The Hunter Biden pardon has silver linings

“My word as a Biden.” Remember that? It was something that Joe Biden was in the habit of saying whenever he was about to utter something untrue. A couple of years ago when the Great Unraveling was beginning to be obvious to everyone, Biden deposited the phrase right before saying that he was “never more optimistic” about the prospects for the country. This prompted one social media wit to respond: “The border is open, real wages are down, energy costs are outrageously high, the Taliban controls Afghanistan, and the cartels are making billions smuggling fentanyl. There is reason to be ‘optimistic’ though — we have a [House GOP] majority who is working to hold Biden accountable.”

In fact, it is extremely unlikely that, this side of the Pearly Gates, Biden will ever be held accountable. “No person is above the law,” he kept saying while his Department of Justice manufactured imaginary torts against Donald Trump. But in pardoning his son Hunter, Biden just demonstrated that certain people are very much above the law.  

Hunter was set to be sentenced later this month. He faced up to seventeen years in the slammer and fines of $1.35 million for his tax fraud, up to twenty-five years for his gun conviction. As Kim Klacik noted, Biden’s 1994 crime bill locked up black men for years for the very same crime of which Hunter Biden was convicted. “This,” she rightly points out, “is the Democratic Party.” Indeed it is. 

And nota bene: Biden did not confine his pardon to those crimes. He issued a blanket get-out-of-jail-free pardon for any crimes his son may have committed, discovered or not, from January 1, 2014 to December 1, 2024. Why the extraordinary all-along-the-waterfront pardon? Could it be that there is naughtiness yet to be confirmed dating back to 2014 when the Bidens’ great Ukrainian money laundering scheme is said to have gotten underway?

Everyone knew that Biden, despite repeated promises to the contrary, was going to keep his son out of prison. He could have done it by commuting his sentence. Instead, he made the unpardonable pardon, simultaneously calling attention to his own and his party’s bad faith and thumbing his nose at every canon of legal decency. As the Instapundit Glenn Reynolds observed, “by claiming that Hunter was singled out because he was Biden’s son, the pardon announcement also comes right out and says that Justice Department prosecutions are politicized and unfair. Not that we didn’t know that, but still.” The public — some of it, anyway — would have pardoned Biden’s pardon had it been more limited and discreet. It won’t forgive or forget this kick in the teeth of basic legal decorum.  

There are two silver linings in this abominable episode, however. One is that the stench of legal favoritism will cling to the Democrats for years to come. Critics have been complaining that they have run a two-tier justice system for years. Joe Biden just demonstrated that in the most egregious fashion.  

The second bright spot includes victims of the Democrats’ two-tier system of justice, the January 6 hostages who are rotting as political prisoners in Merrick Garland’s DC gulag. Donald Trump has spoken frequently about the possibility of pardoning unfairly incarcerated pawns. Biden’s outrageous abuse of his authority makes that much more likely. I hope the executive order is teed-up for January 20 at 12:01.