03 Dec Joe, Hunter, and the Washington Blob
As I have admitted before, I have always had something of a soft spot for Joe Biden. As I put it just over five years ago:
He is a lying, braggadocious goof, who has played political hardball all his professional life and has hit more than a few people in the head with those hardballs. He is a plagiarist with hair plugs who is nowhere near as innocent and harmless as his supporters would have us believe.
He also lost his wife and his baby daughter at the start of his political career and stood by helplessly – despite being the Vice President of the United States – while his oldest son died. That deserves a little sympathy, no matter what else you think of him.
Likewise, I have always felt more than a little bit sorry for Hunter Biden. In addition, to being a degenerate and lifelong grifter, he is a user and abuser of people, usually those closest to him. Still, he lost his mother and sister while still a toddler. He says that his first memory “is of waking up in a hospital bed next to Beau, who turned to him and said, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’” And then, Beau died of brain cancer in 2015. Also, it is clear from this weekend’s activities that Hunter has always been enabled by his father and stepmother. After all, it is difficult to learn from the consequences of your actions, when you are perpetually shielded from those consequences.
Finally, I have always largely agreed with Alexander Hamilton, the author of Federalist Paper No. 74, about the presidential power to pardon and the need for clemency and mercy to temper the severity of a fair justice system:
The criminal code of every country partakes so much of necessary severity, that without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel. As the sense of responsibility is always strongest, in proportion as it is undivided, it may be inferred that a single man would be most ready to attend to the force of those motives which might plead for a mitigation of the rigor of the law, and least apt to yield to considerations which were calculated to shelter a fit object of its vengeance.
Given all of this, you might suspect that I’d be inclined to excuse or rationalize Joe’s instantly infamous pardon of his son Hunter for all crimes, known and unknown, committed from 2014 to 2024. But I am not so inclined. Indeed, I think this pardon is incredibly unfortunate. It clearly violates the spirit in which the pardon power was granted by the Founders to the president, and it makes a mockery of the whole idea of government-provided clemency. More to the point, it says a great deal about what is wrong with American politics today and what will remain wrong with it for the foreseeable future.
To be clear and to answer one of the most frequently posed questions by Biden supporters over the last couple of days: If I were in the same position, then yeah, I guess I probably would pardon my son to spare him the humiliation and pain of prison. But then, I would never, ever, under any circumstances be allowed to be in “the same position.”
If I were a longtime Washington fixture with a son who was a longtime coke-head and grifter, who abused the power associated with my name and my office to provide heaven knows what information to foreign sources, who manipulated and abused everyone around him, including his brother’s widow, who had never shown any remorse for any of his misdeeds, and who was, indeed, eager to continue capitalizing on my position and power, then the political and media establishments would do everything in their power to tell my story and to allow it to destroy me.
They wouldn’t pretend that I’m a really good and decent and honorable guy who would never, ever do anything untoward. They wouldn’t attack and defame my political opponents simply for mentioning my sons’ character (or lack thereof). They wouldn’t organize an intelligence-community-wide effort to call the inarguable proof of my son’s crimes a foreign intelligence fabricated hoax. They wouldn’t defend me over and over and over again, when I lied about the possibility that I might pardon my son. They wouldn’t do anything for me. Rather, they would rightly let the people of the country know that I was, inarguably, a man who should never be allowed near the presidential pardon power – much less any of the other powers of the presidency.
You’ll notice that in the last phrase quoted above from Federalist No. 74, Hamilton suggests that the type of person whom the people would elect president would almost certainly not be the type of person who would abuse the pardon power. “It may be inferred,” he writes, that the president would be the type of person “least apt to yield to considerations which were calculated to shelter a fit object of [the law’s] vengeance.” It never really occurred to Hamilton or the rest of the Founders that the president might be a man who would use the pardon power for his personal benefit, to pardon his kid, for example, or the husband of a woman he thought was kinda hot and who had, in any case, promised to ply him and his friends with oodles of cash.
Over the past couple of days, Eric Holder – the former Attorney General of the United States – has been all over social media, telling people criticizing Biden’s pardon of his son that they are woefully misinformed and should shut up about it. This is hardly surprising, given that Holder is a big part of the reason that Joe Biden was in the position to make this pardon in the first place. Not only is Holder perfectly representative of the Washington Blob that enabled Biden by covering for him and his son for years, he is also the man responsible, more than any other, for turning the pardon power into a grotesque political joke:
Eric Holder was the key man. As deputy AG, Holder was in charge of advising the president on the merits of various petitions for pardon. Jack Quinn, a lawyer for Rich, approached Holder about clemency for his client. Quinn was a confidant of Al Gore, then a candidate for president; Holder had ambitions of being named attorney general in a Gore administration. A report from the House Committee on Government Reform on the Rich debacle later concluded that Holder must have decided that cooperating in the Rich matter could pay dividends later on.
Rich was an active fugitive, a man who had used his money to evade the law, and presidents do not generally pardon people like that. What’s more, the Justice Department opposed the pardon—or would’ve, if it had known about it. But Holder and Quinn did an end-around, bringing the pardon to Clinton directly and avoiding any chance that Justice colleagues might give negative input. As the House Government Reform Committee report later put it, “Holder failed to inform the prosecutors under him that the Rich pardon was under consideration, despite the fact that he was aware of the pardon effort for almost two months before it was granted.”…
If Holder had followed protocols and made sure the Justice Department was looped in, there’s no way that Rich would have been pardoned. Hundreds of thousands of men sit in American prisons doing unconscionably long sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. DNA tests routinely turn up cases of unjust convictions. But Marc Rich bought his pardon with money and access….
To hell with Eric Holder. To hell with Leslie Stahl and the rest of the media who insisted that Hunter Biden had done nothing wrong and that the charges against him had been debunked. To hell with the entire Washington Blob for putting all of us in this mess. Joe and Hunter Biden, I can sympathize with a little bit. I can understand – if not forgive – their failings. The Blob, though….The Blob is evil and it is self-serving and it is the reason Americans don’t trust their institutions even a little bit. The Founders, in their wisdom, foresaw a great deal of man’s infirmities and built their republic to neutralize or at least minimize them. They never foresaw the Blob, however. And that’s a tragedy.
