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JOE BIDEN FINALLY BREAKS A NORM TO KEEP HIS SON OUT OF PRISON  
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Ryan Cooper
December 3, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ Hunter Biden deserved a pardon. But America deserved a lot more
than that. _

President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden walk in downtown
Nantucket, Massachusetts, November 29, 2024., Jose Luis Magana/AP
Photo

 

President Biden has decided to pardon his son Hunter
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after promising for years he would not. He has issued a blanket pardon
for any and all crimes committed over the last ten years.

On the merits, a pardon for Hunter is entirely justified. But it is
highly emblematic of Biden’s profoundly wretched approach to
criminal justice that he has taken bold action to rectify the failings
of the Department of Justice only when they threaten his own son.
Donald Trump may well end American democracy because Biden and
Attorney General Merrick Garland failed to enforce federal law. But at
least the president for the next month and a half prevented one
man—and one man only—from being railroaded by the justice system.

The case against Hunter was trumped-up nonsense from the start, both
literally and figuratively. Hunter has apparently committed many
crimes
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from illegal drug possession to soliciting prostitutes. But he was
charged with lying about drug use on a gun permit application in 2018.
It was a first offense and no one was hurt. As Ryan J. Reilly writes
at NBC News
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regular people are almost never charged with this crime. This is a
country where buying a military-grade arsenal at Walmart while hopped
up on an illegal substance of some kind is practically the national
pastime. And rich elites are as a rule virtually immune from
prosecution of any kind, let alone penny-ante paperwork crimes like
this. That’s not a reason to overlook or nullify the law, of course,
but the context is worth noting.

The Hunter Biden investigation is rooted
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in the 2020 Trump campaign, in which Hunter was the central character
in an effort to characterize the Biden family as riddled with
corruption. David Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for
Delaware, opened the investigation back in 2019.

When Biden took office, he appointed Merrick Garland as attorney
general, and both men were obsessed with what they considered
political neutrality. Rather than firing Weiss or removing him from
the case, he was allowed to continue investigating the president’s
son.

Originally, the case bore all the hallmarks of an American prosecution
of some rich elite—with lots of delay, anxious hand-wringing about
impropriety, and eventually a plea bargain, which was offered in 2022.
But Trump and the right-wing media screamed bloody murder in response,
apparently leading the prosecution to change the terms of the deal
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which then fell through.

Details aside, Hunter almost certainly would not have been prosecuted,
and _certainly_ would have gotten a plea deal with no prison time, if
his father had not run for president and won. Biden is correct to
point out: “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.”

Much like in mainstream political reporting, the Department of Justice
being “neutral” means bending over backwards to appease
conservatives. This also helps explain why Garland failed to punish
Trump in any way for attempting to overthrow the government, making
Garland for my money the worst attorney general in American history.
What justice demanded after January 6th was a drumhead trial and
summary judgment while the shock of the event was still fresh. The
crime was carried out on live television, and key evidence was
published publicly
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before January 6th. Instead Garland did not even appoint a special
prosecutor until more than two years
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after the 2020 election. Trump’s own attorneys general, Jeff
Sessions and William Barr, did more to stop Trump from abusing power
than Garland did.

But now it turns out that Biden is, in fact, willing to break norms,
abandon fake neutrality, and overrule the judgment of Republican
prosecutors—but only to keep his failson out of jail and not for any
other reason.

Biden could have and should have pardoned his son or canned Weiss, or
both, on the first day of his administration. This would have been
more honest and more fair. Instead, he pretended that he was going to
let the system play out “normally,” only to reverse course when it
didn’t play out the way he wanted. He also should have appointed
someone other than a limp dishrag in human shape to serve as attorney
general. Instead he picked Merrick Garland, who couldn’t put away a
would-be dictator given more time than it took the U.S. to win the
Second World War.

A final disgrace is how few people Biden has pardoned in
general—just 26
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at time of writing. The American criminal justice system is stuffed to
bursting with people who were treated much more unfairly than Hunter
Biden. By way of comparison, Jimmy Carter pardoned some 566 people
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plus a blanket pardon for hundreds of thousands
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of Vietnam War–era draft dodgers. There are many people on federal
death row
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who will certainly die if they are still there when Trump takes
office. Let’s hope Biden can spare a thought for someone outside his
own family as well.

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Ryan Cooper is the Prospect’s managing editor, and author of ‘How
Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question
in Politics.’ He was previously a national correspondent for The
Week.

* Hunter Biden; President Biden's Pardons; Merrick Garland;
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