discovered, prosecution won’t be necessary. That’s because in the American system with its complex layers of local, state, and federal officials and multiple legislative bodies, voters are represented by many different politicians at any one time, politicians who all have influence in both the government and the political parties themselves. In such cases where conduct is so egregious that most voters can agree on it, the political pressure from voters and their many other representatives will always be harsher and more immediate than any legal remedy, as was the case with Nixon, who was forced to resign long before any criminal prosecution could come to fruition.
Brevity. It’s the soul of wit. Try it.
Top class trolling by Joe Biden!