Joe Biden Knew It Was Wrong to Pardon Hunter
If this was an appropriate and justified act, why did the president lie about his intention not to do it?
Dear readers,
I’m not terribly surprised that the president lied to us about his intention to pardon his son. One of the most common versions of a “defense” of the pardon I’ve seen is an argument that this is simply what parents do: They protect their children, using whatever powers are available to them. If you are the president, you just have especially extensive powers at your disposal.
The reason I don’t find this “defense” convincing is that our leaders are supposed to be better than the average person. Of course it is quite human and common to abuse your power, but that’s why we’re supposed to elect exceptional people to lead us, and it’s why we build checks and balances into our system of government to limit individual officials’ ability to turn the power of the state toward their personal gain. The pardon power sticks out like a sore thumb in our constitutional system for the lack of such checks, which is why many presidents have abused it. Even despite that legacy of abuse, few have been so bold as to pardon their own relatives.
We can and should expect presidents to rise above the human temptation to abuse the office’s powers toward personal ends, such as by immunizing their children from criminal liability.
I have also seen a lot of whataboutism. Democrats are responding to criticism of the pardon by pointing out that Trump has done a lot of unethical things and will likely do more of them soon. More broadly, Democrats are once again striking up the band about how unfair it is that we need to hold up the “norms” and “ethics” side of things all by ourselves during the Trump era. But Democrats have pitched the Democratic Party as the party that stands for and acts according to better practices and better ethics. So I don’t have sympathy for the complaining — if you’re going to tell people to vote for you because the other side is unethical, you have to be ethical; otherwise, the pitch doesn’t make sense.
In this vein, a lot of people are misunderstanding a tweet from Adam Rubenstein, who warns Biden’s pardon of his son “will be used to justify” whatever ridiculous pardons Donald Trump issues next year. Rubenstein’s claim is not that the Hunter pardon will cause Trump to issue pardons he otherwise would have shied away from; he’s pointing out that the Hunter pardon will make it hard for Democrats to convincingly argue that voters need to elect us to prevent similar abuses of power. And he’s right.
Nor do I have any sympathy for Hunter Biden, personally. President Biden’s statement argues that Hunter was railroaded for political reasons, by a Department of Justice that was too easily cowed by political pressure from Republicans in Congress. And I think it’s true that a less-prominent miscreant who did exactly what Hunter did probably would have ended up facing only civil penalties for the tax violations and no gun charge. But in a broader, cosmic sense, I think the world had been more than fair to Hunter, even before the pardon. If his father weren’t Joe Biden, he probably wouldn’t have been prosecuted, but he also never would have gotten the jobs that paid him handsomely solely for having access to Joe Biden. He also likely would not have had a personal friend willing to lend him the millions of dollars he needed to repay his back taxes after he blew all of his own money on hookers and cocaine. “He ultimately paid his tax bill” is a central part of the argument that his tax problems should have been handled as a civil matter, but if he weren’t the president’s son, he likely wouldn’t have had the unusual luck of being able to repay his tax debt with money that wasn’t his.
Most crimes go unprosecuted. Is it “unfair” to be caught and penalized when most other people are not? Is it “unfair” when prominent people are made an example of because of the higher deterrence value that comes from higher-profile prosecutions? It seems to me that Hunter Biden is a guy who was handed every advantage in the world, and when handed that advantage he behaved in all sorts of terrible ways — he built a corrupt business, he left his wife to take up with his brother’s widow and then got her hooked on crack cocaine, he fathered a love child (with a third woman) whom he sought unsuccessfully to disclaim, he recklessly endangered his father’s political project through his creation of scandal (even publishing a memoir about his bad acts while his dad was president!)1, and then he gave his father terrible advice to fight on in the 2024 campaign when the main thing the Democrats needed was for the Bidens to just go away. He’s a bad man who has rained an endless storm of shit down upon his family, inflicting quite a bit of damage on the Democratic Party along the way, and my overall feeling about his “misfortune” is that if he didn’t want to go to prison, he should at least have paid his fucking taxes with his own corruptly-earned money.
Perhaps the part of President Biden’s pardon announcement that made me angriest of all was where he complained of a conspiracy to “break” Hunter, referencing his son’s ongoing sobriety in spite of his legal challenges. It is clear that the Biden family has long treated the management of Hunter’s substance abuse problems as a communal project, sometimes to the point of enablement. But how they dealt with the fact that their loved one is a crack-addled sociopath was mostly their own private family business. When it became our business — as Democrats and as Americans — was when Joe Biden directed the resources and stature of both the party and the government he headed to the Save Hunter Project. Turning away warnings of the impropriety of Hunter’s Burisma business when he was vice president; putting Hunter on stage at the Democratic National Convention; inviting him to a state dinner right after he’d been indicted; making constant public remarks about how proud he is of Hunter, his scandal-soaked son, who has “done nothing wrong” — the most charitable take one can have on the obvious blind eye that Joe turned toward his son’s corrupt dealings is that he believed casting his son out would cause him to relapse into substance abuse again. But that still amounts to having used his professional resources as the president of the United States to try to make his son feel important and valuable (even though he wasn’t) in desperate hope that it would help him avoid relapse.
And none of this should ever have been our problem. It is neither the party’s nor the government’s job to stop Hunter from using crack. Allowing Hunter to cost even one bit of political capital amounts to an improper diversion of public resources for the Biden family’s private ends.
The pardon is just the final, percussive instance of using public resources to clean up the Hunter mess. All the other professional resources available to President Biden weren’t enough to keep his son out of trouble — only the one presidential power that’s virtually unchecked would suffice.2
The last thing I’d note about the arguments that pardoning your troublesome son is just a normal and obvious human thing to do is that Biden consistently, for months, denied he would do it. If this pardon was appropriate, why did he ever feel the need to say he wouldn’t issue it? The lie is what tells us the president knew this was the wrong thing to do — and then he did it anyway. It’s shameful.
Very seriously,
Josh
Note that Hunter Biden’s politically inconvenient tell-all memoir, Beautiful Things, was published in 2021, after he had apparently gotten sober. A lot of the commentary about Hunter treats his destructive behavior as principally a result of his addiction; I think it’s under-appreciated how selfish and destructive his behavior has continued to be even in sobriety. There is a broader personality problem at work here.
I would note that there is one available check on the pardon power: impeachment. And I am tempted to argue that a member of the House of Representatives should force the issue: impeachment articles can be brought up by any member as a privileged resolution, forcing a recorded vote on either the impeachment or (much more likely) on tabling the impeachment or referring it to a committee. Any kind of vote on an impeachment resolution against President Biden over the Hunter pardon would be an opportunity to get all the members of the House on the record on a question that is likely to remain relevant during the next administration: Is it okay for a president to use the pardon power to protect his own close associates from justice? The reason I’m only tempted to argue this but did not do so, is that I am afraid of the answer the House would render, given Democrats’ reluctance to stand up to Biden, and Republicans’ likely desire to avoid setting a precedent that Trump will soon run afoul of. It’s probably better not to know how many “yes” votes a motion to table would get. But I would be curious to see it.
I honestly just don't care. Biden's political career is dirt, and I don't buy the argument that this cost the Democrat's any political capital. The political capital of ethics and norms is also worth dirt at this point - MSNBC has been shrieking about it for eight years now, and look where that's landed. But more importantly, it's completely immaterial to the work that needs to be done to reform the party.
Elected dems and 2026 candidates should forcefully denounce this if they see fit, and railroad Biden to their maximum advantage. But they should already be doing that with or without the Hunter pardon. The democratic party needs a full overhaul, and frankly, Biden behaving immorally probably makes it easier to distance ourselves from his failed politics.
Eh, bad take in my opinion. Maybe I would have agreed with you prior to Trump.
Trump already pardoned his son-in-law’s father (Charles Kushner), plus Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and others who did misdeeds in his name.
The reality is that it doesn’t matter if the Dems do it or not. Moral high ground doesn’t matter. Trump and MAGA will do what they want, and if they don’t have actual justification, they’ll just make up justification and their base will eat it up.