Views: 6
Biden’s pardon proves there is no equality before the law in America.
When Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race in July, he was hailed for putting his country before himself.
Now, after pardoning his son Hunter for gun and tax crimes, the President faces the same allegation only in reverse: putting his family before his country.
Biden’s decision to grant clemency to his wayward, former drug addict son has sent shockwaves across Washington and will have profound implications for Donald Trump’s presidency.
It also further stains Biden’s legacy, which was already battered after Kamala Harris lost the election against Trump, following accusations that he clung on in the race for too long, damaging his Vice President’s chances.
The most stunning part of Biden’s statement announcing the pardon was that he has essentially adopted Trump’s argument that the justice system has been politicised.
As the President put it: “Raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice”. Biden wrote: “In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”
Squint a bit and it may well remind you of a certain former president claiming for years he has been the victim of a “WITCH HUNT!!!”.
Already Trump is saying he will free all the jailed January 6 Capitol rioters in response, a sign he is enraged by the hypocrisy of the President’s decision.
Republicans may now rally around Trump’s pick to run the FBI, Kash Patel, who claims the bureau is part of a “deep state” conspiracy against the former president.
What makes this worse is that the pardon covers any potential crimes over an 11-year period, an extraordinary time that stretches the boundaries of pardons.
On top of that, Biden and his team have said again and again that the President would not pardon his son.
“I will not pardon him,” said Biden in June after Hunter was found guilty on the gun charges. He was due to be sentenced this month for that case and the separate tax allegations, for which he pleaded guilty, and was facing up to 20 years in jail for both.
Yet Biden’s other comments in that same statement also offer a clue as to why he changed his mind.
Biden said he had “boundless love” for his son, who survived a car crash in 1972 that killed Hunter’s mother, Neilia, and his 13-month-old sister, Naomi.
Hunter, who was three at the time, survived, as did his brother, Beau, who was four, but tragedy struck again in 2015 when Beau died of a brain tumor aged 46.
Hunter’s troubled life, including years of drug use, a torrid affair with Beau’s widow that destroyed his own marriage, and another affair with a stripper with whom he fathered a baby, has been blamed on the trauma of the crash.
For decades his father has stood by him, showing Hunter an extraordinary amount of compassion despite his multiple stints in rehab.
In the pardon announcement, Biden said that he hoped that Americans “will understand why a father and a president would come to this decision”.
As a father, you can perhaps see why he did it. But there lies the central tension behind his decision: as a president he shouldn’t have done it.
If you are being purely Machiavellian, another way to look at this is that Democrats might finally be starting to play Republicans at their own game: doing whatever it takes to get what they want.
Biden’s calculation appears to have been that he may have torched his own reputation but his son will not be going to jail.
Republicans have been doing this for years, the most striking recent example being the former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell blocking Barack Obama from nominating a Supreme Court justice in the final months of his presidency.
At the time Democrats howled that it was unfair but the end result was that it worked and now there is a Republican majority on the highest court in the nation.
Trump has his own share of awful pardons too, including his former strategist Steve Bannon after a fraud conviction; Paul Manafort, his former campaign manager, who was convicted for fraud and conspiracy to obstruct an investigation into himself; and Charles Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law’s father whom he has now appointed as ambassador to France, who was sentenced for tax evasion, witness tampering and campaign finance offences.
The price of course is the corrosion in public trust of a cornerstone of American democracy, the idea that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law.
It’s hard not to see Biden’s pardoning of his son as evidence that that is simply not the case.
(inews)