President Joe Biden’s reason for pardoning his son for 10 full years of crimes and likely crimes has infuriated two critics of wildly disparate political views.
Biden said he pardoned Hunter because the legal cases against him were a politically motivated “witch hunt” that was unfair and downright mean. And it was a hunt only launched because Joe Biden is president.
Conservative Megyn Kelly and honest leftist Stephen A. Smith say that claim is a dog that just won’t hunt.
Kelly roasted Biden by telling her audience about her sister’s addiction that left a mark on her life forever, something that won’t happen to the Boy Wonder of Global Commerce and Industry.
Speaking to Chris Cuomo on his NewsNation program, Smith said Biden should have simply said that he wouldn’t permit his son to land in prison, and leave it at that. People would understand. And Trump, he said, has been the victim of a deranged send-him-to-prison witch hunt by the far left.
Cuomo himself: Biden should pardon Trump.
Kelly’s Brutal Takedown
Claiming that most people who face the same gun and income-tax finagling charges that Hunter did don’t go to prison, Biden said he pardoned his son for one simple reason: The prosecutions were political.
“The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” Biden wrote:
Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the courtroom — with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases.
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.
In fact, the plea deal went south because the judge thought it was “atypical,” “not standard,” and “different from what I normally see.”
But that not insignificant fact aside, Hunter Biden got away with 10 years of self-dealing that enriched the Biden Mafia by some $24 million, most notably in connection with the Biden-Burisma influence peddling scheme and his helping Chinese Reds, through his father, compromise the Obama White House.
Discussing her sister’s addiction to oxycontin, a highly-addictive narcotic, Kelly explained the family gave her “a tough love period, where we weren’t helping her out of the jams that she was creating.” The sister then “found herself in the throes of the criminal law.”
That required a public defender, and while the sister didn’t land in jail, the addiction and its legal sequelae “remained a mark on her record, forever, and you know what does to a person,” Kelly said:
You can’t get a job, you cannot get a damn job because it’s on there and no one gives a damn that you were addicted, no one cares about that backstory I just gave to you.
So f***k you, Joe Biden and your sob story about your rich, spoiled presidential kid, Hunter Biden, and how he’s been singled out.… I know I speak for millions of people who have an addict in their family who did something they’re not proud of who could never get out from under it.
Kelly said Americans have “no sympathy” for Hunter or his father because the latter “enabled all of it.” Kelly also said Joe Biden used Hunter “to line your own pocket. That is what the emails suggest — 10% for the “Big Guy” — and Tony Bobulinski and others.”
Bobulinski is Hunter Biden’s former business partner. He fingered Joe Biden as the “big guy” in an email between Hunter and his associates. The email described how the payola from Red China for Hunter’s services would be split.
Smith: I Agree. Pardon Trump
Speaking to Cuomo, Smith said the pardon “disgusted me” for the same it disgusted Kelly: the reason Biden offered.
No one “would have a problem with him saying ‘this is my son, I love him. There’s no way I’m sending him to jail and I have the power to avoid it.’ Nobody would blame him for that. But that’s not where he went.”
So, Smith said, he had no problem with the pardon itself, and “everybody and their grandmother knew he was going to pardon his son.”
As for the supposed “witch hunt” being the excuse for the pardon, “wait a minute,” Smith said:
What have y’all been doing with Donald Trump all of these years? Now you can make an argument about the legitimacy of the cases against Donald Trump compared to what wasn’t legitimate, etc. That’s not the point. The point is, it was clearly politicized.
Leftists, Smith said, were “hell bent on going after Donald Trump“ to stop him from running for re-election ”because they weren’t confident they would ever be able to beat him.”
Despite all the prosecutions and convictions of Trump, voters said “he’s the guy we want.” For Trump’s victory was an “indictment” of Biden and his policies.
Continued Smith:
For [Joe Biden] to come out and to talk about that this was a witch hunt, when clearly it could be argued that’s exactly what you were doing to Donald Trump. What you assisted in doing seems beyond hypocritical. And that was what disgusted me.
Biden’s explanation of the pardon was “weak” and “pathetic,” he said.
Cuomo agreed with Smith, then offered this remarkable idea.
“If I were [Biden], I would pardon Trump,” he said.
“That’s exactly what I would do,” Smith replied. “Enough’s enough.”
Instead of pursuing Trump legally, Democrats should spend the next four years carefully watching everything he does and “judge every single act that he does.”
Smith noted that President Gerald Ford pardoned his disgraced predecessor, Richard Nixon, so the country could move beyond the Watergate scandal. “It was for the good of the country,” Smith said.
Appearing on Fox’s Will Cain Show, Smith said woke ideology and identity politics are two reasons for Trump’s victory. “It’s such a strong tilt to the progressive left where we are talking about transgender issues and culture wars and identity politics and all of this stuff,” he said. “We are sick of all of that. That makes total, total sense to me, and I’m good with it.”
