President Joe Biden repeatedly assured the nation, ahead of the 2024 election, that he would not pardon his son Hunter, who was convicted on a charge of lying on a federal form for a gun purchase and on serious federal tax charges. If he was telling the truth then, something changed his mind.
On Sunday, Biden granted Hunter an extraordinarily broad pardon. Perhaps Biden was lying all along.
In October 2020, the New York Post broke the story that Hunter’s laptop computer, abandoned at a repair shop and later retrieved by the FBI, contained emails that indicated Joe Biden may have been more involved with Hunter’s overseas business dealings than he had previously admitted.
Despite overwhelming efforts to deny, disparage and conceal the story, investigators in Congress and the Internal Revenue Service eventually pieced together evidence that beginning when Joe Biden was vice president in the Obama administration, the Biden family had received millions of dollars in payments from overseas interests in countries including China and Ukraine.
While the IRS investigated Hunter’s failure to file or pay taxes over a period of years, the Biden administration’s Department of Justice slow-walked any prosecution and allowed the statute of limitations to expire on the most serious charges. IRS whistleblowers testified to Congress that federal prosecutors impeded their investigation by prohibiting inquiries that touched on Joe Biden’s involvement.
The unusual special handling of Hunter’s cases culminated in a negotiated plea deal in July 2023 that fell apart in open court when U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika asked questions about the details of the agreement, including a provision that seemed to grant Hunter Biden blanket immunity, preventing future prosecutions for other past crimes. Noreika inquired whether prosecutors had ever before seen a similar plea deal. Prosecutors admitted that they had not.
In a statement on Sunday, the president complained untruthfully that the plea deal broke down because of pressure from his “political opponents in Congress” and insisted that Hunter was “singled out only because he is my son.” All available evidence points in the opposite direction: the president’s son was singled out for exceptional, kid-glove treatment.
With sentencing dates fast approaching for the gun and tax convictions, the president granted Hunter a pardon for “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through December 1, 2024.”
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That covers everything within the statute of limitations dating to the start of Hunter’s appointment to the board of the much-investigated Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.
Now that he has been pardoned for all crimes charged or uncharged, Hunter Biden has lost the ability to assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Congress, or federal prosecutors pursuing other cases, could force him to testify. But they can’t force him to recall anything.
In its recent ruling on presidential immunity, the U.S. Supreme Court said the pardon power cannot be limited by Congress or challenged in the courts, and a president’s motives may not be investigate
Still, Joe Biden has disgraced himself with this pardon. He has forfeited any claim to the moral high ground in American politics. As Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colorado, has said, “President Biden’s decision put personal interest ahead of duty and further erodes Americans’ faith that the justice system is fair and equal for all.”