Pardon Me?

So many pundits are getting it so very wrong

Oh
My
God

President Joe Biden pardons his son, Hunter Biden, and pundits, politicians, and even professors immediately lose their marbles.¹

Their marbles are rolling all over the internet, getting stuck in nooks, crannies, and hidey-holes from which I dearly hope they’ll emerge later and embarrass the hell out of the people who let them loose.

I am not, of course, speaking of the Republicans. From them I expect nothing less. Their hypocrisy has been so obvious for so long that I (almost) take it for granted. For them, all the pardons Trump, the once and future president, granted to felonious grifters and scumbags in his entourage exist in an alternate universe.

President Biden is a longtime, dyed-in-the-wool institutionalist. He’s also well aware of the hyper-reactivity of the pundits, the politicians, and probably even the professors. He was almost certainly aware that many of them would, to put it in 1960s vernacular, freak out. They would pontificate about how he’d sullied his legacy, let his love for his son trump overcome² his respect for the rule of law, yadda yadda yadda.

He was 100% right to do it anyway.

Because he knows that the incoming president is obsessed with revenge, and his entourage has zero respect for the rule of law unless they can manipulate it to further their own ends.

Ron Filipkowski at Meidas+ pointed out that Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to be head of the FBI, is obsessed with Hunter Biden and what he calls the “Biden crime family.” Writes Filipkowski:

So it is important to emphasize, as nobody in the media seems willing to do, that this pardon is much more about protecting the Biden family from a deranged, vindictive Kash Patel than it is about Hunter’s BS gun charge that he was already convicted of.

Heather Cox Richardson elaborates in her December 2 installment of Letters from an American. She notes that the pardon covers more than the offenses Hunter Biden has already been charged with or convicted of. It also includes “those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”

“The pardon’s sweeping scope,” she notes, “offers an explanation for why Biden issued it after saying he would not.”

Having come of political age in the waning years of J. Edgar Hoover’s reign at the FBI, I totally get it. Hoover weaponized the FBI to go after his enemies, notably Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders.³ Kash Patel and others in Trump’s orbit are more than capable of doing likewise. Trump surely wouldn’t stop them, and if previous performance is any guide, neither would the Republican-led Congress.

The pardon, in other words, offers Hunter Biden protection against enforcement that isn’t constrained by the rule of law.

What concerns me most about the criticism of President Biden’s decision? It’s that the critics don’t seem to have a clue what we’re up against. Do they not realize how fragile the “rule of law,” in which they put so much faith, is in real life? As far as I can tell, the critics are mostly white, mostly male, and mostly privileged by class. It really is long past time for these people to get a grip on what’s going on here.

I need to reread both Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here and George Orwell’s 1984 but I’m still trying to muster up the nerve.

Here’s my question to anyone who doesn’t agree with or understand why President Biden did what he did: Do you think he would have done it if Kamala Harris were the incoming president, the one with the power to appoint the next attorney general and the next head of the FBI?

I don’t. Not for a minute. He would have expected the rule of law to work the way it’s supposed to work, with respect for evidence, double jeopardy, and all that stuff we like to take for granted. He would have known that whomever President Harris appointed to run the Justice Department and the FBI would have been committed to justice and the rule of law.

That President Biden, longtime, dyed-in-the-wool institutionalist that he is, took measures to protect his son against the incoming administration — that is the scariest fact about this whole episode.

And so much of the press and so many of the pundits are still missing it.

After the 2020 election, we consigned our Trumpkins to the fire. As it turned out, the relief was only temporary. Back to work, you all.

NOTES

1. You can guess what four-letter word beginning with s I was tempted to use here. Lately my use of expletives has begun to shock even me, who’s been swearing like a trooper since before she knew what a trooper was. (Something to do with Girl Scouts?)

2. Of the many infuriating things about Donald J. Trump, the one that most bugs my editor-self is how handy the common noun “trump” is for describing things he has done, not done, or threatened to do. “Trumped-up charges,” “emotion trumps logic,” etc. Can bridge players bid “4 No Trump” with a straight face?

3. I was a college freshman on Dec. 4, 1969, when Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were assassinated as they slept in their Chicago apartment. The FBI, along with the Cook County state’s attorney’s office and the Chicago police, was most definitely involved. It made an impression on this then very young woman who’d grown up in a small white town west of Boston. The Zinn Educational Project has the basic info, but there’s more out there.