If Hunter had a different last name, he would never have been able to launch a career in corrupt influence-peddling or launder millions through his “art” or write a self-serving memoir about crack-fueled whoremongering or dump of a gun next to a high school without any real consequences.
If Hunter’s last name wasn’t “Biden,” special counsel David Weiss would never have let him get away with failing to register as a foreign agent or avoid paying millions in taxes that flowed from his foreign arrangements. If your name isn’t Biden, don’t try writing off your hookers and crack as tax deductions.
If Hunter had been treated like anyone else, the Justice Department wouldn’t have tried to give him blanket immunity not only on gun and tax charges but on a slew of uninvestigated potential offenses, including bribery and corruption.
If it hadn’t been for a principled judge named Maryellen Noreika, asking the government’s so-called prosecutors if they could provide a single precedent in which immunity was offered to a person for “crimes in a different case” (they could not), Hunter Biden would have walked last year. The DOJ was trying to pardon Hunter Biden long before Donald Trump won the presidency.
Then again, if it wasn’t for the congressional testimony of Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, it’s highly unlikely Hunter Biden would have ever been charged even with those two piddling misdemeanor counts.
Because for four years, Merrick Garland and the DOJ acted as the Praetorian Guard of the Biden crime syndicate, doing everything possible to keep Hunter Biden out of a courtroom and then dragging their feet to ensure that the statute of limitations on the most serious potential crimes ran out.
Yes, Joe Biden lied on numerous occasions about never having discussed the family business with his son. Joe Biden also lied when he told the country he would never pardon his son. But the pardon letter itself is also a lie.
Like the president, many media outlets framed Joe Biden’s pardon as shielding Hunter Biden from specific gun and tax charges when it is a pardon for all federal crimes committed over the past decade, which includes the times Joe Biden was the vice president and president.
Any genuine investigation into the family’s $17 million foreign influence-peddling business would necessitate deposing the president of the United States and compelling him to answer numerous difficult queries about his connections to disreputable authoritarian regimes. Being a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” will only get you so far.
Hunter Biden’s laptop, despite censorious efforts of the press and social media platforms, was real and spectacular. It was filled with messages referencing his father’s role in securing money and taking cuts from the business, not to mention the witnesses who said that the “Big Guy” had a part in that outfit or the checks written out to Joe Biden.
If Hunter Biden hadn’t been treated differently by the government, he would have had to answer for the 20-plus shell companies he helped set up with his uncle James Biden.
In an Atlantic piece, Jonathan Chait, who spent years excusing Joe Biden’s corruption, contends that Hunter Biden ran a business “based on selling the perception of access to his father.” Really? How does he know? There has never been an investigation despite loads of circumstantial evidence implicating Joe Biden as a willing participant. If the name was Trump, not Biden, we would be gearing up for another impeachment.
Indeed, a little over a decade is a tremendously convenient time frame, considering it coincides when Hunter Biden first began pulling in $50,000-$83,000 per month as a board member of Burisma in 2014, just as his father was forging policy in that country for the Obama administration.
The pardon extends to 2015, when Hunter Biden received emails from a Ukrainian businessman thanking him for the chance to meet with Joe Biden when the latter was vice president.
It extends to 2017 when we have an email proposing an equity breakdown of a venture with Chicom energy concerns, which included the line, “10 held by H for the big guy?” It is the same year Hunter Biden threatened his Chinese partner, Henry Zhao, with the words: “I am sitting here with my father.” Even the Obama administration was worried about Biden Inc.
The pardon also extends to 2019, when Hunter Biden received two wire transfers totaling $260,000 from Beijing with the president’s Delaware home listed as the beneficiary address. The “perception of access” can be quite lucrative.
In May, when the lawfare against Trump was heating up, Joe Biden claimed that no one is “above the law.” This is not true. James Clapper, who lied under oath to Congress about spying on the public, is above the law. FBI agents who abused their power and conspired against the duly elected president are above the law. Generals who make secret calls to our enemies to circumvent the president are above the law. John Brennan, who lied about Hunter Biden’s laptop and a spying operation on Senate staffers, is above the law. Obama’s former Attorney General Eric Holder, unlike Trump appointees, was never going to be handcuffed or thrown into prison for ignoring a congressional subpoena. He is above the law. As were BLM rioters whom Vice President Kamala Harris helped bail out of prison.
And the Biden family is definitely above the law.
The closest recent example of family members being given pardons is Trump pardoning Charles Kushner, his son-in-law’s father, and Bill Clinton pardoning his half-brother. Though both pardons might have been unethical, the pardoned both served time for their crimes. Neither of them, needless to say, were granted 10-year blanket immunity for any criminality.
Many of the Democrats who’ll throw Joe Biden to the wolves now that it’s expedient were cheering on his destruction of “norms” for four years. The same Democrats who warned about the potential weaponization of a DOJ under Trump helped commandeer the agency as an arm of partisan lawfare — and not only to shield their worst actors. In 2016, the FBI helped create and legitimize a conspiracy theory about Trump being a Russian asset that paralyzed his entire presidency. It was basically a soft coup. During the Biden presidency, the DOJ was “weaponized” to go after pro-lifers, orthodox Catholics, parents protesting school boards, and, oh, the Republican presidential candidate.
Democrats have no credibility to oppose Kash Patel’s nomination to the FBI — or much else. It’s bad news for the country that the contemporary Left has decimated trust in so many institutions and “norms” in the name of saving them.
The president’s pardon power has long been misused, though perhaps never in such a blatant personal manner. Clemency power is ostensibly meant to forgive injustices of the system. It is the most king-like power vested in the presidency. So, it is unsurprising, one supposes, that Joe Biden, who abused his executive power recklessly for four years, would wield it for personal gain.
As always, many of the president’s defenders leaned into emotional appeals regarding the elder Biden. Any loving father would have pardoned his once addicted son — a privileged, middle-aged, Yale-educated lawyer and international lobbyist who is constantly being portrayed as a child. One could argue that a good father would never have enabled his drug-addicted son to engage in influence trading (though Hunter Biden was heavily involved in the business after he claimed sobriety.) What is certain, though, is that a patriot would never have put the country in this position.
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But then, “Scranton Joe” has always been a big myth. Much of the press helped fuel the bogus impression of Joe Biden as a man who “radiates decency.” In the real world, Joe Biden was an unimpressive blowhard senator, one of the most shameless fabulists in American political history, and a preternatural liar who would drop his alleged “principles” at the slightest partisan nudge. And, as it turns out, one of the most corrupt presidents in memory. This man, completely in over his head, lucked his way into the presidency on the heels of a pandemic and hysteria over Trump. Democrats portrayed Joe Biden as a centrist, normalizing force. Democrats across the media swore that he had proven his principled decency when allowing the DOJ to prosecute his own son, promising he would never pardon him. His integrity was juxtaposed against Trump, who was then under investigation by Joe Biden’s DOJ.
As it turns out, the lawfare against Trump was just as fake as the president’s alleged decency.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
