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

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.

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

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.

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.