While critics of President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter, has invited rage and ridicule from critics Right and Left. But commentator Glenn Greenwald has highlighted one benefit to the president.
He not only protected his son Hunter from a prison sentence, but also protected himself.
The reason, Greenwald explained, is this: During the same years that Hunter was trotting the globe and lining his pockets with money from sources in China, Ukraine, and Romania, Biden senior was in line to share those profits. So said at least one email found on the Hunter Biden laptop.
Thus did President Biden shield himself from potential prosecution for financial crimes.
No Pardon, No Pardon, No Pardon
Greenwald opened his segment of System Update by noting that Biden, his spokesmen, and their trained poodles in the media repeatedly assured Americans for months that Biden would not pardon Hunter. The laddie buck had been convicted for income-tax crimes and lying on the federal form required to purchase a gun.
“For a year now, we have heard the most over-the-top embarrassing cringe-inducing tributes to Joe Biden as one of the United States’s, if not one of the world’s, most honorable people as evidenced by his steadfast, adamant refusal to pardon even his own son, as proof of how much he honors the role of law, how much he values the norms of the United States,” Greenwald said.
Biden and his press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, myriad times said Hunter would not receive a pardon, as The New American has reported. Biden told ABC News’s pro-Biden reporter David Muir he wouldn’t, and Pierre said it on six occasions: “No,” she said in July 2023. And she said it more than once.
“So I’ve answered this question before. It was asked of me not too long ago — a couple of weeks ago — and I was very clear, and I said no,” she said that September.
“Nothing has changed,” she assured White House reporters in December last year.
She repeated the claim three times this year, including on November 7, when a reporter asked about the pardon in light of President-elect Donald Trump’s thrashing of Vice President Kamala Harris two days earlier.
“We’ve been asked that question multiple times. Our answer stands, which is no,” Jean-Pierre said.
The Excuse
But beyond the obvious lie that Biden, Jean-Pierre, the Democrats, and Biden’s Media Megaphone told, when he issued the pardon, his excuse was that his own Justice Department unfairly prosecuted Hunter. When Trump makes that claim, he is, of course, ridiculed.
“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 said:
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.
“Devoted to the Rule of Law”
While the Democrats “central campaign tactic” was ensuring that Trump landed in prison, “we were told over and over that President Biden’s honor has forever demonstrated, was forever placed beyond question by how devoted he was to the rule of law that he would even allow his sole-surviving son, Hunter Biden, to go to prison rather than compromise this noble principle of the rule of law,” Greenwald observed.
The Democrats — “the guardian of all things decent about American political life” — said Biden would never pardon Hunter even if he or Harris lost the election on November 5.
Noting that the Justice Department’s plea agreement with Hunter was so generous that the judge in trial wouldn’t accept it, and prosecutors withdrew it, Greenwald said Americans repeatedly heard that Biden couldn’t pardon his boy. For “this is something only Donald Trump and the Republicans do,” Greenwald observed. And only Republicans “accuse the justice system of being politicized when they’re accused of crimes or convicted of crimes.”
Democrats, instead, “trust the justice system,” Greenwald continued, reading from the pardon itself; i.e., that prosecutors only went after Hunter because he is Joe Biden’s son, and they were pushed into it by Biden’s Republican opponents:
Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter. From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.
Yet that claim — selective, unfair prosecution — is precisely what Biden and the Democrats said is the peril of a Trump presidency.
Yet “we have been told that what was so dangerous about Trump and his movement is that they attack the integrity of our institutions. They accuse our sacred Justice Department of being selective in their prosecution, of politicizing their prosecutorial power, and in doing so unfairly impugn the wonderful men and women who work in the FBI and the Justice Department and the U.S. Security State,” Greenwald observed:
And yet here’s Joe Biden condemning his own Justice Department for, quote, selectively and unfairly prosecuting his son Hunter — exactly what we’re told only the Trump movement does, which is what makes him so dangerous.
Biden Protected Himself
That hypocrisy isn’t the only problem with Biden’s pardoning Hunter, Greenwald continued. The president not only pardoned the Boy Wonder for the crimes of which he was convicted, but also any crime he committed or might have committed from 2014 through 2024.
It is “arguably the most sweeping pardon issued in decades if not in American history,” Greenwald said.
Those years are critical to the pardon because of what Hunter “was doing when he was profiteering off his father’s influence while his father was vice president running Ukraine, when Hunter Biden” was on the board of the Burisma energy company, “for which he had zero qualifications.”
That position led to the Biden-Burisma influence peddling scheme, which involved then-Vice President Joe Biden’s demanding that Ukraine fire a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma or face losing $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees. The prosecutor was investigating the company, which paid Hunter a small fortune, for corruption.
Then there were Hunter’s activities in China, Greenwald continued: “Memos and witnesses said that Joe Biden would have been a profit participant.” One witness was Tony Bobulinski, an associate of Hunter’s who fingered Joe Biden as the “Big Guy” in an email describing how profits from a deal with China’s CEFC energy company would be split. The “Big Guy” would get 10 percent.
The Biden Mafia feared that those revelations from Hunter’s famous laptop, just prior to the 2020 election, would help Trump defeat Biden, “which is when the CIA lied and said it was Russian disinformation.” That refers to the 51 former intelligence officials who shilled for Biden. They knew the laptop was not Russian disinformation, as then Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe had said.
Biden senior’s involvement in Hunter’s far-flung business empire, which at minimum involved self-dealing — some $24 million flowed into the Biden Mafia — if not bribery and influence peddling, both federal crimes, means that the benefits of the pardon spill over to the outgoing president.
“This pardon, in other words, doesn’t just shield his son from the criminal convictions that he pled guilty to and was about to be sentenced for,” Greenwald averred:
It shields him for all possible crimes going back to influence peddling and trading in Ukraine and China, for which there’s evidence that Joe Biden himself may have had criminal exposure.
So this pardon not only protects Hunter Biden, but in the vastness of, of the scope of it, potentially protects Joe Biden himself.
Greenwald said the pardon is reminiscent of the pardon that President George H.W. Bush issued to the participants in the Iran-Contra scandal. The Reagan administration illegally sold arms to Iran and diverted the revenues to Nicaraguan guerrillas who were attempting to overthrow the nation’s communist government.
The pardon protected Bush, Greenwald said, because it stopped any criminal probe of participants in the arms sales — which included Bush as vice president.
