Hunter’s blanket pardon makes the entire Biden administration look breathtakingly sleazy

Along with a get out of jail free card, the move is a calculated “screw you” aimed by Biden at the heart of the Democrat party he believes unfairly muscled him out of running again.

Joe Biden entered the presidency claiming that all the stories about his son Hunter’s laptop were lies.

He will leave it next month having granted Hunter blanket immunity for everything that laptop documented, and much else besides.

Make no mistake: The Biden presidency is now looking hopelessly compromised, corrupt even.

While he was running for re-election – before he was exited from the race – the president swore up hill and down dale that he would never pardon his son.

This week, he did just that, cutting Hunter a break, not just on gun and tax charges, but everything he may have done for the past 11 years.

Hunter Biden, son of US President Joe Biden, leaves court after his guilty plea in his trial on tax evasion in Los Angeles, California, on September 5, 2024. Picture: AFP

To understand the real reason why the president (to the extent Biden remains a functioning commander in chief) committed this act of breathtaking sleaziness, it helps to understand the background.

Including that this all looks like a deeply-calculated “screw you” aimed by Biden at the heart of the Democrat party he believes unfairly muscled him out of running again.

A man walks past "The Mac Shop" in Wilmington, Delaware where Hunter Biden left his now infamous laptop, which the Biden administration and others claimed was fake news and Russian misinformation. Picture: AFP

Note that this not the first shot taken by the president at his own party.

After he was forced to step aside from the race in the wake of his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, Biden pulled a House of Cards manoeuvre by quickly endorsing Kamala Harris – who he knew from personal experience was a lightweight with no shot of winning – before the party could speed run a primary process to pick a new candidate.

As a result, the Democrats were stuck with a dud candidate who we now know was never ahead in any of her campaign’s own internal polls.

It was a move entirely in keeping with his bar room bore’s honour code ("no one f*cks with a Biden”, a hot mic caught the president telling a Florida mayor in 2022) and his belief that he, and only he, could have kept Trump from returning to office.

Hunter Biden (C) walks with his son Beau and his wife Melissa Cohen Biden on the tarmac of Delaware Air National Guard Base in New Castle, Delaware. Picture: AFP

Now, with Hunter’s pardon, Biden has put the entire Democrat establishment in a bind.

For one thing, the move makes everyone who defended the Biden family and claimed the laptop was Russian disinformation (happily we will never know if saying otherwise would have been criminalised by Labor’s proposed misinformation bill) look like a fool.

And, for another, it grants political immunity to Donald Trump against charges that he is playing politics with his incoming appointments – including FBI director designate Kash Patel, who has vowed to clean up the law enforcement agency that did so much to push the Russia collusion hoax.

There may be much more to clean up, too.

The scope of the pardon includes all of Hunter’s activities starting from the time his father was Barack Obama’s vice president and he was a newly minted oil and gas expert doing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in consulting for the Ukrainian firm, Burisma.

Why so broad a pardon, then, if Hunter’s activities were above board and he was not, as many have claimed, a cut-out and conduit for dodgy foreign money to hit Biden family bank accounts?

US President Joe Biden hugs his son Hunter Biden. Picture: AFP

While the President himself has not been implicated, his son received millions from his activities not only in cash, but also, in one case, a diamond.

The president’s brother Jim has also been implicated in a wide variety of schemes, including using the Biden family name to promote a hospital chain that was accused of a $100 million scheme to defraud Medicare.

And Donald Trump was impeached in 2019, don’t forget, because he asked questions about the Bidens’ relationship with Ukraine. The fact that Biden did not simply pardon Hunter for gun and tax crimes suggests that maybe Trump was on to something.

Yet this may all have been too clever by half.

If the plan was to toss a grenade in the lap of the Democrats while clearing Hunter’s criminal record and leaving the Bidens with millions in potentially ill gotten influence peddling gains, there may still be hurdles ahead.

One side effect of the pardon is that it takes away Hunter’s Fifth Amendment rights to self incrimination – if he is innocent, there is nothing to protect himself from – which could lead to him being called before a hostile Congress to testify about the family business.

Meanwhile as the Bidens ride off into the sunset with millions, the Democrats are left to pick up the pieces.

Republicans can laugh in the face of claims that Trump is violating “democratic norms” and point to this pardon as an example of exactly what they are trying to fix.

Democrats, meanwhile, will have to decide whether they’ll stand by their man, or say the Bidens’ behaviour is beyond the pale.