President Joe Biden announced Sunday that he has pardoned his son Hunter Biden, who faced sentencing this month on gun crime and tax convictions, marking a reversal as he prepares to leave office.
“Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter,” the president said in a statement. It is a “full and unconditional pardon,” according to a copy of the executive grant of clemency.
This official grant of clemency cannot be rescinded by President-elect Donald Trump.
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Wait, does this mean that Hunter no longer gets to plead the 5th on anything?Report
Anything covered by the pardon.Report
From the article:
That means that Hunter can’t plead the 5th on any Federal crimes, at all, over the last decade.
Huh.Report
I think it’s the case, though I’d like to hear from Em on this, that he could still plead the 5th if his testimony would expose him to prosecution for state crimes based on similar facts.Report
And, of course, the headline:
Report
Oh no! Republicans don’t respect Biden any more.Report
For that particular tweet, my criticism (and contempt) is not of Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, nor of Republicans.Report
Good.
And anyone who thinks this will “justify” Trump doing wild pardons, please remember this:
1. He has already did it at the end of his first term;
2. His cabinet nominees lets us all know exactly what is second term is going to be like;
3. He was going to do wild pardons anyway;
4. He just nominated Charles Kushner to be ambassador to Framce. Kushner is a man who tried to honeypot his own brother in law and send the tape to his sister.
4a. Guess who pardoned Charles Kushner?
5. “Just because Republicans are going to be bad, doesn’t mean Democrats need to stoop low” and 5 bucks gets you a cup of coffee the chance to hold your head high as the train takes you to DachauReport
I didn’t mind when Jimmy Carter pardoned Billy, I don’t mind this pardon.
I think that this pardon is funnier than Billy’s pardon, but maybe it’s just because a lot of humor from the 70’s doesn’t translate perfectly to the current year.
(It does seem that the institutionalists seem to hate the pardon but the accelerationists seem to love it. Seems about right.)Report
Jared Polis, for example, is doing it again:
Above the law?
No.
Nobody is above the Omnicause, Polis.Report
He’s obeying in advance!
That’s what the kids are calling it when Democrats fail to fall in line and act like shameless partisan hacks, right?Report
Polis is extremely wrong but maybe he is angling for a folding chair on the train to DachauReport
A “revealed preference” question, if I may.
Have you and yours looked into escaping the country at all? I understand that Israel has a lot of real estate now that it didn’t have two years ago and some of it is really nice and on the water.Report
Maybe leave the “pater familias” discourse to the RETVRN crowd, Governor?Report
The “pater familias” stuff is the main reason the pardon is defensible.
Without it, it’s just another case of a president pardoning a guy who diverted millions of dollars his way and that tacky whether it be (whatabout this other guy) or (whatabout Trump).Report
Hunter Biden diverted million to his dad? Do tell.Report
It has to do with Burisma. There’s details in Hunter’s laptop. (Remember when the statement that the laptop belonged to Hunter was called a “conspiracy theory”? Good times.)
But that’s all besides the point.
If we look at it as a father pardoning his son, we don’t even have to look at that stuff.
We can just say that Biden was a bad president but a good father.Report
My wife has recently started watching reruns of “Match Game”, and it’s interesting how often Billy Carter comes up as a reference and the whole cast laughs because Obviously Everybody Knows Who That Is, Right?
See also PJ O’Rourke complaining that he couldn’t write a political-humor book because if he tried to make it about contemporary political figures he’d be revising right up to print time “and still come up with a book as dated as a Jody Powell joke” (which, reading the book in 1989, I had no idea who Jody Powell was but at least I understood the sentiment.)Report
Maybe we’ll get Hunter Beer out of this.Report
Or crack pipes.Report
My dad has a 6-pack of Billy Beer that he’s saved all these years, but I don’t think he’d buy a Hunter Crack Pipe.Report
It doesn’t have the same charm, that’s for sure.Report
This might be one of the better exchanges in the history of this site.Report
It’s a case of “Everyone who understands this exchange should schedule a colonoscopy.”Report
Only surprised that he did it so early; was expecting it as one of the many that will be signed Jan 19th. I guess it had to do with the upcoming sentencings. And maybe Christmas.
It’s not an everything-burger, but it’s not a nothing-burger… it’s a something-burger that just muddies the waters when Trump blanket pardons his family and then himself. That’s the thing about a pardon: it’s a gift wholly in the power of the President. There’s no (necessary) pretext of justice or process or meaningful criteria; simply a gift of the Head of State. The only recourse is to impeach the President for applying his Presidential Powers thus. That’s a check of sorts, but an ex post facto check. Which is why Jan 19 is such a busy day, ordinarily.
The escalation, if there is one, is if Biden pardons a bunch of Govt. folks to ‘protect’ them from Trump; it’s a challenging iteration problem. If you pre-emptively pardon Govt folks for fear of a event that hasn’t happened for crimes they supposedly haven’t committed, well, I think you’ve just ushed in a new norm. And that norm sort of immanentizes the thing you were afraid was going to happen: Govt employees acting with presumed future immunity.
Now, I suspect that Biden will *not* do this since most of these calls are from the irrational Left and Biden’s instincts are usually stolid when it comes to institutions… but that’s what I’d watch for. Else Hunter’s pardon is just the new normal for family, a +1 to the Billy Carter precedent.Report
I was also expecting this to be last minute. Ensure that it’s buried under all of the headlines about the ghastly things Trump has in store for us.
Not a betting man but I think it’s unlikely Biden does anything norm changing for government employees. I also think chances Hunter is pardoned are a lot lower if Harris wins. In terms of size, scope, and complexity of burger I guess I’d say the people have spoken by electing Trump. We as a society simply do not care about this level of malfeasance from our ruling class. Biden has now officially made his contribution to the gap in accountability enjoyed by some but not others, but I find it really hard to look at this in particular as outside the scope of what we’ve long been willing to tolerate. Shame on him but a lot more shame on us.Report
It did a good job of wrestling with the Kash Patel nomination for Top Headline Supremacy fights.
There’s a supercut of journolists praising Biden for being the kinda guy who wouldn’t pardon Hunter.
And there’s a bunch of accelerationist dems who are more than willing to go on the record and say “Good for him!” and “Whatabout Trump?” in the aftermath.
Yeah, I’m not sure we’re going to learn anything either.Report
We’ve also learned that no one cares what journalists think either. They may be the least credible group in the entire country.Report
Yup. The main stream media is a fascinating, macabre, thing. It doesn’t have a functional business model but the successor models that devoured its old business model need to have something like the MSM around to leech off of so it gets funded to a degree and persists partially on the backs of something like voluntary labor where the participants are partially paid in public prestige, but as an odd kind of zombie industry. Very very strange. I wonder what will actually be the new paradigm?Report
It has been suggested that Joe Rogan’s podcast is now more impactful the the NYT or the WaPo.Report
I think we’re just returning to broad form advocacy journalism that was the norm before the post-war consensus.
Every outlet will have it’s faction; some will be artful and well crafted, others just plain yellow journalism.
It was the pretending that neutrality was still the norm that has been disabused entirely. The interesting question to me is the hour of it’s death. It obviously starts with FOX, but when did the virus kill the host? 2012? 2020? Not sure, honestly. But I think it’s dead.Report
That’s plausible to a degree but what form will it take? The old media revenue streams are slurped up into Google, Facebook et all and they’re not coming back. So are we sleepwalking into a world of endless unabashedly partisan podcasts? Ugh. But maybe that’s just because I personally cannot stand podcasts (or talk radio for that matter).Report
Yea, I think your previous comment gets to the difference, that being that these entities tend to lack their own information gathering apparatus, which is the expensive and thankless part. The new media still relies on the legacy media for stuff to comment on.Report
Exactly, so is current state basically stable? An atrophied but break even primary news gathering apparatus that survives on financial scraps and on the job of doing it being prestigious for wealthy left wing children of the well to do so they work those jobs for peanuts (and slant the whole thing their way)? It seems… precarious… to me but I have no idea what the alternative is.Report
I think the ‘news gathering’ portion is also changing, and is ripe for more change.
While it always relied on contractors to a certain extent; I think it’s now closer to 90% contractors and the bigger problem right now is that NYT and other news agencies are ‘sourcing’ the gathering to people with agendas that they either endorse, decode, or don’t catch.
But once you’re not actually putting Wolfe Blitzer’s boots on the ground and are instead relying on NGO’s to provide those boots, then it’s a matter of screening and money.
We’re already seeing close collaboration between the Parties and their Network(s) of choice… there’s nothing to stop better ‘vertical integration’ of gathering, reporting, opining and direct political messaging as just another cost of running campaigns.
Might be slightly easier in an Internet based National news framework — no need to run Decatur to Syracuse to Waco news desks.Report
That may work for political stuff but wouldn’t work very well for the non-political stuff. And if it’s all just outsourced to NGO’s well that just compounds every problem everyone has with the current models and, again, who the fish is gonna pay for it?Report
As the pundits and wannabe pundits of the world get their underwear in a bunch about Hunter pardoning his son for crimes which pretty much almost ever lead to indictments in the first place, let’s look at the find upstanding nominee for Secretary of Defense and see if we can get our priorities straight: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/pete-hegseths-secret-history?_sp=c14de77e-6851-4630-adb2-722315e90da1.1733133137960
“After the recent revelation that Pete Hegseth had secretly paid a financial settlement to a woman who had accused him of raping her in 2017, President-elect Donald Trump stood by his choice of Hegseth to become the next Secretary of Defense. Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, issued a statement noting that Hegseth, who has denied wrongdoing, has not been charged with any crime. “President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his administration,” Cheung maintained.
But Hegseth’s record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.
A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting ‘Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!'”
I am not optimistic about pundits and wanna be pundits untwisting their underwear and getting their priorities straight.Report
which pretty much almost ever lead to indictments in the first place
The lesson to learn is if you’re going to commit crimes, then don’t write a tell-all book about you committing those crimes.Report
It’s the funniest gods-damned thing I’ve read in these “nothing matters any more” times.Report
Ugh, Hunter again. A few disjointed thoughts.
-Right wing yelps of this being unconscionable are pretty ignorable. Hunter wouldn’t be facing any of these charges if he was anyone but a Biden. The tax charges are ones pretty much everyone in his income bracket indulges in and anyone in his tax bracket that gets busted on them typically does what he did which is pay back the missing money with interest and then the IRS moves on. The gun form nonsense is pure opportunistic pap. It also bears noting that everything else Hunter Biden has proven, over both hostile and neutral investigations, to be entirely nothing- especially in terms of Joe Bidens alleged involvement.
-That being said it still isn’t a good look for Biden to be pardoning him. Especially not after promising he wouldn’t.
-Both those things being said this is obvious a move of despair and angst on Joe Bides part. On some level he knows that Trump will be his legacy just as he was HRC’s legacy. That the best case scenario for us all is that Trump coops all the (considerable) good Biden did in his four years of office and claims then as his own has to chap Joe something fierce- it certainly galls me.
-It’s a bad choice for the country and the Party. But Joe Biden isn’t a Christ figure or he’d have never run for a second term (I do not believe for a second he’s so far gone that he couldn’t make that choice for himself) and leaving Hunter hanging in the wind for the dubious mercies of a vindictive Trump administration to beat about is a very big sacrificial ask that Biden simply is unwilling to rise to. I’m not a Father but I can very easily imagine saying “no” to that request even though it clearly diminishes Joe Biden.
-As usual Hunter is a quintessential fail-son and diminishes and grimes everything/one he’s involved with. Ugh.
-Fundamentally this is a statement by Biden that, No, he does not believe the guard rails of the system will hold under the next Trump administration and it is certainly an ominous prophecy in that.
But yeah I agree with Marchmaine that this isn’t a nothingburger, but it’s very close to one. A very dreary dismal barelysomethingburger.Report
I think Biden should consider issuing prophylactic blanket pardons to a whole lot of Democrats and make it clear he is doing so because Trump has made it clear he intends to use his second administration for revenge for perceived slights and he is appointing people willing to go all in on this desire. The Mayor of Denver has already been threatened with arrest.
I am taking Trump seriously and literally.Report
I was just about to make the joke that Biden should pardon Bill and Hillary!!!Report
Biden should pardon everyone at Dominion.Report
I don’t agree. Pardoning Hunter is at least sellable and understandable for him as a person. Blanket pardons of large numbers of people? No. That is an implicit suggestion of wrong doing of huge numbers of people. If Trumps going to go after them make him put in the time and energy doing it.Report
We aren’t going to norm our way out of this.Report
We aren’t going to norm our way out of this as Lee notes. If Trump’s nominees make it through, things are going to get really, really bad most likely. Why is it a good argument to say “well we really need to see if Trump does arrest the Mayor or Denver or Attorney General James or District Attorney Willis.” He might try and do it anyway even if Biden issue a preemptive pardon but do we want to get to the sh@t has hit the fan stage” and discover it is too late.Report
I’m not making an argument for norms, actually, I’m making an argument for stone cold calculation. On the scale of effective, popular, damaging and evil activities Trump could do from one to ten, chasing after officials like this would be ineffective (1-3), noisily unpopular (6-8), do very little damage (individually potentially high but on the masses, 1) and would be very evil (8-10). So, frankly, it’d be a waste of rep, effort and attention to head Trump off from doing it. If he wants to chase his tail going after individuals who are well resourced to resist his persecution, would make a lot of noise, would make him look bad and could very well stymie his efforts at going after them? Good.Report
The Federal Government has resources it can throw at almost anyone and drown them especially if Trump succeeds in turning the entirety of the DOJ into his own personal consligere forceReport
It does, but those targets would be well financed, with good attorneys and good knowledge of the law and good connections to media. They would fight like heck and tangling with them in courts would be a far more useful waste of Trumps time than just about any other thing the fisher could waste his time doing.Report
If you’re a defendant, criminal or civil, the worst thing is losing a case. The second-worst thing is winning it.Report
Is that because of the cost of defending it or some other reason?Report
Cost of defending. My hourly rate is basically 500 an hour for cases done on the billable hour scale. There are some cases that I can resolve in a few hours or less but that is not most cases. Let’s assume I can resolve a case in 60 billable hours total. That is 30K and this on the lowish end.
A case motivated by vindication can easily lead to hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in legal fees and costs and the attorneys able to handle this kind of litigation probably charge a lot more than 500 dollars an hour. Their junior associates might charge more than 500 dollars an hour.Report
“The gun form nonsense is pure opportunistic pap.” And here I was thinking the Dems, and especially the President, were the party of gun control and making those laws tougher……
Seems the party’s/candidate’s positions are a bit more “flexible”. Maybe it was just for the commoners.Report
How many similar prosecutions of people NOT named Biden were conducted by the DoJ in the last decade?Report
No idea. Is there a website where the DOJ releases that info?
But here’s the thing. Hunter did it and was clearly guilty. So, it’s a case of “rules for thee not for me”. If you’re going to be sanctimonious about gun control, this just makes you out to be a hypocrite.Report
Why? Again unless you can show its a widespread thing that is prosecuted for, Hunter’s guilt is not the issue. Because if it’s not widely prosecuted – and it turns out it’s not widely prosecuted – he was strung up by politically motivated prosecutors in the Trump DoJ who wanted to make a name for themselves with the boss.
How unlikely is it?
And that’s out of 28,369,750 background checks performed that year by the ATF. That’s 0.00105% of all background checks resulted in prosecutions for lying – which most assuredly undercounts the number of people lying on said check forms. The DoJ had no reason to go after Hunter Biden except for his last name.
https://www.ncja.org/crimeandjusticenews/few-prosecutions-for-lying-on-atf-gun-purchase-form#:~:text=The%20odds%20of%20being%20charged,roughly%20similar%20for%20fiscal%202020.Report
Yet again I wonder what you ae looking at.
Thankfully only 478 people lied on their form (well, 479 now that Biden has been confirmed to have lied on it). Out of those, 62% had cases filed.
So yes, it seems quite reasonable for Hunter to have charges filed when the majority of those know to have lied on the form did have cases filedReport
I’m looking at the information in the link in my response. Information which tells me that 0.00105% of background checks in the year Hunter Biden lied are prosecuted for lying. Knowing what we know about human nature, it’s not likely that of 28+million background checks performed only 479 people actually lied on their forms. Its such a statistically small number that he would likely have escaped scrutiny except for his family name.Report
Yes, that is a great, lying statistic.
A referral for lying means they had to be caught lying. I am actually not surprised that the number caught/referred is low, because of how challenging it would be to find. They even mention it in the link.
Really sucked for Hunter that he gave them the proof they needed in his book to prosecute. He thought he was above the law. Oh wait the Big Guy just proved he was. Oh well.Report
Nobody would have bothered to look if his last name wasn’t Biden.Report
You assert that and the 62% prosecution rate for known lying statistic disagrees with you.
I agree that if he was not a Biden, he would not have had a reason to write a book that incriminated himself. Then his lying would never have been found out and he would not have been prosecuted.Report
62% prosecutions is still vanishingly small in terms of the number of background checks done. Others have written books as well, but we in the US don’t use that as the basis for a prosecution.Report
Imagine if OJ wrote “If I did it” *BEFORE* the trial.Report
Speaking as decidedly not a fan of Trump, this kind of sounds like the knock against the NY state conviction of DJT.
That said, as Sammy sang, “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.”Report
I don’t think it is. Trump flaunted his actions in way Hunter didn’t, and the pool of people who could have been prosecuted for the 34 felonies he was convicted of is decidedly smaller.Report
I was writing more regarding the novelty of the charge. I’m sure there are plenty of similar things that happen that are just swept under the rug.
I’m not saying DJT shouldn’t have been charged. Hell’s bells, throw the book at everyone!Report
I actually don’t think there are a lot of similar things that happen that others should be charged for.Report
What Philip asked.Report
On the one hand, I consider this an egregious abuse of power. On the other hand, it’s not hard to see why Biden did it. Beyond wanting to protect his son from Trump doing his best to invent crimes for his enemies, at this point why the hell should Biden do the right thing instead of the thing that’s best for him? The American people clearly have no standards for the probity of their leaders, Trump is merely the most obvious example of this. I believe that every President post-Carter at least has done at least one thing that merited impeachment. Thus far Biden hadn’t, at least as far as I’m aware, so why not drop to what is clearly the standard for American Presidents?Report
I thought he might commute the sentence then issue a broad pardon…
It’s complicated because it was the Biden DOJ that eventually secured the indictment and conviction of really egregious Tax Evasion — like not even fudging, just not paying any taxes on $Ms in 2016, 17, 18 & 19.
I think it’s pretty clear that the DOJ attempted to do something like that with their plea deal: almost commuting the sentence with a sort of ‘pocket pardon’ on the back-end. But that got upended by a judge who questioned the terms forcing the DOJ to say there *wasn’t* immunity which HB then rejected.
It’s not really a Trump thing.
I mean, I’m hearing rumblings that he’s now open to questioning without access to the 5th — but I’m not exactly sure how that would work. What it might could do is open him up to a *future* crime of lying under oath – assuming the FBI has just enough to catch him in some ‘truths’ that work at cross purposes.
TLDR: Probably should have commuted the specific convictions and stopped there … the decade long blanket pardon may be a gift too far.Report
Oh, I’m sorry are you upset at the Hunter Biden pardon?
It makes your blood boil to see rich, powerful people commit crimes and just get away with it, huh?
The dishonesty and hypocrisy of people just flagnantly, publicly, and unapologetically abusing power and public trust? Bothers you, does it?Report
(looks around)
No? I think it’s freakin’ *HILARIOUS*.Report
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has tweeted out disapproval of Biden’s pardon.
This chick has potential. Give it a decade or two and she could wrest control of the center away from the stupid party, if the smart party would actually let her.
(Of course, the center’s going to change where it is a half dozen times or so in the next 20 years…)Report
I’m not sure how letting his son get twice indicted, twice tried, and once convicted means Biden put his kid above the law, as opposed to Trump who literally ran for president again to keep from being tried.Report
Well, here, let me quote her words and you can read them and see if they make any sense to you.
I mean, let’s face it, Biden made the right decision as a father and it’s stupid to think that any one of us wouldn’t take advantage of a two-tiered justice system on behalf of our own families. Of course we would!
Also, Trump would do the same thing.Report
I read them and I was reacting to her assertion that Biden put his family above the law.
And Trump did analogous thing his first term.Report
Sure! We agree! It’s not a big deal! Everybody does it!
The only people who posture against it are people trying to win elections in the future!Report
America’s Conscience is deliberately not helping:
Report
I think what’s coalescing is confusion over the 11-yr blanket pardon.
That is, when I did a little research and found out that Pres. Carter(!) commuted G. Gordon Liddy’s sentence to basically time-served plus the $40k fine; there seemed to be a pretty plausible defense for commuting Hunter’s sentence and leaving the fines/tax re-payments intact.
Most everyone goes… yeah, the convictions stand, he pays the fines, and it’s not like Hunter Biden is going to practice law anymore… and who among us hasn’t wanted to avoid paying taxes? And of course everyone would prevent their son from going to prison, if he pays the fines and taxes. Aw, Biden is so cute.
The 11-yrs of crimes he ‘may’ have committed or been party to? That’s just begging the question, besides not paying taxes on the $Ms he received, are we really confident those $M were legally gotten? Did he fill out all of his Foreign Lobbying forms? Seems a lot of folks forget to register as Foreign Lobbyists when funds start landing from abroad.Report
Back when we were discussing the whole gay marriage thing, one of the distinctions I liked to make was the whole “Marriage in the Eyes of the State” vs. “Marriage in the Eyes of God” thing.
Evangelical types liked to argue that two dudes weren’t “really” married and people argued against them with some variant of “how dare you” and whatnot and it seemed to me that people were using one word to refer to two very distinct concepts.
Anyway, this makes it look like Hunter is guilty AF, as the kids say. Remember that scene at the beginning of Superman?
Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.Report
It’s all very sketchy, especially since that 11-year horizon just happens to take it back to 2014, the year Hunter joined the Burisma board.
The people here trying to defend it or whatabout it are being dumb, in my opinion — the election is over, Biden will not be running for office ever again, this action benefits only the Bidens and actually hurts the Democratic party — but the harm to the Dems is even higher if they turn themselves in knots trying to defend him. Joe is a career politician, not a saint — let him take some heat for this.Report
Joe will ride off into the sunset. Not sure what his life expectancy is considering his age related mental decline but he’s never going to be in office again.Report
Yep, I’d be totally fine if the Dems lined up and flamed the decision in unison. It’s very obvious what Biden is doing- he is afraid that Trump will gin up some kind of charge on Hunter and throw Bidens’ sole remaining living child into jail or worse so he’s trying to prevent it with a pardon that encompasses pretty much anything Trump and his lackeys could muster. The uncharitable interpretation is that there are actual material crimes that Hunter committed but that seems dubious since, if there were any, we’d have heard about them by now. Still, this is good for Hunter Biden and not good for anyone else except to a very very small degree it’s good for Trump and his Trumpkins since it’ll give them a very very small fig leaf to whatabout when they do whatever they were going to do anyhow.Report
if there were any, we’d have heard about them by now.
(Didn’t we hear about them by now?)Report
Substantive ones? No.
To recap there are a collection of substantive allegations, all of which have had no material evidence supporting them and, accordingly, had no charges brought on them by either the first Trump admin or the Biden admin.
There are two crimes that were found in the course of the fishing expedition and charges were brought on them under Biden: tax evasion and not filling out a federal form correctly or honestly while Hunter was hopped up on crack (a form to purchase a gun which he subsequently never used). Charges were -only- brought on these cases because of who Hunters’ father was. They are real but they aren’t substantive. And they are only Hunters crimes and not reflective of any larger conspiracy or crime.
Bidens’ pardon is basically just a gesture of despair and fear. He believes, though not for no good reason, that Trumps second administration will invent a reason to destroy his only living child, that the system will not protect Hunter from that abuse of power and, accordingly, Biden is trying to forestall it with a pardon.
A braver or greater man would not do it and dare Trump to do his worst. But Biden is a Father first evidently. I don’t approve of it but I certainly can understand it.Report
They’re about as substantive as the claims of Biden’s senility back in June, I guess.
Only partisans are squawking about it.
“No material evidence”
Well, that’s where the laptop comes in handy, doesn’t it?
I hear that it’s Russian disinfo, though.
“no charges brought on them”
Well, the good news is that Hunter’s been pardoned for any additional acts that are chargeable.Report
I suspected that you’d bring the laptop up. And that laptop (the public image of it anyhow) contained precisely -zero- evidence of any wrongdoing. Remember that the FBI has the original, untampered with, laptop. The laptop stuff we’ve seen was fiddled with by numerous actors and even that, highly compromised, image had next to nothing. That the actual unfiddled with laptop never surfaced in any of the actual partisan investigations indicates, quite clearly, that it had nothing on it and thus was more valuable left hidden so both they and people, like you, could keep alluding to it darkly. If the actual laptop had contained anything at all useful to them we’d have seen it released long ago.
So, no, entirely Un substantive unlike Bidens senility in June. Maybe more like Bidens’ alleged senility in 2020 or 2021 or 2022 or likely 2023. Or Hillary’s senility and frailty in ’16. How’d that one age out btw?
As for the pardon, that’s good news for Hunter and Trump. Ain’t good news for anyone else as I mentioned. But Joe Biden isn’t prioritizing anReport
It’s not the laptop. I’d worry about the 2019 New Yorker Magazine article attempting to inoculate us about Biden younger.
Plus the digging of the house oversight committee… plus the banking trails.
It’s one thing to prove tit-for-tat bribery, but it’s much easier to nail someone for banking $Ms from foreign entities and failing to fill out the proper forms. Ask Flynn, Manafort, etc. etc.
But, now that he’s dispensed from filling out the forms, I guess people are free to ask probing questions under oath about his various LLC’s ‘laundering’ money from CCCP, Romania, Russia, Ukraine, etc.
There’s even a chance it’s all legit. I mean, NYMag didn’t really think so, but he was reforming his life and all that…Report
Personally I don’t spare even a second of concern for Hunter Biden. If I could press a button and erase him from existence with no further consequences I would be sorely tempted. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he’s cut any number of corners and broke any number of minor rules in his endless trading on his Fathers’ name. But none of that impugned on Hunters Fathers reputation or legacy until this moment when Biden issued that selfish, despairing and entirely understandable pardon. If I were advising the Dems I’d tell em they should flame Biden like a rack of ribs over it. They won’t, of course, but they probably should.Report
Charges were -only- brought on these cases because of who Hunters’ father was.
Hunter has lived his life capitalizing on his father’s political influence. That’s everything from his highly paid college “internship” to his series of jobs for various people who pretty nakedly want to influence his father.
He then wrote a tell all book going over his coke addition and some of the things he did during that time.
It is awkward to claim he’s not a player when he’s clearly been claiming the reverse for his entire adult life. It’s also awkward to claim there is no evidence when he wrote a book about the things he’s charged with.Report
We’re not talking about evidence of Hunters petty malfeasance. He’s a fail son who’s peddled on his Fathers name his entire life. That class of lowlife is bipartisan and exists all over the place. That’s not up for debate. The point is that the only reason we’re hearing about Hunter at all as opposed to any number of other parasitic relatives of Republicans and Democrats is that Trump tried to spin up an entirely run of the mill failson into some kind of corruption web that encompassed not just Hunter but Biden himself and involved the trading of access and policy favors for lucre. They have utterly and completed failed to prove any evidence of that allegation, in total. They’ve found no unaccounted for filthy lucre to the older Biden no shady access or policy concessions back to dubious characters, nothing.Report
Sure. All of that is true.
But the conclusion is only that Joe is clean. According to the Biden Justice department, Hunter is not.
And this wouldn’t have come up if Hunter himself (yes, and the GOP) hadn’t shined a spotlight on this.
The legal system is then faced with the problem of what to do. If we follow the normal laws and rules, Hunter ends up doing time.
This is pretty normal for someone who burns his life down, does a lot of things we’ve criminalized, and then writes a book about it.
That’s what the pardon is protecting him from. Not the GOP weaponizing the justice system, but the justice system functioning as it normally would at this point.Report
Okay but in admitting that you’re also admitting that all the spilled ink and investigations and also Trumps foreign policy interventions on the subject were all baseless.
As for the pardon, I disagree slightly- If the goal was simply to shield Hunter from the consequences of the charges he currently faces it would be narrowly written. The sweeping and wide ranging timeframe is very obviously designed to eliminate every attack surface a future administration would use to try and destroy Hunter Biden. It’s not -just- a get out of jail free card now but also a very desperate attempt to block any attempt to destroy Hunter in the future.
As for the charges Hunter currently faces it’s true that jail time is the, on paper, possible penalty he’d face but if you look at how crimes of this sort are typically prosecuted then you’d have to admit that Hunter is facing remarkably stern treatment; most tax fraudsters get a fine and payment of the missed taxes if they ever get prosecuted at all (normally the IRS collects the back taxes plus interest and moves on rather than fight a court battle) and the gun form related charges are virtually never prosecuted at all let along have jail time associated. The proposed punishment is within the letter of the law, but at the very extreme end of that window and wildly beyond what any non-son of a President face. I observe this not to defend Hunter whom I couldn’t hold in more contempt if I tried but to simply be fair to Joe.
But ultimately it’s a gesture, as I originally said, of fear and despair from Joe who doesn’t believe the Justice system under Trump will be Just towards his son. Sure, Trump never pursued Hillary but Hillary lost to Trump. Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020 and it’s not unreasonable to expect, especially given Trumps language, much greater malice from Trump in light of those facts.
If I had my druthers Biden would not pardon Hunter and dare Trump to do his worst. But I don’t have kids. Would you leave one of your kids to Donald Fishin Trumps tender mercies after he’s spent 5+ years being the subject of a two minute daily hate from the right? Really? If you had the power to exempt him and no fishes left to give about your own, now ended, career or besmirched legacy?Report
also admitting that all the spilled ink and investigations and also Trumps foreign policy interventions on the subject were all baseless.
No. Hunter’s resume and the behavior of the people hiring him look a lot like he’s selling political favors. The investigations were well deserved. Adding to that the whole sex, drugs, and criminals angles made them doubly so.
But ultimately it’s a gesture, as I originally said, of fear and despair from Joe who doesn’t believe the Justice system under Trump will be Just towards his son.
This is total nonsense.
Biden had the ability to pardon him for anything Trump could have done but also let Hunter serve his time for the things his own justice department found. Biden could have also not pardoned him for the things he’s already been found guilty of but then zapped everything else.
Hunter has been given a breathtakingly large scope of a pardon when normally those are extremely narrow. It was also done without involving the people who normally vet and write these things.
This was a favor to his son.Report
I don’t deny it was a massive and blatant favor to his son and I don’t approve of any element of the pardon- we just disagree on whether it was out of fear of Trump going much further and I don’t think such fears are baseless.Report
The “out of fear” explanation doesn’t cover what Biden actually did.
For that to work, we need to believe Hunter is an innocent lamb and Joe Biden’s Justice Department’s findings and actions were politically motivated.
This is a helicopter parent saying “not my child”.
“Out of fear” is an excuse, not an explanation.Report
Certainly not- we both agree Hunter is guilty of the tax charge and the picayune gun form charge.
My explanation, unlike yours, explains the enormous scope and breadth of the pardon Joe issued. If Biden was simply trying to get Hunter out of the current charges he could have pardoned those specific charges/crimes. His pardon, instead, is for all actions/allegations that took place in a huge swathe of years. That’s like trying to kill a local cat by carpet bombing the entire county. Biden is very obviously trying to pre-empt any effort to gin up any form of charges against Hunter by a future administration; not just get Hunter out of his current charges.
I don’t approve of any of it, mind, but that’s because I think a Trump administration spending bandwidth crucifying Hunter Biden would be some of the least nationally destructive, albeit evil, stuff they could spend bandwidth on. But I’m not Hunter Bidens’ father.Report
I bequeath upon the Republic the Marchmaine Solution for Broad Pardons:
The recipient must declare all the crimes he has committed and for which the Pardon now applies. They get to unburden themselves of all their crimes with impunity; but any crimes they fail to disclose may be prosecuted. After all, we want the Pardon to be fully efficacious!
The Grantor of Pardons may decide that they would rather not learn of all the crimes in this manner, and instead may henceforth require all the crimes from the recipient in advance — and then can decide which crimes they actually want to pardon.
Win-Win.Report
Certainly not- we both agree Hunter is guilty of the tax charge and the picayune gun form charge.
The Biden pardon covers everything, including crimes we both agree upon.
President Biden could have trivially had the pardon only cover whatever Trump might do. He choose to have it cover everything that his own Justice Department found.
No matter the rhetoric, the black letter of the pardon isn’t designed to prevent Trump from misusing justice, it’s designed to prevent his own Justice Department (yes, and Trump’s later) from doing anything.Report
Let’s take a poll. Who thinks Biden would have issued the pardon if Harris had won? Who thinks Harris would have pardoned Hunter if she had won?Report
What is your answer to your questions?Report
Does Gallup tell the people he polls what he thinks?Report
Okay. For Harris to have won, she’d probably have had to change her message significantly. Hrm. Maybe to something like “I’m a former prosecutor and, lemme tell ya, crime is bad. When *I* am president, I will tackle crime instead of coddling it!”
Given this pre-condition, I think that Biden would have had sufficient reason to worry that Harris either knows where the bodies are buried or that she knows a guy who knows where the bodies are buried and therefore would have pardoned Hunter Just In Case.
But maybe a different message would have resonated more and swung more swing states… but that seems like the most likely one that would have had the most people perk their ears up.Report
You know, if you don’t want to participate in the poll, you can just not participate.Report
Oh, lemme do part two: Harris wouldn’t have pardoned Hunter in this scenario.
I regret the oversight.
(Thinking about it some more, it might even be *GOOD* for Kamala in this scenario. It’d give her something to rail against. A Sista Soulja, if you will.)Report
Meanwhile, on Earth 1….Report
On Earth 1, Trump 1.Report
I think Biden would have pardoned Hunter no matter what happened. His own Justice department has found enough to lock him up for years, and that’s bad enough.
Hunter went through a period of time when he burned his life down. He’s much better now.
The argument for a pardon isn’t that the GOP is coming after him. With Biden stepping down there is no point and we saw what Trump did with HRC after she lost power, i.e. nothing.
Hunter’s problem has been with the Joe Biden Justice department. Trump won’t change that… but as part of burning his life down he crossed lines and then his tell all book broadcast them.
The argument is that he is a different person now and deserves a second (or 3rd, or however many chances Joe has given him) chance. Joe Biden has been helping him his entire life, this is just once more.Report
I doubt Biden would have issued the pardon had Harris won. There would have been a significant cost to Biden and Harris for that where there isn’t now. And Hunter would have been facing conventional penalties for what is very small beer convictions. Absent the specter of Trumps administration stringing Hunter up to punish his father for whupping Trump in 2020 I don’t think Biden would have pulled the trigger.
And Harris? No way in fishin’ heck would she have done it.Report
There’s now discussions over whether Biden should/will pardon Adam Schiff, Anthony Fauci, and Liz Cheney.
This is like the end of Godfather II.Report
Discussions where? Twitter?Report
It has broken the blood/brain barrier and has leaked out into Politico.Report
Gotcha, next thing to twitter then.Report
Newsweek is talking about it now too. The next thing to the next thing to twitter.
Let’s hope nobody else starts talking about it, lest we have to say “No, Biden isn’t that stupid” before explaining “well, you have to understand… I was right to think that he wouldn’t do that but Trump forced Biden’s hand on this…”Report
Yeah as if Newsweek, Politico and twitter set the discourse. We shall see but I have profound doubts. Then again, the old man has used pardon powers in ways I don’t approve of already. I still don’t think he’ll be expending them for Fauci, Cheney and Schiff; no matter what Newsweek, Politico and X say.Report
Oh, I would never argue that Newsweek or Politico sets the discourse.Report
CBS is talking about it now.
Report
This wouldn’t set a bad precedent at all.Report
Imagine someone saying “you just *KNOW* the prez is going to pardon Cheney” in 2008.Report
Man, I wish in 2008 (or in 2024, for that matter), we though there’d be any chance that Cheney would be tried for his crimes.
But yeah, liberals are shortsighted, on this and so many other things. Remember when a Democratic solution to gun violence floated by high-ranking Dems was to block gun sales to anyone on the No Fly list? Or their insistence on using the word “terrorism” increasingly broadly and loosely? And these are probably the exact same people who 20 years ago were so upset about the Patriot Act, the No Fly list, and the increasingly loose use of the word “terrorist” to refer to anyone we don’t like.Report
Speaking of Journalism, there was a silly little scandal over the last day or so revolving around the pardons and AI.
CNN “journalist” Ana Navarro-Cárdenas tweeted this delightful tidbit out:
As it turns out, it seems that Hunter deButts was not the brother-in-law of Wilson and did not receive a pardon from Wilson. So a bunch of people pounced and Anna then tweeted out this:
That’s right! It’s a screenshot of ChatGPT’s report.
Too good to fact-check. If that’s all that happened, it’d be worth a “‘Hunter deButts’ was the name of my band in high school” joke and then we could move on sadder but wiser.
But Esquire decided to get into it. Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce published a column titled “Hunter Biden Isn’t the First Presidential Son Caught Up in Controversy. Anybody Remember Neil Bush?” with the subhed “Nobody defines Poppy Bush’s presidency by his son’s struggles or the pardons he issued on his way out of the White House. The moral: Shut the fck up about Hunter Biden, please.”
As it turns out, Poppy Bush did *NOT* pardon Neil.
This quickly got an editor’s note:
This lasted about an hour before Esquire pulled the column entirely. But if you want to read the corrected column for yourself, you can read it on the archive here.
If this is the level of journalisming we can expect over the next four years, we’re really going to wish that journalismists didn’t shoot themselves in the foot over the previous four. Eight. Twelve. Sixteen. Twenty.Report
Clearly this is all the fault of techbros poisoning the information ecosystem. If you can’t even trust a Google search anymore, how can we expect journalists to do their jobs?!Report
A google search would have found the names of Wilson’s brothers-in-law and been able to hold them up to Wilson’s pardons.
This wasn’t even that.Report
Nah, it’s documented that AI makes stuff up. There was a case in cali IIRC, where a lawyer submitted a brief using AI and did not fact check it. Turns out many of the cites were made up. He was fined. From the article I read AI making stuff up is a known issue.Report
No competent lawyer would never use it for research. It’s gotten a bit more useful at things like contract or policy drafting in the absence of a template or a similar document on hand to work from. Even then someone who knows what they’re doing still needs to thoroughly check it.Report
We argued about it at the time!
The story is that the real lawyer asked the paralegal to do some research, the paralegal asked ChatGPT, ChatGPT hallucinated some cases, the paralegal gave the stuff to the real lawyer, AND THE REAL LAWYER SIGNED OFF ON IT.
When unable to find the cases himself, THE REAL LAWYER JUST KIND OF SHRUGGED.
Anyway. Someone on twitter pointed out that this year will be the year that you relied on AI the least for the rest of your life. Happy 2025.Report
AI making stuff up is a known issue.
The AI is supposed to make stuff up. That’s it’s job. It creates a rough draft that is spell checked.
When you ask for anything from an English paper to the bare bones of a program, it’s making stuff up. It’s strengths are speed of content creation and grammar/syntax. It’s weakness is it doesn’t understand what you want.
I’ve used it professionally. It’s great, but it’s a tool I use and not a thinking entity that could replace me.
Those idiot lawyers were trying to use it as a search engine and not an intern.Report