Six months after telling the nation he would not pardon his son, President Joe Biden did exactly that, and reaction from the firearms community is overwhelmingly negative, even though the president’s move was hardly surprising.
Hunter Biden was convicted in June of three federal firearms felonies when a jury took less than three hours to conclude he illegally purchased and possessed a firearm while using illegal drugs and lying about it on a federal Form 4473. There was no small irony in the fact that Joe Biden had supported the laws his son violated.
The elder Biden granted his son a full and unconditional pardon, reneging on the promise he made repeatedly. The hypocrisy of his actions came through in his statement of justification: “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.”
The very same arguments might be made about the man who will replace Joe Biden in January, the former president who was, according to his faithful supporters, persecuted, prosecuted and victimized by “lawfare” by Democrats who stopped at nothing in their efforts to keep him out of office a second time. Donald Trump not only suffered political warfare, he also survived two assassination attempts by individuals who many believe were driven by the hateful rhetoric espoused by his opponents, including President Biden, who portrayed the incoming president as dangerous to democracy.
The president has also said nobody is above the law, but evidently that standard applies to those whose last name is not Biden. Call it an early Christmas present from father to son.
Hunter Biden was also facing big problems related to his guilty plea on tax charges.
To their credit, virtually every left-of-center news agency reporting on the pardon acknowledged the president had gone back on his vow to not pardon his son.
- CNN: “By pardoning his son, Joe Biden has reneged on a public promise that he made repeatedly before and after dropping out of the 2024 presidential race.”
- Los Angeles Times: “In June, Biden categorically ruled out a pardon or commutation for his son…”
- New York Times: “Many of the president’s allies and critics had expected him to use the unique authority vested only in his office, even though the president’s spokeswoman had denied for months that Mr. Biden had any intention of doing so.”
- NBC News: “Biden’s plans to pardon his son were first reported by NBC News. He had said publicly multiple times that he would not pardon him.”
Joe Biden is an accomplished prevaricator. A report from the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability this past February showed the president “lied to the American people when he claimed he “did not” interact with his family’s foreign business associates.” In that report, the committee said “evidence uncovered through bank records and witness testimony proves Joe Biden interacted with nearly all of his son Hunter Biden’s foreign business associates. President Biden spoke by phone, attended dinners and meetings, and had coffee with his son’s foreign business associates. These individuals include Russian and Kazakhstani oligarchs, a Burisma executive, and Chinese nationals who collectively funneled millions to his son.”
This report effectively demolished the president’s repeated claims he never spoke to Hunter about his son’s business dealings. The New York Post tells a far different story, however. When Joe Biden bowed out of the 2024 campaign this past summer, an impeachment inquiry came to an end, the newspaper recalled.
As the elder Biden prepares to leave office in about seven weeks, his legacy already in tatters, the Sunday pardon amounts to the icing on a stale cake.
Joe Biden has received four “Pinocchios” from the Washington Post fact checker several times, for lying about Republican tax plans to his laughable canard that the Second Amendment prevented people from owning cannons. Politifact has a rather lengthy list of his fibs, not the least of which has been his repeated claim that the gun industry is the only industry in the country with immunity from lawsuits. It’s not true and never was, and Joe Biden knows it.
So now, Hunter Biden skates on a federal gun conviction for which other people might do time or at least have a felony conviction on their records which prohibits them from voting or ever again owning a firearm.
Perhaps the biggest falsehood of them all came in his pardon message: “For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: just tell the American people the truth.”
For such a remark to be credible, it helps if you know how.
About Dave Workman
Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms, and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.
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