19 Thoughts On The Pardon Of Hunter Biden
Special edition on an avoidable mistake.
Prior to the election, I added an article idea to my editorial calendar with the tentative headline “President Biden Should Commute Hunter’s Sentence.”
That probably sounds a bit…convenient for me to mention now, after Biden’s Sunday decision to pardon his son, but it’s the god’s honest truth. I intended to write and publish it on the occasion of Hunter Biden’s scheduled sentencing later this month, with the expectation that if Biden were to break his promise to deny his son a pardon, he’d do it on his way out the door, amid a flurry of other pardons and the crush of inauguration news, after Hunter had already been ordered to prison. It would have advised an alternate course.
Things worked out a bit differently. So below I explain my thinking about the pardon itself, and why my proposal, now overtaken by events, would’ve been the better option.
A small part of me admires Biden for doing this in plain view, taking the blowback on the chin. (Though he was presumably motivated by the judicial calendar as much as the virtues of transparency.)
On the merits, and viewed narrowly, a pardon is at least arguable: The hanky-panky surrounding this case, starting in Donald Trump’s first term, makes the charges Hunter Biden ultimately faced the fruit of the poisoned tree. On a wider view, the pardon was unwise and unnecessary.
The argument for commutation over pardon entails striking a balance between legal and political considerations.
Very few Americans grasp how obscene and unethical the GOP’s treatment of the younger Biden has been. That reflects the moral and strategic failure of congressional Democrats and Merrick Garland, who together fed Hunter to the wolves rather than excavate the full truth of Trump 1.0’s corruption of DOJ. If they’d done the latter, Garland would’ve been well positioned to terminate the case long ago. They bent to fear of perceived partisanship rather than act in the interests of justice.
It’s thus a bit late to expect the public to understand the pardon as anything other than self-dealing. And that’s not just because the public is incurious and Democrats are cowards.
Joe Biden is hopelessly conflicted. Hunter Biden did violate criminal laws, according to a jury that his lawyers helped to seat, and to Hunter Biden himself, who agreed to plead guilty to the charges against him, before congressional Republicans helped scuttle the agreement.
Biden thus could and should have taken a different course—one much more consistent with the ideal of equal justice.