The president issued a pardon “total and unconditional” on Sunday, absolving Hunter Biden54, of any crime committed in the last decade.
Hunter Biden was convicted by a jury in June of lying about his drug use when he bought a gun and pleaded guilty in another trial for tax evasion, this after he would have reached an irregular agreement with the Department of Justice led by Merrick Garland appointed by Biden and a former official in Barack Obama’s administration, of which Biden was his vice president.
Biden justified the decision by claiming that his son had been the subject of a “politicized process” begun under the Trump administration and that “there is no reason to believe it will stop here.”
The pardon was surprising because when he arrived at the White House In 2021, he committed to restoring the “integrity” of a judicial system that Democrats considered “corrupt” after Trump’s term (2017-2021), despite the fact that the Biden administration has used the Department of Justice as a tool to persecute his adversaries and benevolent with the corruption cases of which Hunter Biden has been accused and the alleged involvement of other members of the Biden family.
Pardon for “sensation”
“It was not an easy decision,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre declared on Monday aboard Air Force One, bound for Angola, who repeatedly said that the president would not pardon her son.
And the White House denied time and time again that Biden was going to pardon his son. The last of them on November 7.
“The president does believe in the justice system and the Department of Justice, but he also believes that his son has been politically targeted. That is what we have seen over and over again in recent years,” the House spokesperson stressed. White.
In this sense, he argued that one of Biden’s reasons for granting clemency has been his feeling that his political opponents were not going to pass up the opportunity to persecute his son. “It didn’t seem like they wanted to forget it,” he said.
However, the spokesperson evaded questions about Biden’s change of opinion and did not clarify exactly what the specific trigger was that led him to make the controversial decision. Jean-Pierre was even asked if the Biden Administration will ask for the resignation of Attorney General Merrick Garland, to which he responded with a resounding “no.”
“I don’t think it’s a contradiction. Both things can be true. You can believe in the Department of Justice and you can also believe that the process has been politically affected,” Jean-Pierre insisted at a press conference.
Journalists also questioned whether Biden “he has faith in the judicial system except in cases involving his son.”
“Iceberg”
“He’s a liar,” conservative political strategist Scott Jennings, a White House staffer during the George W. Bush administration, told CNN.
“For months, he and his White House spokespeople promised Americans that he would not forgive Hunter Biden,” Republican Senator Tom Cotton recalled on Fox News on Monday.
“Now we know that his word is worthless,” he added.
For Republican James Comer, the accusations against Hunter “were just the tip of the iceberg” and the president lied “from beginning to end about his family’s corrupt influence-peddling activities.”
“It is unfortunate that, instead of acknowledging their decades of bad practices, President Biden and his family continue to do everything possible to avoid accountability,” the congressman added on the X network.
Democrats fear that Trump will use Biden’s decision to justify pardoning those convicted of the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, a plot that Republicans accuse Democrats of following an election that Trump considered fraudulent in 2020.
“Does Joe’s pardon for Hunter include the J-6 (January 6) hostages, who have already been imprisoned for years?” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Sunday.
“Bad precedent”
Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, accused the president of having “put his family before the country.”
“This is a bad precedent (…) that will unfortunately tarnish his reputation,” Polis published in X.
However, political scientist Nicholas Creel of Georgia College and State University argues that nothing Biden does before leaving office will influence his successor, who “simply doesn’t care about precedent.”
“While I’m sure there will be many experts who claim that Biden pardoning his son opens the door for Trump to use his pardon power in overtly personal and political ways, I find that ridiculous,” he said.
American presidents issue hundreds of pardons or commutations of sentences, especially at the end of their four-year terms.
The pardon granted to Hunter constitutes one of the few cases in which an American president exercises this constitutional power for the benefit of his family.
Released from years in prison
Hunter was found guilty last June on three counts in a case related to the illegal purchase of a firearm in 2018, having acquired it when he was a known drug user. Two of the three crimes with which he was charged carry a maximum penalty of ten years in prison, while the third of them is punishable by up to five years.
Last September, the US president’s son pleaded guilty to nine charges, three of them serious, related to the non-payment of $1.4 million in taxes between 2016 and 2019, as well as trying to declare payments he made as business expenses. to prostitutes, a subscription to a pornographic website, and his daughter’s college.
