Given Joe Biden’s apparently intimate involvement in Hunter’s dealings, it follows that his intent in pardoning his son is effectively to secure a pardon for himself.
U.S. President Joe Biden in November (White House, Carlos Fyfe)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
This is the sixth in Consortium News’s series on the extensive criminal allegations leveled at Hunter Biden in the course of the past year and President Biden’s apparent involvement in his son’s influence-peddling affairs. We conclude the series with this commentary on Joe Biden’s announcement last weekend that he has granted his son a full pardon. Our earlier reports can be read here, here, here, here and here .
With his shocking presidential pardon of his son Hunter, announced Thanksgiving weekend, when the maximum number of Americans would be watching football games and consuming potato chips, Joe Biden goes out just as he was the whole of his tatty career as a politician — a self-serving fiddler, indifferent to democratic process, ever going against his word.
Peter Baker, that inimitable (thank goodness) clerk The New York Times posts as its chief White House correspondent, tells us in Wednesday’s editions, “We don’t really know how history will remember Joe Biden. It’s too early to say, obviously.”
Actually, we really know at this point. Obviously.
Much has been made of Biden as the family man torn between his duties as president and his compassion for an errant son as the victim of perverted justice. The Times unfolded a singular line of argument on Tuesday.
“President Biden was deeply concerned,” Katie Rogers and Glenn Thrush reported, “that legal problems would push his son into a relapse after years of sobriety, and he began to realize there might not be any way out beyond issuing a pardon.”
No other way out. Here we have Joe Biden pimping the helpless suffering of his son’s addictions (to alcohol and crack). It is of a piece with Biden’s very regular references, always for similar political advantage, to the death of his other son, Beau, and the earlier deaths of his first wife and daughter.
The Rogers and Thrush piece now passes for news reporting Americans are invited to take seriously. It is one among countless others of its kind and quality that are together a measure of how the corruptions of the Bidens, father and son as well as others, have deepened an already severe crisis in American media and turned public discourse into bad afternoon television.
The reporting on the pardon has been defective since the White House released the Executive Grant of Clemency, along with Biden’s official statement, last Sunday. The Times, The Washington Post, the other major dailies and the broadcast networks all reported as if in unison that Joe Biden’s motivating concerns were the guilty verdicts Hunter Biden faces on gun-possession and tax-evasion charges.
Hunter was scheduled to be sentenced later this month. Biden père has told the nation his intent was simply to protect Hunter from a judicial system that political antagonists had unduly politicized.
From the president’s statement:
“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. Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the court room—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.”
You read a statement such as this and you have to wonder whether Joe Biden is capable of speaking truthfully in any circumstance bearing upon his personal interests.
The plea deal, negotiated in the summer of 2023, was indeed carefully negotiated — by Hunter’s attorneys and corrupt Justice Department prosecutors acting to keep the president’s son out of prison. The agreement collapsed not due to political pressure — there was none — but because an un-beholden judge with a commitment to the rule of law, Maryellen Noreika, read it and threw it out of court.
The feature of the plea bargain that moved Judge Noreika to put an end to the negotiated arrangement was its stipulation that Hunter would be immune from further prosecution not only for the matters then tried — the gun and taxes charges — but for any other crimes he may have committed. Preposterous, Noreika rightly concluded.
Special Treatment
Joe Biden, foreground, and Hunter during inauguration of President Barack Obama, Jan. 20, 2009. (acaben, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Was Hunter Biden singled out as his father asserts? Not as his father asserts, but yes, singled out. He had made a mess of his life, breaching various laws while doing so, and was singled out for special treatment in a judicial system that plainly leaves elites and their families above the law.
This context is essential to understanding why Joe Biden decided — and one strongly suspects this was not, as reported, a decision Biden considered and took over the Thanksgiving weekend — to grant his son clemency in the manner he did. The operative language in the official document, the raison d’être of the case, is this:
“Be It Known, That This Day, I, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., President of the United States, Pursuant to My Powers Under Article II, Section 2, Clause 1, of the Constitution, Have Granted Unto ROBERT HUNTER BIDEN A Full and Unconditional Pardon For 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, including but not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted (including any that have resulted in convictions)…”
As is easily discerned, President Biden has reinstated, not quite verbatim but nearly, the terms of the plea agreement thrown out of court a year and a half ago — the agreement he defended in his official statement as fair and reasonable. He has granted his son precisely what Judge Noreika found objectionable — open-ended immunity for crimes “he has committed or may have committed or taken part in.”
The dates are what matter in this language. Hunter Biden assumed his infamous board seat at Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas supplier, in March 2014, a few months after the beginning of the period his father’s pardon covers. Years of bribe-taking, extortion schemes, and various other financial machinations involving Burisma and other foreign clients followed.
The tax and gun charges, to put this point another way, were all along minor matters next to the far graver allegations leveled at Hunter Biden. This is why guilty verdicts on the lesser infractions went through. They were effectively displays intended to demonstrate prosecutors’ integrity and seriousness as they ignored or otherwise quashed compelling evidence of grand-scale corruption.
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As has been widely remarked, Hunter’s attorneys were almost certain to argue successfully for very light prison time, or none, during the sentencing hearings due this month. The gravity of the foreign business dealings allowed for no such prospect. Not only did these yield Hunter, his business colleagues, and his uncle, Joe’s brother James, tens of millions of dollars; the evidence implicating Joe Biden — “the Big Guy,” as Hunter referred to his father — is hard and plentiful.
It is possible, providing one has followed various investigations into Hunter Biden’s influence-selling schemes, to read the terms of Hunter’s pardon as Joe Biden’s upside-down admission of his son’s guilt.
And given Joe Biden’s apparently intimate involvement in Hunter’s dealings — as an enabler and a beneficiary — it follows that Joe Biden’s ultimate intent in pardoning his son is effectively to secure a pardon for himself — that is, to protect himself by immunizing the master of all the malign ceremonies from prosecution.
It was more than a year ago, in September 2023, that the House speaker at the time, Kevin McCarthy, authorized the Oversight Committee to open preliminary hearings to determine if the full House should begin impeachment proceedings against the president for his alleged involvement in Hunter’s corruptions.
Plenty of Evidence
Vice President Biden during a meeting with Ukrainian legislators in Kiev, April 22, 2014. (U.S. Embassy Kyiv, Flickr, Public domain)
Evidence had already begun to accumulate. It was obvious Biden was headed into increasing political peril. And it was obvious that the White House and the Democratic machine, having concluded neither Biden nor his son could win at trial, would fight their corner in the media.
Evidence? What evidence? There is no evidence. This was the Democrats’ rather pitiful counter as the case against Biden mounted.
In mid–December 2023 the full House voted to begin a formal investigation into the president’s alleged involvement in Hunter’s affairs, based on the accumulating evidence, implicating the president as a participant in and/or a beneficiary of Hunter’s years of manifestly criminal conniving during his father’s years as Barack Obama’s vice-president and during the post–Obama interim before Joe was elected president in 2020.
This evidence was formidable. It included very considerable email and text message archives, 36,000 pages of bank records, and 2,000 pages of the Treasury Departments “suspicious activity reports,” which cover irregular international bank transfers. There was also testimony from Hunter’s business partners, federal agents, federal attorneys, and Mykola Zlochevsky, the chief executive of Burisma Holdings.
The investigators’ inventory included records of gross payments to the Biden family, chiefly Hunter and Joe’s brother James, of more than $20 million during the years (2009–2017) Joe was vice-president. Investigators also uncovered a network of more than 20 shell companies the Biden family set up to disguise payments received from influence-peddling schemes Hunter conducted in Ukraine, Russia, China, and elsewhere.
U.S. Vice President Biden visiting Kiev in January 2017. (U.S. Embassy Kyiv, Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0)
At that time of the House vote a year ago, Oversight made clear those areas where it would further focus its attention. These include what Hunter Biden and James Biden took in from their dealings with various foreign entities and where it went, the numerous occasions when Joe met with Hunter’s foreign partners, and the extent to which the Biden White House and the Justice Department had obstructed or suppressed investigations conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service.
Among the most significant findings of F.B.I. and IRS investigators was a payment of $10 million Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly extorted from Burisma in an even split, as described by Zlochevsky in several interviews with an F.B.I. informant, and a payment of $240,000 James made to his older brother immediately after a Chinese equity investor paid Hunter several million dollars.
As the stonewalling at the Biden White House continued, mainstream media began reporting, again in unison, that the House hearings had reached a dead end. But the propaganda operation against the Oversight Committee was failing.
More than two-thirds of Americans, according to a poll conducted earlier this year, thought the House hearings should continue; half of these respondents — 34 percent of those surveyed — “think Joe Biden is guilty of corruption and should be impeached.”
Hunter Biden agreed to testify under oath last February, an appearance he refused until he was threatened with contempt of Congress. The House Ways and Means Committee, which also had an investigative function in the Biden case, voted on May 22 to release 100 pages of new evidence showing that Hunter Biden lied three times during that testimony.
The evidence of this was provided by Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, the two IRS investigators who had previously presented the Oversight Committee with evidence of the Biden family’s corruption.
It is a family of liars, we can now conclude. Joe Biden, having denied any involvement in his son’s businesses on multiple occasions, was proven to have lied on just as many. He went on to assert numerous times that he would not pardon his son.
Strangely enough, he said in the official statement issued last Sunday, “From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word… .” This is Joe Biden. He has operated for half a century on the understanding that people believe his lies if he repeats them often enough.
It is likely that the case against the Biden crime family, as various commentators have taken to calling it, is closed, but it is too early to conclude this with certainty. Biden’s pardon is perfectly legal, but a court challenge would be legal, too, if the House or another entity chose to mount one.
While Biden’s intent appears in part to have been to protect himself a well as his son, it does not automatically follow that he cannot be investigated after he leaves office.
How far the House investigations would go, where they would lead, always hinged partly on political will: Oversight and Ways and Means had sufficient evidence to try Joe Biden, but it was never certain the full House would advise the Senate to do so. And it was highly unlikely the Senate, with a Democratic majority until last month, would proceed to trial.
The damage the Bidens have done to an already failing republic is very formidable. This is chiefly due to the gross corruption of the Justice Department, from attorney general on down, and straight through the F.B.I.’s leadership. As I have written elsewhere, when the judicial system decays, the road to failed-state status opens.
Democrats are fond of asserting that Donald Trump, in his second term, will politicize the Justice Department as a matter of avenging his enemies. One hopes not, although Trump has plenty of cause to seek revenge for actual politicized prosecutions against him.
It was the Democrats who corrupted Justice, in large measure to protect Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. And this will be the deepest, most enduring scar they leave on the American polity.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
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Very little remains that could do anything positive to brighten Joey Biden’s legacy.
What harm would it do to pardon Leonard Peltier?
It would do a little something to rehabilitate his disgraceful career of crookedness…
Why just point at the Biden family alone??? A saying says: it is OK to cheat, just don’t get caught. This says a lot about the entire US.
Re: ” … a judicial system that political antagonists had unduly politicized.”
The familial conspiratorial aspect of this case brings it to a new depth of the essence of US domestic and international politics: confession by accusation.
But wait, the BIG, optimally distracting holidays are coming that we can only assume Biden will exploit to preemptively pardon himself!
“Here we have Joe Biden pimping the helpless suffering of his son’s addictions”
And anyone who knows anything about addicts knows they need to suffer consequences in order to overcome their addictions. Biden’s words only make sense in a family that did not love their children, did not care for their children, paid no attention to their children; this is what creates addicts. I would think that having Joe Biden for a father would drive anyone to addiction.
And excepting the troll, the comments on here are very good.
If Hunter weren’t a Biden, he would have been in jail long ago and that might even have deterred him from further criminality…not likely, but a possibility. Joe Biden, lowlife that he is, has done nothing but enable his son to become the degenerate that he is.
Thank You Patrick
“It was the Democrats who corrupted Justice”
Actually the Reps had DOJ, FBI, and HSA corrupted long before Biden: I filed over thirty whistleblower reports of theft of conservation funds by Rep politicians in FL, complete with the Complaint, seven appendices of fact, and six memoranda of law, to the local, state, headquarters, and OIG offices of the DOJ, FBI, and HSA, about thirty filings over the last two years of the Trump admin, and again in the early Biden admin, and they never responded let alone investigated. Upon filing FOIA requests they denied having any info at all beyond one set of the accompanying letters, and as defendants in my FOIA lawsuit they deny having anything more, not even an email to coordinate rejection by their offices.
The truth is that DOJ, FBI, and HSA are completely corrupted from the top down: regardless of the incumbent political party, they completely refuse to investigate or even acknowledge complaints of political party theft of government funds. That is their business, after all, and that of all of the political party hacks appointed to run those agencies.
The judiciary are just as thoroughly corrupted by the money power running the political parties: not one of them is honest. I can give you dozens of examples of undeniable corruption: not a single federal judge is not a crook.
Your much vaunted Constitution, with its supposed separation of powers between legislative, executive, and judiciary, fails to recognise that the real power behind them all, and much else, is money.
Of course we know that poor Hunter was picked on by the law when he was innocent of all charges, just as poor innocent Israel somehow gets blamed for wicked needs it never commits because it is selected out from all other nations as a victim for special treatment. Joe Biden certainly helped in this behaviour as well.
Yes. If poor Hunter had been black and poor and a notorious crack addict, he’d have been incarcerated – or simply shot – years ago.
joe biden is despicable.
Look at the manner in which he presided over uncle clarence’s confirmation hearing.
How are you any better with your ‘Uncle Clarence’ slur?
Love or hate his jurisprudence, there is no denying that Clarence Thomas is the embodiment of the American Dream. Born into crippling poverty as a descendant of slaves living in the deep south BEFORE the civil rights movement ended Jim Crow, Thomas got an education, became a lawyer and eventually worked his way up to the Supreme Court. If his politics were different, he would be put on a pedestal next to Thurgood Marshall as one of the greatest examples of a successful black man in America. But since he has the ‘wrong’ politics, he is mocked as ‘Uncle Clarence’ and no one bats an eye.
Tell that to Anita Hill and the other eleven women Uncle Clarence harrassed.
Oh, you want to be objective and unbiased: the INSTITTION of SCOTUS is corrupt. Thomas and all of them, be they labeled “liberal” or “conservative”. Who cares if he came from poverty? The end result is we have corrupt judges who both openly and secretly take bribes, have conflicts of interest etc. If you think that is cool, then be honest and say that bribery and institutional corruption is OK.
Thomas is up to his eyeballs in sleaze. And yes, he has risen to the top – but for what? Does he work to improve the lot of those he grew up among, or to defend the oligarchs and their system of profits?
What a load of bullshit. His politics? He is thoroughly corrupt as are most (all?) of the supreme court justices. If Thomas is your idea of the “american dream,” it’s time to quash such a nightmare. Plenty of people born poor have ethics, something Thomas has never burdened himself with.
I took the comment as to be about Biden’s presiding role in humiliating a woman alleging Thomas had pretty clearly sexually harassed her.
If anything, the comment implies the bi-partisan nature of the relationship.
I believe there’s enough evidence and public contempt against the DNC to formally invoke the Federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
What if… We form a Recall Election Party to replace the DNC?
What if… Recall Election Party could terminate any political person found to violate a constitutional provision, including PAC’S that represent foreign interest… What if…?
Twenty shell companies in one family certainly points toward corruption. Who needs 20 shell companies unless there’s something to hide?
The biggest lies are about wars for strategic NATO and US profits in provoking Russia by weaponizing the Ukraine.
If Joe didn’t know the details, he’s an idiot. (Always a possibility.)
If he did know, he’s just another neolib pol purchased by and in service to terminal capitalism. The kind the Ds have pushed for decades while we, the working class majority, keep saying NO!
It hasn’t been clear whether or not it’s the collective Biden or if he himself acts for the neocon would-be unipolar empire. But he has shown his true colors with that gift of ever active, indiscriminate landmines and the okay for nukes. The lame duck is a maimin’ duck; to be remembered as Killer Joe. (See Quincy Jones’ catchy orchestration and lyrics: “Killer Joe don’t you go; hurt me slow, please Joe.” ) Well now Joe, truth is despite your delusions, we DON’T want pain and we really, really DO want you to go!!!
in case you were looking for examples of moral integrity, the
“white” house would be the last place to turn to, wouldn’t it?
corruption and drug addiction will never go away, will they?
granted: it’s not easy to admit one’s weaknesses and failures.
but people with backbones are hard to come by in high places.
or do they all think they’re above the law, no backbones needed?
That Biden constantly demands sympathy for Hunter’s drug addiction is beyond disgusting when he was the author of the ’96 crime bill that unduly punished drug possession with draconian minimum sentencing requirements and ruined the lives of millions of people. His compassion for people outside his bubble is nonexistent, even when he has an example of drug addiction struggles literally staring him in the face.
I find that attitude prevalent among lawmakers. For example, traces of cocaine were found not so long ago in nearly every toilet in the UK parliament, strongly suggesting its use is widespread among MPs. But will they vote to legalise it? Of course not. It’s OK for them or their mates to shovel it up their noses, while those who supply it face long prison sentences for giving them what they really want.
I have no doubt that the Ukraine war is all about providing cover for the most corrupt president in my lifetime. Far more corrupt than the bloviating clown game show host who was once and soon will again be POTUS.
The hypocrisy of the modern Democratic Party is embodied in the three families that have controlled it, the Clintons, the Obama’s and the Bidens, each more corrupt than the other although that seems mathematically improbable. Unfortunately, millions of decent liberals and progressives have permitted themselves to be terrified into supporting the absolutely worst among us who betray everything liberalism and progressivism stand for. Ask yourselves: where is the free health care for all, the free education at all levels for all, the social safety net for all, the world at peace respecting human rights and international law. Those are the progressive and liberal values, not abortion on demand and transgender supremacy over feminism. Things to think about as this article makes clear.
Ditto, plus no opening to Cuba.
I don’t think “it follows that Joe Biden’s ultimate intent in pardoning his son is effectively to secure a pardon for himself.”
I strongly suspect others in the Democratic Party or ‘deep state’, fearing their own criminal (or just plain unsavoury) activities might come to light if Hunter is further investigated, have pressured President Biden into this. Pardoning Hunter could be their way of keeping a lid on what really happened with the Maidan coup, or some other nefarious machinations we know even less about.
I’ve since come across this:
“President Joe Biden’s senior aides are conducting a vigorous internal debate over whether to issue preemptive pardons to a range of current and former public officials.”
‘Biden White House Is Discussing Preemptive Pardons for Those in Trump’s Crosshairs’,Politico, 12 December
If Al Capone was alive today he wouldn’t go into organised crime and skim the top from millions of dollars, he’d go into organised politics and skim the top from billions. Organised crime brings in chump change by comparison, and to escape prosecution he’d have to keep bribing public officials. Organised politics is where the real money is and those pesky public officials he’d now own them.
You might like reading Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail to comprehend the close links between organized crime, corporate America, the government, and the military-industrial complex. Organized crime also pays in the billions.
Not knowing very much about this subject, I would have found your arguments more valid if they weren’t made with such obvious prejudice. I thought journalists were supposed to report with impassionate objectivity.
Obviously, you don’t know about the “subject”.
Then, don’t comment…
I missed hearing from the trolls, I thought maybe they got lost or something, maybe watching MSNBC or CNN.
Remember the first amendment you have the right to be misinformed/uniformed by anyone, DNC and members displays that all the time. ;-]
Charley, what prejudices the case are the facts. You don’t know about this case because corp media doesn’t cover it. Only NYT did, a single day with all of these “prejudiced” facts reported without challenge. No follow-up, no op-eds, no editorials. MSNBC etc still say “no evidence.” But I thank you for reading Consortium and engaging with us in the fact-based Center. None of my Progrssive freinds want to discuss this, and the NYT comments on the coverage castigated NYT for daring to bring it up.
The current crop of crooks is just another symptom of the disease: full blown institutional corruption. Traitors, war criminals, TBTF banksters, genociders, are effectively above the law. Prison and taxes are only for the “little people”. The next regime will be just as criminal as the last. I remember Richard Nixon saying “I”m not a crook”…50 plus years ago. Plus ca change….
Look I know that I am a bit of a cynic, but let’s face it; if an attempt to prosecute Biden for anything after he leaves office is made, his alleged ‘cognitive problems ‘ will all of a sudden get worse and he will be declared unfit to stand trial.
He was already declared unfit to stand trial more than a year ago in re to the files at home issue … unfit for trial but apparently fit for presidency and making the call on nuclear war! Does anyone believe this any more?
I think its import to distinguish between the National Security State and Government…the former is the MIC, the latter is the social service and safety nets that government supports. The graft in Medicare, for instance, can be monitored and controlled. The single bid contracts for the F 35 war plane can not.
And the National Security State has contingency plans for nuclear war that will kill most everybody in 72 MINUTES, according to Annie Jacobsen’s new book. Not much social concern there (and DONE with our tax dollars!).