You will probably agree that President Joe Biden's issuance of a broad pardon to his son Hunter Biden is the world's least surprising news. Many have predicted for quite a while that, whatever Biden said about pardoning his son -- he vowed he would never do it -- Biden would, in the end, pardon his son. And on the Sunday night after Thanksgiving, he did it.
Republicans, of course, slammed Biden for lying. "Joe Biden has lied from start to finish about his family's corrupt influence peddling activities," said GOP Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the leading Biden investigator in the House. "The charges Hunter faced were just the tip of the iceberg in the blatant corruption that President Biden and the Biden Crime Family have lied about to the American people. It's unfortunate that, rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid responsibility.
That's pretty representative of the Republican view that Hunter Biden's shady influence peddling in Ukraine, China, Russia and elsewhere was done for the purpose of enriching not only himself but his father and the rest of his family. Indeed, according to documents discovered on the notorious laptop, Hunter sometimes complained about having to share his ill-gotten gains with his father, also known as "the big guy." There's no doubt that Joe Biden has for years falsely denied knowledge of and involvement in his son's business activities. So now, the pardon is just one more step for a president who "has lied from start to finish," in Comer's words. Indeed, while the pardon applies to Hunter Biden, it might also protect Joe from further damaging revelations.
The point is, the GOP reaction to the Biden pardon was about Joe and Hunter Biden. The Democratic reaction, on the other hand, was about Donald Trump. Some Democrats defended Biden's actions by speculating that a Trump Justice Department would pursue Hunter Biden, and that Joe Biden needed to put a stop to that before it could begin.
"Biden was right to do it," MSNBC contributor and former Justice Department official Anthony Coley told Politico. "Trump is putting in place the pieces to weaponize the DOJ -- why would Biden leave his only surviving son exposed in that way?" The NeverTrump publication The Bulwark called Biden's decision a "tough call," but added, "consider what Trump's weaponized Justice Department would have done to Biden's son."
Other Democrats criticized the pardon by arguing that it gave away the moral high ground that they believe Biden and the anti-Trump resistance occupied. They have predicted that in his next term, Trump will abuse the pardon power. They are primed and ready to attack him for it. But how can they accuse Trump when Biden abused his own power? Joe Biden has just made life much more difficult for the anti-Trump resistance.
"Now he's taken one more issue off the table from his fellow Democrats, many of whom were hoping to torch the Republicans for their support of Trump's pardons," wrote The Atlantic's Tom Nichols. Also in The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait wrote that "principles become much harder to defend when their most famous defenders have compromised them flagrantly." And The Bulwark's Charlie Sykes tweeted, "Smart person texts me: 'Joe Biden has just removed the issue of pardons from the political arena for the next four years and Trump probably once again can't believe his own dumb f---ing luck' ... Sadly, I think he's right."
Here's one last way to look at it. Presidents have sometimes put their constitutional, unreviewable pardon power to unsavory uses. Does anyone really believe that Joe Biden, lamest of lame ducks in the last few weeks of his presidency, was going to let his son go to jail? Last week, I tweeted, "It seems a lock that Biden will pardon Hunter or commute his sentence. Reason: He's my son, and I'm outta here." And that is what happened. Yes, that creates problems for people who plan to spend the next four years attacking Trump. But the Biden pardon is first and foremost a story about Joe and Hunter Biden.
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