President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter, a convicted felon, doesn’t just raise the obvious allegation that he lied when he said he wouldn’t pardon the Boy Wonder. It also has White House spokesman Karine Jean-Pierre backflipping and cartwheeling like an Olympic gymnast to explain it.
Jean-Pierre told reporters that neither she nor Biden lied when they said — in Jean-Pierre’s case repeatedly, as X posts show — that the president wouldn’t pardon Hunter if a jury convicted him on federal tax charges or of lying to obtain a gun.
The press secretary seemed to confess that the president would not have pardoned Hunter if President-elect Donald Trump hadn’t trounced Vice President Kamala Harris on November 5.
On X, Biden’s no-pardon vow went viral, along with the far-left pro-Biden media’s effusive praise for the president’s supposed devotion to law and order.
“Always … Truthful”
Biden pardoned his oft out-of-control son because, he said, he was “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.”
And he was prosecuted and convicted of lying on the federal form required to purchase a firearm only because “several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election.”
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. There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. 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.
There followed howls of indignation. X users reposted Biden’s claim that “no one is above the law,” along with video of Biden and the Democrats claiming the same thing. One of those Democrats was, of course, Jean-Pierre, who repeatedly told reporters that Biden wouldn’t pardon Hunter.
Then came the pardon, to the obvious chagrin of the pro-Biden media, which ceaselessly praised Biden for claiming he wouldn’t pardon Hunter, famously covered up the Hunter Biden laptop story, and otherwise shilled for the Biden Mafia.
The important thing is, Biden didn’t lie when he said he wouldn’t pardon his miscreant son.
“First of all, one of the things that the president always believes is to be truthful to the American people,” Jean-Pierre said:
That is something that he always truly believes. And if you see the end of his — I assume that you’ve read his statement — and you look at the end of that statement and he actually says that in the first line in the last paragraph. And [he] respects the thinking and how the American people will actually see this in his decision-making.
And I would encourage everyone to read in full the president’s statement. … He lays out how he came to this decision. He came to this decision this weekend, so let’s be very clear about that. He says it himself. It’s in his voice. He said he came to this decision this weekend. And he said he wrestled with this, because he believes in the justice system, but he also believes that the war politics infected the process and led to a miscarriage of justice.
(That’s what critics have said of the Justice Department’s merciless prosecution of defendants in the January 6 “insurrection” cases.) That aside, Jean-Pierre confessed that Biden wouldn’t have pardoned the boy if Harris hadn’t lost the election. Then she appeared to retreat from that answer.
“Do you think this would have happened if Harris hadn’t lost the election?” a reporter asked.
“I’m not going to get into the election,” Jean-Pierre said. “It is a no. I can answer that. It is a no.”
Amusingly, the press secretary said Biden does not agree with Trump that the justice system has been “weaponized for political purposes.”
“He said he believes in the Department of Justice,” Jean-Pierre said:
He does. He says it in his statement. He believed, he also believes that war politics infected the process and it led to a miscarriage of justice. He believes his son was unfairly targeted. He said that what his political opponents have done to my son, that’s his words, is cruel and enough is enough.
He says he believes in the justice system. …
[H]e believes in the Department of Justice. He also believes that politics infected the process here. It affected the process. And you saw that when the deal fell apart, and let’s not forget, Department of Justice agreed on that deal. The president said if that deal had moved forward, he thought it would be a fair process. And when that deal fell apart, his political opponents took credit for it. They took credit for it and didn’t seem like they were going to stop.
In fact, a judge killed Hunter’s plea deal on the gun and income-tax charges because the provisions were “atypical,” “not standard,” and “different from what I normally see.”
A jury convicted the younger Biden on the gun charges. He pleaded guilty to nine federal income-tax violations, three of which were felonies.
Prison was ahead, The New York Times reported, had President Biden not intervened.
“He faced up to 17 years in federal prison during a scheduled sentencing hearing in Los Angeles on Dec. 16, but would most likely have served no more than 36 months behind bars, according to sentencing experts,” the newspaper reported.
He could have landed 25 years for the gun, but likely would have served only 16 months.
No Pardon
President Biden repeatedly said he would not pardon Hunter.
At a D-Day celebration in Normandy, France, in June, when ABC’s pro-Biden reporter David Muir asked him whether he would abide by a jury’s decision and not pardon Hunter, the president said “yes” to both questions.
“I will accept the outcome of this case,” he said on June 11.
During a news conference on June 13 with Ukraine dictator Volodymyr Zelensky, Biden repeated that promise:
With regard to the question regarding the family, I’m extremely proud of my son Hunter. He has overcome an addiction. He is — he’s one of the brightest, most decent men I know. And I am satisfied that — I’m not going to do anything. I sa- — I said I’d abide by the jury decision, and I will do that. And I will not pardon him.
Then again, “no one is above the law.”
H/T: Legal Insurrection
