Biden to issue pardon for Hunter Biden
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President Joe Biden has decided to issue a pardon for his son Hunter and is expected to announce it Sunday night, according to a senior White House official with direct knowledge of the decision.
The decision marks a reversal for the president, who has repeatedly said he would not use his executive authority to pardon his son or commute his sentence. The pardon comes ahead of Hunter Biden’s Dec. 12 sentencing for his conviction on federal gun charges. Hunter Biden also is set to be sentenced in a separate criminal case on Dec. 16, after pleading guilty in September on federal tax evasion charges.
The pardon is expected to cover both Hunter Biden’s gun charges conviction and guilty plea.
The senior White House official said Biden decided over this weekend to grant his son a pardon and began to inform his senior aides on Sunday.
The presidential pardon power is a royalist anachronism that either shouldn’t exist at all, or should be far more hemmed in by bureaucratic limitations than it currently is, but that’s not relevant to the merits here. Those include:
(1) Hunter Biden was subject to criminal prosecution for purely political reasons. The offenses he was convicted for are almost literally never prosecuted. The tax evasion charge is particularly outrageous: pursuing criminal charges for tax evasion when the defendant has paid back all the taxes, penalties, and fines that the taxpayer owes essentially never happens.
(2) That Republicans will scream about this is, under the circumstances, something to which any decent person, i.e., not a Republican, should pay exactly zero attention.
. . . Nate Silver continues to burnish (dyswidt?) his reputation for totally not hysterical punditry: