“No one is above the law.” Remember that, Joe Biden? Probably not, given the permanent rinse-cycle his brain is on, but Biden (or whoever held the phone for him) tweeted that just a few months ago.
But that’s all a long time in politics.
Biden, a Democrat whose term ends on Jan 20 when Republican President-elect Donald Trump takes office, signed an unconditional pardon for Hunter Biden on Sunday and said he believed his son had been selectively prosecuted and targeted unfairly by the president’s political opponents.
This is despite, just a few months ago, Biden also flatly denying that he would issue any such pardon.
Biden claims the pardon is to protect his son from future prosecution by political opponents. Which may be partly true, but the real story is blindingly obvious: it’s all about protecting Biden Inc.
Having dubbed them the “Biden crime family,” it is a near certainty that Mr Trump, absent a comprehensive pardon, would have had his Justice Department spend the next four years hounding the younger Mr Biden. The older one, too, presumably.
Not to mention the rest of the cartel, who were all in on the corrupt payments from Ukraine, the cash-for-access scams and all the rest of it. Joe Biden was just ‘the Big Guy’ at the top of the pile, creaming off his 10 per cent.
The scope of the pardon is also breathtaking: “A Full and Unconditional Pardon for those 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 covers a lot. Especially if you’ve seen some of the really disturbing visual material found on Hunter Biden’s ‘laptop from Hell’.
Backdating the pardon to cover all potential crimes from 2014 onward is especially egregious. Most acts of presidential clemency are retrospective, washing away a criminal conviction or foreshortening a prison sentence for a felony. This one looks deliberately designed to block a likely investigative process of real significance. Many legitimate questions remain unanswered about the Bidens’ foreign entanglements in Ukraine and China in the period when Joe Biden was vice president and then out of office after 2017.
After four years of shrieking about a supposed ‘threat to democracy’ from a second Trump term, it’s beyond clear now that the Democrats were shouting at the mirror (after cleaning Hunter’s leftover lines of coke).
The Hunter pardon is a lamentable one, another bruising blow to the institutions of American democracy.
For one thing, it pre-emptively collapses expected Democratic criticisms of Mr Trump’s behavior when he returns to office next month. Accusations that Mr Trump abuses his office to help friends and family will ring even more hollow after Biden Jr has been relieved of any accountability for his crimes […]
They have spent four years in a prosecutorial pursuit of Mr Trump, much of which was a nakedly political lawfare campaign to undermine and ultimately lock up their political opponent. The Hunter pardon represents something like the inverse of lawfare: the use of executive power to shield the Democrats’ favorites from the reach of justice, thereby upholding the worst sort of double standard and undermining respect for the rule of law itself.
If the Democrats didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any.
