Column: The backlash on the backlash against the Hunter Biden pardon
LA TimesDays later I’m still seething that President Biden gave a “full and unconditional” pardon to his troublesome surviving son. With the pardon of Hunter Biden, who’d pleaded guilty to tax evasion and was separately convicted of lying about his drug addiction on a gun application, Joe Biden put his family ahead of his fealty to the animating pledge of his presidency: to restore governing norms and the rule of law after both were shredded by his predecessor, Donald Trump. But those Republicans weren’t elected, Trump was, and he’s the vengeful former and future president who vowed last year to “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.” Given such explicit threats, and Trump’s first-term record of trying to politicize the Justice Department and FBI, why should Biden leave his son to Trump’s nonexistent mercies? Last year he produced a literal enemies list for Trump and separately said he’d prosecute Hunter Biden as a foreign agent, never mind past investigations that produced nothing. As former federal prosecutor and law professor Joyce Vance wrote recently, by way of justifying the pardon, Trump as president could have made Hunter Biden’s life in federal prison “extremely difficult.” And a Trumpian Justice Department could have redoubled efforts to charge him for foreign dealings going back to his father’s time as veep, as Patel has suggested.