More pardons?

As if losing the presidential and congressional elections last month was not enough to break the spirit of Democrats, President Biden pardoned his son Hunter.

And not just for a few matters during a specific and limited time, the president reached back more than 10 years and extended the pardon to anything and everything Hunter may have done.

The very respected, conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, who has been critical of President Donald Trump’s appointment
process says, “Biden’s pardon of Hunter is as disconcerting as Trump’s more exotic administration nominees.”

In her December 5 WSJ column, Noonan reminded her readers, “It is embarrassing as a citizen to see the president of the United States pardon his son, and in such an all-encompassing way, for any legal transgression going back nearly 11 years, which feels like a concession to the assumption that his more interesting law-stretching or -breaking may be yet unknown. The president had promised frequently and explicitly that he wouldn’t pardon his son, that he’d play it straight and let the course of justice play out. Which means he knew it was important to people, to how they viewed him, and so he lied to reassure them. All this did what others have said: lowered trust in political leaders, made the cynical more cynical.”

Not surprisingly, some Democrats agreed with Noonan.

Our president had said over and over again that he would not pardon his son. We believed him.

Now we wonder if there will be a price Democrats will have to pay for the president’s change in position. Will Democrats suffer for Biden’s change of mind or for misleading the country about his intentions regarding a pardon for Hunter?

Noonan has no doubts. “The nature of Hunter Biden’s bad actions is famous in the public mind because it involves videotaped depictions of decadent behavior—guns, drugs and sex, all memorialized by him and stored on his famous laptop. It became an emblem of the assumption that the elites of our nation, the people pulling the strings, are wholly decadent—dope-smoking lowlifes, abusers of others. It’s looking very Late Rome among our leadership class. Anyway, by pardoning his son the president makes himself look part of all that.”

Noonan feels strongly that Biden made a mistake. “The pardon struck me as a bitter action, too. A president who cared about public opinion, or even that of his own party, wouldn’t have done it, or quite this way. It’s the president flipping the bird to an ungrateful (and also rather decadent!) nation that coldly turned on him after a single debate, and then elected that tramp Donald Trump—they deserve what they get.”

“Will the pardon, as some of the president’s friends say, be forgotten tomorrow? No. People still remember Bill Clinton’s late-night pardon of Marc Rich for tax evasion, wire fraud and other charges. People who like Mr. Biden and those who dislike him will always end the telling of his political story with “And then at the end he pardons his son!”

“What an act of disrespect,” Noonan exclaims.

Noonan cites reports that President Biden is considering giving pre-emptive pardons for officials not yet even accused or convicted of breaking the law, wow. If that is true, it makes you wonder. What have our leaders been up to the past four years that they require such unprecedented forgiveness? Even with fears of a vengeful Trump Justice Department, pre-emptive pardons are an excessive move.”

Here, in my view, Noonan is mistaken.

President-elect Trump has promised a vindictive program against all who opposed him or displeased him. We can hope that Trump is exaggerating his intentions.

But Biden owes his staff and close-in supporters the same protections he gave his son.



D.G. Martin, a retired lawyer, served as UNC-System’s vice president for public affairs and hosted PBS-NC’s North Carolina Bookwatch.