Mind-Boggling Backfire: By Pardoning Hunter, Joe Biden Might Be Going to Jail
Conservatives are still smarting over the fact that Hunter Biden’s gun and tax charges were pardoned by his father after his father specifically said he wouldn’t use his presidential power to do so.
Mind you, anyone who really believed that promise also still believes in Santa Claus and the non-existence of the word “gullible” in the dictionary. However, it was the brazenness of it all — the language he used, the fact he dumped it at the end of the Thanksgiving weekend, and then the fact he jetted off to Angola right after it was issued — that made it particularly galling.
“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong,” he said in his statement on the pardon, two sentences after he praised “a carefully negotiated plea deal” that “unraveled in the court room,” he said because of pressure from his “political opponents in Congress.” (It was, in fact, because the judge was incredulous at the unusual nature of the deal, which she called potentially unconstitutional.)
“For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: just tell the American people the truth. They’ll be fair-minded. Here’s the truth: I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice — and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further,” he said in conclusion.
That too was a lie — he’d sworn that he’d not interfere with the power of the pardon — but never mind. What’s done is done, and now there’s a deeper question: Did Joe Biden sign onto a pardon that could put him in jail?
That seems like an insane question, but perhaps not so much. First, let’s look at the breadth of the pardon, which goes well beyond the federal gun and tax charges. In fact, it covers everything back to 2014 — the year when he started on the board of Burisma, quelle surprise.
Joe Biden’s 11-year blanket pardon of Hunter is even more expansive than the pardon Gerald Ford gave to Richard Nixon in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. pic.twitter.com/9ThNOEGyo5
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) December 2, 2024
This means all of Hunter’s foreign business dealings — including potential FARA violations and the like — are off the table for the prosecution. As you might remember, Joe was always linked to these in a very ancillary way, never playing a major part but always closer to the action than you might have liked him to be if you were one of his handlers.
Hunter Biden used Joe’s VP perks to pursue deal with Carlos Slim https://t.co/Yz52bkBsxd pic.twitter.com/cC7CKvDORO
— New York Post (@nypost) July 1, 2021
That’s Joe Biden with Carlos Slim — Mexico’s richest man, once the world’s richest, with whom Hunter and his partners were pursuing business deals at the time.
This becomes particularly problematic when you look at Hunter’s time on Burisma’s board and Joe’s own claim he got a Ukrainian prosecutor who just happened to be interested in Burisma’s corruption once upon a time fired:
Here we have Joe Biden bragging about how he totally manipulated the judicial system in another country and got the Ukrainian prosecutor fired
This all while that same prosecutor was investigating the company (Burisma) that just happened to be paying his son, Hunter….. pic.twitter.com/UwbNUQzIj2— Richard (@ricwe123) December 2, 2024
Biden’s people have always maintained, of course, that the prosecutor himself was corrupt. Which might have been true — indeed, it’s likely to be, because virtually everyone in Ukrainian politics was so corrupt that the country elected an actor who played an everyman anti-corruption presidential candidate who ended up winning on a fictional TV show to be an everyman anti-corruption president of their country in real life. (To be fair, Volodymyr Zelenskyy managed to defend the country against Russian aggression admirably, if to a stalemate, even if he hasn’t quite tackled corruption just yet.)
However, consider this: Now that he’s not in trouble for anything he says, Hunter Biden might have to talk about it. From Mike Davis, an attorney with the constitutionalist Article III Project:
If Biden pardons someone–like, say, Hunter or Jack Smith–they can no longer invoke the Fifth Amendment’s right against self-incrimination to avoid testifying before Congress or grand juries.
If those pardoned refuse to testify, they can face new charges for criminal contempt.
— 🇺🇸 Mike Davis 🇺🇸 (@mrddmia) November 26, 2024
See, here’s the thing: With the Fifth Amendment, your right to stay silent against self-incrimination only applies if you have something you can incriminate yourself for. This is why certain witnesses are often given immunity: that immunity then forces them to say the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, or else they’re the ones breaking the law.
Now, to be clear, this principle has never been applied to a high-level presidential pardon. Immunity, when employed in such a way, is used to either bargain for or compel accurate testimony under the rubric that, if the subject lied, they’d be in deeper trouble because that’d then be the crime.
And various news sources are wondering just what this pardon means if the House GOP or a special counsel decides to open up an investigation. Newsweek quoted an attorney who said Hunter would absolutely be compelled to testify, the legal team at Reuters said the “pardon could limit his ability to invoke that [Fifth Amendment] right” if called to testify, and an attorney who talked to NewsNation simply called the situation “uncharted territory.”
The last one is probably the most apt. If presidential pardons could compel testimony, for instance, Hunter Biden probably wouldn’t be the first recipient hauled up before Congress to spill the beans. After all, it’s worth remembering that in the wake of Gerald Ford’s Nixon pardon, the Democrats had nearly 300 seats in the House of Representatives thanks to huge midterm gains in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Presidential privilege might make that a bit different, but you might think those Democrats would be inclined to get Nixon to tell everything he knew about Liddy, Hunt, Ehrlichman, Segretti and the like, and get it on record.
Furthermore, pardons don’t cover state charges — and Hunter could reasonably assert that there are a few states with a passing interest in unreported income from his foreign business affairs, to say nothing of the bizarre case of the gun in the dumpster. And, even failing all that, it’s still worth noting that, legally speaking, the phrase, “I have no recollection of that, congressman,” goes a long way in a Capitol Hill hearing — especially when most of the period covered by the pardon was when the man in question was verifiably a polydrug addict.
That being said, if anything about the Biden family “business” doesn’t still hinge upon stuff where state charges could be brought, this could be extraordinarily damaging to Joe “The Big Guy” Biden, if not put him in prison if he’s deeply enmeshed enough in either the Burisma or Chinese Communist Party-linked CEFC deals that Hunter is forced to give old dad up.
Then that being said, it’s also quite likely that any prosecutor treats Joe Biden like special counsel Robert Hur over Biden’s retention of classified documents — where he recommended charges not be pursued not because the circumstances didn’t warrant it or because there wasn’t duplicitousness on the president’s part, but that a jury would likely see him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
However, at the very least, if courts decide the pardon is de jure immunity and that Hunter must testify, at the very least, the concept of Joe Biden as a well-meaning dad who was simply a little overindulgent with his child could be — indeed, likely would be — torpedoed out of the water for the rest of history. We’d know how thoroughly we’d been lied to on this, just as it will invariably tumble out that we were thoroughly lied to on so many other fronts.
The difference is that Hunter’s compelled testimony would be an immediate, shock-therapy dramatization of how bad it really was — the second act of the June 27 debate in which the veil was pulled back and we all realized how thoroughly cognitively deficient the president had become. If it doesn’t end Joe in jail — or both Joe and Hunter sharing a cell, if Hunter refuses to testify or perjures himself — it will, at least, end the half-decade charade of snow-white innocence the outgoing first family has pulled on us.
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