Biden's Pardon Was a Missed Opportunity

He's managed to please no one except himself. It didn't have to be that way.

Hunter Biden and prison…not gonna happen

Yesterday President Biden issued a full blanket pardon to his son Hunter, immunizing him from punishment not only for the crimes of which Hunter has already been convicted, but also for any other offenses that he “may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.” Notably, this time frame conveniently begins just a few months before Hunter was controversially appointed to the board of directors at the Ukranian energy company Burisma Holdings, a position for which he had virtually no relevant experience other than having direct access to the then Vice-President of the United States, his father Joe. The obvious question is just what it is that Joe knows about his son’s activities at Burisma that might necessitate such a blanket, time extended pardon, but let’s be honest…it doesn’t take too much of an imagination to figure it out. Old Joe himself has openly bragged about how, as Vice-President, he got a Ukranian prosecutor, who just happened to be investigating Burisma, fired by threatening to withhold aid to Ukraine.

The pardon comes, of course, after literally months of explicit denials by Biden and Biden’s spokespeople that honest Joe would ever pardon Hunter, even for what he got convicted of doing, much less anything and everything he might ever have done. The next briefing by Biden’s Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre ought to be a doosey (Doocey?) given that on six separate occasions she has categorically denied Biden would ever issue a pardon. Why she hasn’t resigned yet after being made to be a liar by her boss isn’t entirely clear, although one could argue that the whole point of her job is to be a good liar. (She definitely fails at the “good” part.)

Jean Pierre isn’t the only one in Biden’s administration to be thrown under the bus with this pardon. In his explanation for having reneged on his promise, Biden accused his own Department of Justice of “selectively and unfairly” prosecuting Hunter. In reality the DOJ did nearly everything it possibly could do to protect Hunter from prosecution, including slow walking charges so that the most serious ones fell outside the statute of limitations, and then agreeing to a plea deal so absurdly favorable to the defendant that the Judge rejected it for what she understatedly called its “atypical provisions”. And this is what they get for their efforts, being accused of a political prosecution by the very guy they were trying to politically protect? If Attorney General Merrick Garland had any self-respect he too would have turned in a resignation letter immediately upon hearing this accusation. (For your guide, he’s still on the job.)

Biden has also managed to beclown a vast swath of the media, many members of which credulously accepted Biden’s “no pardon” assurances with the exact same childlike naivete that a 4-year old displays with parental assurances that Santa Claus will be visiting the house on December 25th.

You might think that those in the media who were peddling Biden’s “pledge” as if it ever had any real merit might be embarrassed or even angry now in the wake of him having shown them to be fools, but no. Instead what we find is the tediously predictable….blame Trump. In its main story on the pardon, the New York Times reminded its readers that:

…the president’s announcement came at the same time that Mr. Trump made it clearer than ever that his second term would be focused on retribution and revenge against Mr. Biden — with Hunter Biden as a prime target.

In a textbook example of what is meant by Trump Derangement Syndrome, CNN’s SE Cupp responded to the pardon by somehow concluding that Joe Biden’s pardon of Hunter Biden is actually a stain on Donald Trump’s legacy.

NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg apparently agrees, but goes even further in blaming not just Trump, but American voters as a whole.

I can't bring myself to be even a little mad about Biden pardoning Hunter. The values and norms he'd been trying to uphold were obliterated by American voters last month. Why sacrifice your son to a dead god?

These people are unhinged.

But to be honest, I can’t get too worked up about the pardon either. This is in part because it was completely predictable. Biden has been a politician for over 50 years, and has been lying for political gain for pretty much the entirety of that career. What kind of moron would have actually believed that Biden’s pledge not to pardon his son was issued out of “principle” rather than passing political expediency? (The kind of moron named John Harwood, it turns out!). Biden is a career politician with highly dubious ethics, not a principled moralist. It should have been obvious to anyone of even marginal intelligence that once there was no political price to be paid for having pardoned his son, Joe Biden would do it. And once he was no longer running for the presidency, any potential political price had disappeared for good.

And frankly, the blanket pardon is, from a certain perverse perspective, the honorable thing to do. After all, many of the most serious allegations against Hunter - the things the DOJ actually pursued him on were the least serious - involve Hunter simply acting as the bagman for Joe himself. When lower level capos go to jail to protect higher ups, there is an expectation that they and their families will get taken care of. If these accusations are true, Joe has an obligation to Hunter not just as a father, but also as the head honcho of the, er, Biden family business.

But perhaps most importantly, I can’t get too worked up about the pardons because, if I am honest, it is probably what I would do in the same situation. If one of my kids was in legal trouble, and I could make it go away with a sweep of my pen, I would almost certainly seize on such an opportunity to spare my kid a prison sentence, especially for a non-violent crime. What loving parent wouldn’t? Some critics have accused him of putting family above country. My own guess is that he is putting himself above everything…the pardon helps him at least as much as Hunter. But okay, let’s say he is putting family above country. And the problem with that is…what exactly? If I were to make a list of the most valued things in my life, my country would rate pretty highly, but it most definitely would not rate more highly than my own kids. I doubt I am particularly unique in that respect.

My own critique of the pardon is not so much that he issued it, but rather how he did so. Or, more accurately, how he didn’t. I think Biden had a rare opportunity here to fuse his own crass self-interest with the wider interest of the nation, and to play the part of a true statesman rather than a rank partisan. Imagine if, in the same order in which he pardoned his son, Biden had reached across the deep, partisan political divide and also pardoned all of those involved in the J6 Capitol riot. He could have sold this as an attempt to ease partisan passions over how the DOJ is being, or might in the future be, used to pursue political goals, and a chance to have a kind of reset after 4 years of partisan rancor and accusations over the events of J6 and its aftermath. How might that have altered the current political environment?

Since Trump was likely to have pardoned many of the J6ers once he gets into office anyway, there would be no practical effect of Biden pre-empting him and doing it first. They’d be getting off one way or the other. And had Biden done it, not only could he have earned plaudits as a non-partisan “unifier”, he could at the same time have deprived Trump of the chance to score points with his own base. As it stands now, all Biden has done is provide Trump with political cover for doing what he was almost certain to do in any event, a fact that has not been lost on leftist critics of Biden’s pardon.

I suppose one could argue that if Biden was the type of politician to genuinely care about dialling down the partisanship and bringing the nation together, we probably wouldn’t have gotten to this point in the first place. But still, having failed at having destroyed the Trump phenomenon (he probably made it stronger), having produced an illegal immigration crisis of unprecedented scale, and having created the conditions for a complete electoral drubbing of his party at the polls, one would imagine that Biden would be in the market for a legacy beyond being simply a senile, corrupt abuser of power for personal gain. With a little imagination, and virtually no cost, Biden could have presented himself as making a grand gesture to bring the nation together.

But no. He couldn’t do it. Had his chance…muffed it.