Joe Biden breaks his promise and pardons Hunter

President Joe Biden announced Sunday that he pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, sparing him ahead of sentencing for felony tax and gun crimes. The ne’er-do-well was potentially facing years of jail time after pleading guilty to nine federal tax charges and getting convicted of three felony gun offenses. “Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter. From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,” Biden said in a statement released Sunday…

President Joe Biden announced Sunday that he pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, sparing him ahead of sentencing for felony tax and gun crimes. The ne’er-do-well was potentially facing years of jail time after pleading guilty to nine federal tax charges and getting convicted of three felony gun offenses.

“Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter. From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,” Biden said in a statement released Sunday night. He also alleged that the judicial process had been tainted by politics and was worried that investigations and prosecutions against his son would continue after his presidency.

The decision came as a shock to those who still believe the “word of a Biden” meant something. The president and his press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, insisted multiple times that Biden would never pardon his son. Jean-Pierre attempted to reconcile her repeated denials from the podium with Biden’s signature on the pardon paperwork by claiming that Biden only reached the decision this weekend — rebutting a story in NBC News that said he had discussed the possibility with confidants in June.

But the flip-flop shouldn’t surprise anyone who has paid much attention to the Biden family, which is as self-interested as it gets. Joe Biden has been making excuses for Hunter’s behavior for years, including getting his presidential campaign to coordinate with national security officials to reject Hunter’s laptop as Russian disinformation. The president’s granddaughter lived rent-free at the White House for three months so she could cosplay as American royalty with an excessively extravagant wedding on the South Lawn. Biden’s brother James reportedly bragged about his connections to political power to help his own business. Dr. Jill allegedly forced the Marine Corps band to create her own first lady walk-up music and covered up her husband’s mental decline to stay in power longer. Biden himself has a history of plagiarism and fabrication and, if we are to believe the reports, was more worried about his “legacy” as a president than he was doing right by the American people.

Media revisionists are already casting the pardon as proof of Joe Biden being a loving father above all. But it’s not good parenting to never let your kids learn from their mistakes. As my colleague Ben Domenech writes, “Love sometimes requires you to be tough, to require honorable consequences, especially in the face of addiction of all forms.” Biden treats his son like a “dysfunctional teenager” rather than a “pompous fifty-four-year-old prick whose day job is as a corrupt artist and night job is ‘sober-ish’ in the mid-Atlantic sense,” Ben adds.

It’s also important to note that the pardon covers all possible crimes committed by Hunter going back to 2014, not just the tax and gun convictions. Could this be because that’s when Hunter’s alleged pay-to-play scheme as a Burisma board member got under way? Perhaps Joe just wants to protect Hunter from any legal exposure from his years of sex and drug escapades. Perhaps, more sinisterly, Joe is protecting himself from further investigation into the “family business,” i.e. foreign cash transfers in exchange for access to the vice president, if Hunter’s former business partners and the House Oversight Committee are to be believed.

Biden might have a big swath of his party and the media ready to defend him, but some are clear-eyed enough to see the truth. CNN legal analyst Elie Honig said that the pardon will “tarnish Joe Biden’s legacy,” adding that he “lied to us for a long time.”

If there is one good thing for Republicans about Hunter’s pardon, it’s that Joe Biden played right into Donald Trump’s complaints about a two-tiered justice system. “Donald Trump has spoken frequently about the possibility of pardoning unfairly incarcerated pawns. Biden’s outrageous abuse of his authority makes that much more likely,” Spectator contributor Roger Kimball writes.

-Amber Duke

On our radar

TRUDEAU FLIES SOUTH FOR WINTER Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau flew to Mar-a-Lago this weekend to hold a bilateral meeting with President-elect Donald Trump on issues of trade, illegal immigration, energy, and defense spending. Trump has threatened Canada and Mexico with a 25 percent tariff on all products exported to the US.

COVID CONCLUSIONS The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released its final report on the Covid-19 outbreak Monday, concluding that the virus almost certainly leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, that the US government was funding gain-of-function research and that overly broad lockdowns were “worse than the disease,” in addition to other key findings.

WORD OF THE YEAR The Oxford University Press named its 2024 word of the year as “brain rot.” Oxford defines it as the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”

Democrats for DoGE

Elon Musk is the world’s wealthiest, most famous and most notorious former Democrat. Now, the green-energy pioneer is best friends with President-elect Donald Trump and is hell bent on slashing wasteful spending, even if it eliminates tax credits to his own companies.

Musk, alongside businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, will soon be helming the Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE), which will expire on America’s 250th birthday in 2026 with a lofty goal of cutting trillions of dollars in government spending. The pair of eccentric Republicans have gotten some surprising reinforcements along the way.

None other than Senator Bernie Sanders admitted that “Elon Musk is right” to look at waste in the Pentagon, for example. “The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions,” the Democratic socialist senator wrote on X, which Musk owns.

But Sanders is not alone among Democrats in admitting that Musk may be onto something.

“They could save tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars depending on how it is structured and what they do, this could be a constructive undertaking that ought to be embraced,” Senator Chris Coons, one of President Joe Biden’s top allies in the Senate, said. The clip was eagerly tweeted by America PAC, into which Musk has plowed millions of dollars.

Congressman Ro Khanna, who recently criticized his home state governor, Gavin Newsom, for failing to include Tesla in planned electric vehicle subsidies, made his willingness to work with Musk even clearer. “When it comes to cutting waste, fraud, and abuse and opening the 5 primes to more competition, there are Democrats on HASC who will work with @elonmusk and @DOGE,” Khanna tweeted.

“Cool!” Musk posted in response.

Musk and Ramaswamy can expect an even warmer reception from Republicans in Congress, who have already rolled out a select subcommittee in the House of Representatives and a DoGE Caucus in the Senate.

–Matthew Foldi

Conservatives thumb noses at Trump’s DEA pick

President Donald Trump’s pick to head the Drug Enforcement Administration, Hillsborough County sheriff Chad Chronister, ran into headwinds from conservatives who are aghast at the Florida man’s record during the coronavirus pandemic.

“I’m going to call ’em like I see ’em,” Congressman Thomas Massie wrote on X. “Trump’s nominee for head of DEA should be disqualified for ordering the arrest of a pastor who defied Covid lockdowns.”

While Massie has no say in confirmation votes, he is not a lone voice in expressing concern about Chronister, who posted on his own X account several years ago about arresting Pastor Ronald Howard-Browne for “intentionally and repeatedly disregard[ing] state and local public health orders, which put his congregation and our community in danger.”

Some of Chronister’s critics have noted that he also urged boaters “to keep fifty feet between your boat and other boats and follow @CDCgov guidelines” at the onset of the pandemic.

Sean Davis, CEO of the Federalist, summed up the argument against Chronister: “Chad Chronister is a woke, BLM-excusing, DEI-enforcing, immigration law-ignoring buffoon. There are thousands of solid sheriffs in this country who are far more qualified to run DEA than this left-wing clown.”

The sheriff is not without his allies, many of whom are the only votes he actually needs in order to get confirmed. His home state senator, Rick Scott, praised him as “an incredible pick to lead the DEA.

“When I appointed Chad as Hillsborough County Sheriff in 2017, he had already spent more than twenty years in law enforcement fighting every day to protect Florida families,” Scott said. “His work over the last seven years shows Chad’s dedication to cracking down on crime, fighting the fentanyl crisis, and showing up every day to keep Floridians safe.”

–Cockburn