A “fortunate son” indeed

When I last wrote about Hunter Biden for WORLD Opinions back in June 2023, the column was titled “Fortunate son?” What was then a question has been definitively answered by President Joe Biden’s decision to extend a full and thorough pardon to his son for crimes going all the way back to 2014.

The potential and admitted violations of the law are numerous: at minimum, including hard drug use, prostitution, illegal possession of a firearm (three counts), tax evasion (nine counts), and failure to register as a foreign agent while lobbying the government of the United States. Allegations also swirled that he was shuffling money from foreign governments and businesses to the point of trading policy for cash. He has already been convicted of the firearms and tax evasion counts and faced years in a federal prison. But the president’s pardon goes beyond just the points on which he has already been convicted. It encompasses everything going back a decade, whether or not it has been charged (or even known).

The American people will rightly be outraged by this perceived presidential favoritism. They’ll be doubly frustrated because President Biden and his spokespeople had promised many times not to pardon Hunter Biden, as recently as June. But those pledges all went out the window now that the election is over and the president’s son faced sentencing in just a few weeks.

The pardon is yet another chapter in the sordid tale of politicization of the U.S. Department of Justice. WORLD readers know this well: The targeting of pro-life protestors under the FACE Act, the heavy-handed HIPAA charges against a whistleblower on transgender children’s surgeries, the FBI investigation into traditionalist Catholics, the dispatching of federal authorities to look into all those parents who dared to show up at school board meetings. Now we see the flip side: The power to prosecute your political opponents is also the power to pardon your allies, and apparently your children.

I hope President-elect Donald Trump is ready to use his pardon power on Day 1 in office. He can start by withdrawing the charges against whistleblower Eithan Haim and pardoning or commuting disproportionate sentences of the pro-lifer “rescuers” convicted under the FACE Act. He should also ask the Office of the Pardon Attorney to analyze whether any Jan. 6, 2021, protestors received disproportionate sentences that seemed politically motivated.

But whatever President-elect Trump does upon taking office will be an appropriate policy response to the weaponization of the Justice Department. It will be totally different in kind from what President Biden has done here, which is nothing more than the exercise of raw political power in favor of a family member. No one doubts Hunter Biden broke several of these laws—he has even admitted to several of the crimes in his memoir or court filings. But he will escape justice for all of them.

If President Biden thinks a broad pardon or the termination of his tenure in office will end Republican interest in the potential bribery angle, I think he has another thing coming. For one thing, some lawyers are suggesting that Hunter Biden will no longer be able to claim the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination now that he’s protected by the pardon. And Republicans, who have retained control of Congress, can continue to press forward with investigations. Other avenues of accountability are also possible, such as the pending investigation to terminate Hunter Biden’s D.C. law license.

When President Gerald Ford decided to pardon his predecessor, Richard Nixon, his polling numbers tanked, and it likely cost him the election in 1976. Yet it was a necessary predicate to putting Watergate in the past—A Time to Heal was the right title for Ford’s autobiography. President Biden’s pardon of Hunter Biden will not put his crimes in the past. It may keep his son out of jail. And he may hope that doing so on a Sunday of a holiday weekend will minimize the press attention. But I don’t think Republicans in Congress or their base will so easily move on from the allegations—this may well only fuel the fire.