For much of Joe Biden’s presidency, even going back to the 2020 campaign, Republicans tried to find a scandal involving the overseas business dealers of Hunter Biden, the president’s son. The younger Biden made millions of dollars in Ukraine and other countries, which led various GOP-aligned entities, from the House Oversight Committee to the New York Post, to make Hunter Biden their Public Enemy #1 for much of the Biden presidency.
For all of its investigation, the Oversight Committee was not able to find any wrongdoing in Hunter’s business deals that they were able to tie to his father, nor did an impeachment inquiry ever go anywhere. Hunter, after a plea bargain that fell apart, was charged with crimes, including lying on a gun permit application and tax evasion; he was convicted on the first charge and pled guilty on the second.
Now, taking advantage of the virtually unlimited pardon power that the Constitution grants to presidents, President Biden has pardoned his son, even after vowing for more than a year that he would not.
The pardon is not unprecedented, as presidents have pardoned family members before; Bill Clinton pardoned his brother, Roger, for his drug conviction decades earlier. Donald Trump pardoned dozens of associates, including just about everyone convicted of a crime in connection with the Mueller probe, and also granted a pardon to Charles Kushner, the father-in-law of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, for a particularly disgusting crime.
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MAGA loyalists did not react positively to the news of Hunter’s pardon. That included Miranda Devine, the New York Post reporter who has been a leading media figure in the anti-Hunter beat, even authoring a book about him:
Column’s up: We always knew Joe Biden would pardon troubled son Hunter — it’s totally on brand for the president to break another promise to the American people https://t.co/rs6uH5P1Op
— Miranda Devine (@mirandadevine) December 2, 2024
So did Donald Trump, Jr., who also faced criminal jeopardy at one point while his father was president:
This is 100% right!!! https://t.co/2oR7nBOaSu
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) December 2, 2024
Donald Trump himself, meanwhile, tied it to “the J-6 hostages”:
It’s been sad that the Hunter Biden pardon will “embolden” Trump to use the pardon power liberally once he gets into office, although there’s little indication that Trump didn’t plan to do so anyway, as he did in his first term. That message, though, indicates that blanket pardons are on the way for January 6 participants who were convicted of their part in the 2021 Capitol riot.
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
