THE PARDON

In a political world that these days mixes Kafkaesque nightmares with Orwellian lies in almost equal measure, comes now the pardon of Hunter Biden by his father, the President.

The president's pardon power is plenary.  

He can issue one for any reason or no reason.

Nevertheless, the Department of Justice has a whole unit --  the Office of the Pardon Attorney -- whose job it is to evaluate the sea of requests sent to the Oval Office. 

To do so, it has created -- and create is the operative word here -- a set of standards it applies to those requests. 

Thus . . .

In the Office of the Pardon Attorney, an applicant has to wait five years from the point of conviction to apply.  The Pardon Attorney evaluates  the post-conviction conduct, character and reputation of the applicant. He considers the seriousness of his crime, the impact a pardon might have on others, and the extent to which the applicant has accepted responsibility for his criminal conduct. 

None of those standards matter legally.

Yet they exist.

The apparent ultimate goal is to determine whether one who petitions for a pardon is worthy of one.

So . . .

Was Hunter Biden worthy?

As one might expect in today's polarized political world, opinions on that question are divided. As far as I can tell, they fall into the following five categories:

1. Absolutely not;

2. Absolutely f---ing not;

3. No, but understandable;

4. Absolutely, on the merits; and

5.  Absolutely, given the next president.

I fall into Category 5, despise 2, am sympathetic to 1 and 3 and (therefore) less so to 4.  

Category 1 is occupied by purists in the Democratic party who think the President has sacrificed principle. It includes the we-can-never-act-like-them crowd who consider such sacrifices fatal. Category 3 is occupied by those same Democrats but stifles the outrage by conceding any father in the President's situation might have done the same thing.  Category 4 is the ground upon which the Biden himself has for the most part chosen to stand.

Category 2 is peopled by the GOP's MAGA hypocrites who applauded Trump's own unparalleled abuse of the pardon power in his first term.  

In that first term, Trump gave pardons or commutations to friends, relatives and assorted hangers on, most if not all of whom had committed crimes far more serious than Hunter Biden's. Trump's recipients included political henchman Roger Stone (convicted of false statements, witness tampering, and obstruction), campaign manager and Russian-colluder Paul Manafort (guilty of tax fraud, bank fraud, failure to disclose hidden foreign accounts, and sentenced to 47 months imprisonment), former National Security Adviser General Flynn (originally pled guilty to false statements), the loud mouth architect of MAGA authoritarianism, Steve Bannon (charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering), seven criminally convicted Republican Congressman (for crimes that included bribery, securities fraud, tax evasion and campaign violations), and his relative, Charles Kushner (convicted of tax evasion and witness tampering; Kushner is daughter Ivanka's father-in-law and Trump's now-proposed Ambassador to France). 

Category 2 folks deserve no sympathy. 

In fact, because their hypocrisy knows no bounds, irritating them is an advantage.

The best defense of the pardon is what awaited Hunter Biden going forward, not a watering-down of what he did in the past. 

President Biden, however, is being pummeled now because he is focusing more on what occurred in the past than on what awaited his son in the future. 

In that vein, the President's argument is that the gun and tax charges to which Hunter either pled or on which he was found guilty were overkill. In the case of the former,  the younger Biden lied on a form by saying he was not a drug addict at the time he purchased the gun. Because he only had the gun for a week (his sister-in-law wisely threw it away) and never committed any crimes with it, the general practice, had it been followed, would have been to not file a charge, especially given the fact that the would-be defendant was in recovery and years sober by the time the conduct was investigated.  In the case of the latter, the taxes Hunter owed were paid in their entirety, as was the interest and all the penalties, and these types of cases are often if not typically resolved administratively with civil penalties.

This overkill boat, however, is leaky.  

Apart from the fact that both crimes are often tried and not resolved administratively, addiction is not a defense to years-long tax evasion and honest answers on background questions are among the little we have left in what remains of any effort to keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have them. There's a reason addicts and guns are a bad mix. Guns are dangerous and addicts are unstable. 

And there's no "I love my son" exception to those facts.

The justification for the pardon, therefore, cannot be found in US Attorney (and Special Counsel)  David Weiss's prosecution. That prosecution may have been aggressive.  But it was not selective. 

The justification, however, can be found in what awaited Hunter Biden.

The world changed on November 5. 

America elected Donald Trump and Trump has pledged to take revenge on his perceived enemies.  

Among those perceived enemies are the Bidens in general and Hunter Biden in particular. 

Trump has been gunning for Hunter for years and has never let up on his claim that Hunter and/or his father were taking bribes from Ukraine or were otherwise engaged in illegal conduct in connection with Hunter's (obviously) nepotistic seat on the board of Burisma.  Though these charges have been investigated by the GOP for years, no evidence whatsoever has been found to sustain them. In fact, the very evidence the GOP relied upon for the charge -- a statement from FBI informant Alexander Smirnov -- has been deemed false by Weiss, who -- apart from indicting Hunter --  has also indicted Smirnov for lying to investigators and making false claims that the Bidens had accepted bribes from Burisma.

Trump also blames Joe Biden for the two federal indictments levelled against him in connection with the attempted coup on January 6, 2021 and his subsequent theft and illegal storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. All of this is also baseless. President Biden had nothing to do with those indictments.  They were brought by a Special Counsel who Biden did not appoint. So fastidious was the due process given Trump that he was able to delay the cases until after the election. Given the DOJ's policy against prosecuting sitting presidents, they have now been dismissed. 

Nor, contrary to the GOP's amen-chorus of Trump enablers, were the indictments the product of "lawfare" or "weaponization" of the Department of Justice. There was more than enough evidence to indict the former President on both charges, and though we will not know for a while (and maybe never) whether there was enough to convict him, that was the way to bet. Trump endorsed a scheme to deem fake electors legitimate. On January 6, 2021, he watched his supporters assault police and ransack the Capitol for hours before telling them to leave (which they did upon his order). Back in Florida after his administration ended, he lied about classified and highly sensitive documents he had taken and failed to return, and then tried to over-up his crimes and destroy evidence with the help of idiot-loyalists.

He is now committed to appointing sycophants to run the Justice Department and the FBI.  

His first nominee for Attorney General -- former Rep. Matt Gaetz -- spent years repeating Trump's "weaponization" lie and his second -- Florida's ex-Attorney General Pam Bondi -- is a 2020 election denier who defended Trump in his first impeachment trial and has promised to "prosecute the prosecutors" who indicted Trump during the Biden administration.  

His putative FBI Director -- Kash Patel --  has pledged to "find the conspirators -- not just in government, but in the media . . . who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections." As Patel put it, "We're going to come after you. Whether it's criminally or civilly, we'll figure that out."  In his 2022 book Government Gangsters, Patel actually named the sixty people he intends to "come after".  The list is a Who's Who of Trump opponents and critics. It includes President Biden, Vice President Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland, former President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Robert Mueller, and witnesses who testified against Trump, some before the US House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, others in Trump's two impeachment trials.

These are not people who can be counted on the uphold the rule of law and they are not people Joe Biden is obliged to assume will proceed in good faith.  The far greater likelihood is that they will turn the Justice Department and the FBI into a today's version of McCarthyism. In the 1950s, Wisconsin's then-junior Senator said he had lists of "known communists" working in the US State Department. He didn't but numerous lives were ruined as he pretended otherwise. Today's McCarthyism pretends Trump won an election he lost and wants to prosecute the very people who tried to hold him accountable for his attempted coup. To insure this occurs, Trump is appointing fellow travelers at DOJ (Bondi)  and the FBI (Patel).

For them . . .

Hunter Biden was a target in waiting.  

It wasn't going to end with guns and taxes. 

Regardless of the facts.

Consider this possibility:

Hunter Biden was scheduled to be sentenced this month. Assume, for purposes of argument, that he was able to avoid serving time in jail and was given an extended probationary sentence and fines, neither of which would be uncommon given the victim-less nature of the gun crime and the full payments (back tax, interest and penalties) on the tax charge.

How do you think Trump, Bondi, Patel and the beholden-GOP would have reacted? 

What do you think Trump would have ordered Bondi and Patel to do on the afternoon of January 20, 2025?

For starters . . .

Fire Weiss, who obviously does not think Hunter or the President were bribed by Burisma?

Joe Biden was not obliged to find out.

Viewed as a life raft for a guy who did not deserve one, the pardon of Hunter Biden is an abuse of the rule of law.

But . . .

Viewed as a barrier that stops a fascist and his loyalists from turning the law into a machine that fulfills his own asinined grievances, pathological narcissism, and baseless conspiracy theories . . .

It is an act of statesmanship.

In light of the lethal possibilities that flow from Trump's inherent narcissism, Bondi's loyalty and Patel's list . . .

I hope there are many more.