Hunter Biden’s pardon is the death rattle of the elites
President Biden’s pardoning of his son shatters the moral pretensions of the establishment
And just like that, the virtuous come crashing back down to Earth. For months, US president Joe Biden said he would not pardon his son, Hunter. We the high-minded do not play such low games, he said. We respect juries. We respect the law of the land. Look how different we are to Donald Trump, how so much more morally spotless, cried the Dems’ acolytes in the legacy media. Where Trump handed out pardons like candy to his crooked associates, we the righteous few, the ‘adults in the room’, would never dream of exonerating bent friends at the expense of the integrity of the republic. We are better than that, they said. Over and over and over.
Yet now, lo, a pardon has been issued. Biden has gone back on his word. Juries, it seems, don’t count for much after all. The law of the land must play second fiddle to Hunter’s freedom. And the preening elites who held up their non-pardoning president as proof that they are a better moral breed than Trump and the plebs who vote for him now find themselves in the dirt with the rest of us. The magnitude of what Biden has done feels positively dizzying. In so spectacularly breaking his own promise, in spending his last few weeks in this decaying administration issuing emperor-like decrees of liberty to his own kin, he has shattered the moral pretensions of his presidency, his party and arguably his entire class.
The pardon is extraordinary. Hunter was due to be sentenced this month on his convictions for illegal gun possession and tax evasion. He was the first child of a serving president to be convicted of a crime and it looked certain he would spend time in the slammer. But daddy has saved him. And then some. The ‘Executive Grant of Clemency’ is sweeping. Not only does it wash away the crimes we know for sure that Hunter committed – it also protects him from being charged with any other offence that may have occurred in recent years. As Politico put it, the decree ‘insulates’ Hunter from ‘ever facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade’.
So this is more than the clemency that many presidents have granted through history. Much more. It feels like a Rome-style bestowing of a special status on the son of the ruler. The erection of a moral shield around a convicted criminal solely on the basis that he shares the DNA of the president, that he’s a blood princeling to the court of the Democrats. Dems really went from saying ‘We don’t pardon our loved ones like Trump does’ to issuing the most sweeping aristocratic annulment of a jury decision of modern times. Margaret Love, a former pardon attorney in the Justice Department, says she has ‘never seen language like this in a pardon document’. Apart from in Gerald Ford’s blanket pardon for Richard Nixon in 1974, that is. There, too, the pardon extended even to offences not yet charged.
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