President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter on Sunday night is the least shocking story of 2024.
If you couldn’t see this one coming ever since Hunter was indicted – even with the Biden administration’s absurd denials – then you have no idea how things work.
Nor is it all that upsetting. If a father won’t rescue his son, what kind of father is he?
The blanket pardon covering any federal crime Hunter Biden committed during a period of 10 years 11 months – from January 1, 2014 to December 1, 2024 – has some liberal media outlets fuming.
This means President-elect Donald Trump will pardon the people who entered the U.S. Capitol during the January 6, 2021 riots!
Oh, the horror.
Of course he will. Unlike Biden, Trump has already said he will, a bunch of times.
It’s also worth doing. Unlike Hunter Biden, who has done no time behind bars, some of the rioters have been sentenced to absurd stretches in federal prison that they are currently serving. In the interests of justice, their punishment ought to be commuted.
Trump should also pardon the anti-abortion activists arrested at abortion facilities for violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994, a federal statute that primarily protects abortion facilities from pro-lifers.
Whatever the wisdom of their actions, what these people did came from a good place – trying to save unborn babies from being killed. They don’t belong in prison.
The power to pardon is inherently messy, because it involves one man deciding that convictions for federal crimes don’t matter anymore. But that’s the way our system works.
The Founding Fathers gave the president of the United States some of the same powers as the king of England, including executive clemency. Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution says that the president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” That means any federal crime can be pardoned by the president, with the exception that he can’t prevent the United States Senate from removing federal officials (including the president) from office.
For good or ill, the president has almost unlimited power to stay the long arm of the law when it comes to federal crimes.
As for the appearance of impropriety, Joe Biden’s pardon of his son doesn’t come close to what Bill Clinton did on his last day in office in January 2001, when he pardoned Marc Rich, a fugitive from justice on charges of fraud, racketeering, tax evasion, and illegally doing business with Iran while Americans were still being held hostage there. Rich’s ex-wife was a major donor to the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton’s campaign for U.S. Senate, and the Clinton Library.
Lest you think there’s some linkage there, though, banish the thought from your head. Bill Clinton assured us in a column in The New York Times in February 2001 that there was “absolutely no quid pro quo” and that any such suggestion is “utterly false” – and who would know better about utterly false statements than Bill Clinton?
Compared to that one, Joe Biden is a minor leaguer.
The real shame of the Hunter Biden scandals is not that Hunter won’t go to jail, but rather that we don’t seem any closer to finding out just how much influence Hunter peddled to try to further his business deals in Ukraine and China, and just how involved Joe Biden was. That is something worth nailing down and making public. Not to try to put the Bidens in jail, the way Democrats tried to do with Trump, but to try to make sure this sort of thing never happens again.
We could use a Truth and Reconciliation Commission examining the Biden years.
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