President Biden has decided to pardon his son Hunter 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, 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, 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 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, 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 before January 6th. Instead Garland did not even appoint a special prosecutor until more than two years 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, 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 directly, plus a blanket pardon for hundreds of thousands of Vietnam War–era draft dodgers. There are many people on federal death row 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.
