On Sunday, President Joe Biden pardoned his only living son, Hunter Biden. Hunter was convicted, earlier this year, of three felonies associated with buying a gun while in the throes of addiction. The prosecution of Hunter Biden was always intended as a political attack on his father, and while Hunter absolutely had/has issues, very few in the legal and law enforcement community actually believed that Hunter should be imprisoned for years for these felonies, which is what would have happened. Now that Donald Trump is the incoming president and Joe Biden is going to retire to Delaware, Biden changed his mind. He said back in June that he wouldn’t pardon Hunter. That was before he was squeezed out of his reelection campaign. That was before Trump “won.”

President Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon of his son Hunter on Sunday night after repeatedly insisting he would not do so, using the power of his office to wave aside years of legal troubles, including a federal conviction for illegally buying a gun and for tax evasion.

In a statement issued by the White House, Mr. Biden said he had decided to issue the executive grant of clemency for his son “for those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024.”

He said he made the decision because the charges against Hunter were politically motivated and designed to hurt him politically. “The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” Mr. Biden said in the statement. “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.”

He added: “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

It was a remarkable turnaround for a man whose presidency and five-decade career was built in part on the idea that he would never interfere with the administration of justice. In 2020, he made the case that former President Donald J. Trump should be ousted from office to restore that kind of independence in America’s democracy, and he argued the same in 2024. But in his statement, Mr. Biden sought to make the case for interfering after all, accusing his political enemies of going after his son in ways that anyone else would not have been. He said that he still believed in the justice system, but added, “I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice — and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further.”

[From The NY Times]

The “I thought you believed in the justice system” line of attack is so stupid, as is the line of “he made the case that former President Donald J. Trump should be ousted from office to restore that kind of independence in America’s democracy.” One man incited an insurrection on the nation’s Capitol, another man pardoned his son after a malicious political prosecution on gun charges. They are not the same. And Americans clearly wanted the insurrectionist anyway. Speaking of, the Times does note that Trump has made a lot of noise about even more retribution and revenge against the Biden family for his second term. I do not blame President Biden at all for pardoning his son. Apparently, Pres. Biden told Hunter about his plans to pardon him over the Thanksgiving holiday. It would not surprise me at all if Biden made the final choice to pardon Hunter right after he went to church on Sunday.

Anyway, Trump has promised pardons for all of the January 6th insurrectionists. In his first term, he pardoned many of his biggest political allies, some of the biggest nutjobs in the country – Joe Arpaio, Dinesh D’Souza, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Stephen K. Bannon, and George Papadopoulos, just to name a few. If you’re mad about Hunter Biden’s pardon, keep that same energy for all of these f–kers.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.