Legal/Law/Criminal Justice and Reform

‘More Skeletons In The Family Closet’: Biden’s Broad Pardon For His Son Looks Like Cover For ‘Nixonian’ Corruption

(DOD Photo by Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Carlos M. Vazquez II)

President Joe Biden’s unusually expansive pardon for his son could be an effort to guard against further investigations into his own alleged corruption.

The pardon isn’t limited to crimes already charged but extends to cover offenses Hunter Biden “may have committed” over a nearly eleven year period beginning in 2014, when the younger Biden joined the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Biden’s decision will “hamper any further investigation into the financial corruption of the president and his family and their use of his office for financial gain,” Hans​​​​ von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told the DCNF.

“Despite the overwhelming evidence that he violated FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act], the Justice Department never indicted Biden despite multiple indictments of other individuals for similar violations,” he said.

Biden and his business partner Devon Archer each made $1 million a year sitting on Burisma’s board of directors, according to the House Oversight Committee.

In December 2015, Hunter Biden “called D.C.” to discuss government pressure facing Burisma, Archer told the House Oversight Committee. Archer also said the Biden family “brand” was part of what made Hunter Biden valuable to Burisma.

“Joe Biden says his son was the victim of ‘selective’ prosecution; the only ‘selective’ prosecution Hunter Biden was subject to, as revealed by numerous whistleblowers, was the selective effort by FBI and DOJ officials to delay, sidetrack, hinder and prevent serious criminal charges from being brought against Biden,” von Spakovsky said. “This pardon is a grand example of Joe Biden’s arrogance, mendacity, and obnoxiousness, and his view that he and his family should be above the law.”

Hunter Biden may not have been charged at all without a judge’s careful questioning of his initial “sweetheart” plea deal, which prompted disagreement in open court about the extent of a provision the defense believed offered broad immunity.

A Delaware jury convicted Hunter Biden on federal gun charges in June, and he was scheduled to be sentenced this month. In September, Hunter Biden pled guilty to felony tax charges, avoiding a trial in California after he was accused of failing to pay $1.4 million in taxes while spending extravagantly on “personal” expenses like drugs and strip clubs.

If the case had gone to trial, prosecutors wanted to call Hunter Biden’s business associate to the stand to testify about money he received from a Romanian businessman trying to influence public opinion and policy in the U.S. The associate was compensated over $3 million between Nov. 2015 and May 2017, which he split with Hunter Biden and another partner, according to the DOJ’s indictment.

Biden could have commuted any prison term after his son’s sentencing or simply issued a narrow pardon for the charges he faced, former federal prosecutor Joseph Moreno told the DCNF. His decision to instead issue a broad pardon reveals that he “knows there are even more skeletons in the family closet that need to be scrubbed from existence.”

It also means the Bidens “will now never face justice for their collection of over $20 million in revenue from sources which have never been fully accounted for,” he said, creating an expectation of future “pardons of Biden’s brother and other family members between now and January 20.”

“This is a disgraceful end to Biden’s legacy as President, during which he used his Justice Department both to harass his political enemies and protect his son from the consequences of his actions,” Moreno said. “Biden’s memory will now likely be associated with a Nixonian degree of corruption and abuse.”

Other evidence unveiled by the House Oversight Committee has revealed potential ties between Biden and his son’s overseas business dealings.

In one July 2017 text message to a Chinese business associate, Hunter Biden allegedly warned he was sitting next to his father.

“The step between this and a self-pardon is less than a nanometer,” Goldwater Institute Vice President Timothy Sandefur for Legal Affairs wrote on X.

Margaret Love, the DOJ’s pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997, told Politico she has seen language this broad only in President Nixon’s pardon.

“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” Love said. “Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned.”

Blanket pardons like the one issued to Hunter Biden “have not been tested by the courts, though there is some debate about whether a president can Constitutionally pardon someone for acts that were never formally charged,” former federal prosecutor Katie Cherkasky told the DCNF.

“It would be up to the Supreme Court ultimately if they were to try to limit the scope of the presidential pardon, which would only come about if prosecutors attempted to charge Biden with something that arguably fell within the pardon and he sought to challenge it through the courts,” she said.

Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith said Biden may benefit from the Supreme Court’s July ruling on presidential immunity, which would prevent the Trump administration from launching a criminal investigation into “possible obstruction of justice” relating to the pardon.

“The Court said that a pardon was a conclusive and preclusive presidential power, and that the president’s exercise of such a power is broadly immune from criminalization, investigation, or prosecution by a subsequent administration,” Goldsmith wrote on X.

Biden repeatedly affirmed he would not pardon his son. As recently as November, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre insisted a pardon was not on the table.

“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,” Biden wrote Sunday. “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.”