Littwin: The Hunter pardon was Biden’s last grave step in a year of selfish decisions

I am a father. If I were Hunter Biden’s father, knowing that my son faced prison during the time of the dark, vengeance-filled, corrupt forces set to inhabit the White House and Justice Department, I know I would be scared for my son.

I know that leaving him in the hands of MAGA World’s worst, who will never stop their vengeance tour against the Bidens and others on their long and sordid enemies lists, would feel like an abandonment.

I can’t say for sure, since I don’t have to make the decision, what I might have done. But I know what I would not have done.

I would not have promised, while I was running for office, when it would have mattered to voters, that I would do the right thing and never pardon him. And that matters.

This was a campaign promise, which he has now broken, even knowing from the beginning that the yearslong investigation of Hunter was meant to injure the father. Why did he make the promise? I leave that to you to judge. I know what I think.

I would never have promised, as Joe Biden did, that he wouldn’t interfere in the prosecution of his son, who faced sentencing later this month on tax and gun charges. Even after the election, Biden’s press secretary said the president would not commute, pardon or in any other way interfere with the verdicts against his son.

I would never have said, as Joe Biden did, that he respected the jury system in Hunter’s trial, only later to make it all too clear that he respects the voice of the jury only so far as it doesn’t reach a member of his immediate family.

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I would never, under those circumstances, have pardoned my son. And I certainly would never have pardoned him first. There are many others who are completely innocent — unlike Hunter, whose past has been both tragic and toxic, who turned access to his father into a money-making proposition — who need protection. 

Biden should have first offered pardons to those in immediate danger of Trump persecution. We’ve just seen Trump nominate Kash Patel — who went so far as to list likely enemies,  including deep staters and other swampers — to be head of the FBI.

There are as many as eight significant would-be Trump appointees who have already joined the war against nearly all Trump opponents, from “woke” generals to now-out-of-work politicians who bucked him, to my guys — the enemies of the people.

I know what I’m saying here won’t be a popular proposition for many reading this column. The polls show that Democrats have done a complete flip-flop on the issue, with most saying they opposed a pardon back in June and now pretty much overwhelmingly supporting one. That’s not a surprise. In this hyperpolarized time, we pick our teams and tend to stick with them.

What’s interesting is that prominent Democratic members of Colorado’s political class — including Sen. Michael Bennet, Gov. Jared Polis and Rep. Jason Crow — have stepped up in criticizing Biden’s pardon. Many more Democratic politicians have chosen to avoid the topic.

Bennet’s reasoning is closest  to mine — that Biden’s pardoning decision is in line with much of what he has done in his last year as president, amounting to, in Bennet’s words, “putting his personal interest ahead of his responsibility to the country.”

What Joe Biden has done in pardoning Hunter is what Donald Trump would have done, putting himself and his family above the law. Except Trump almost certainly wouldn’t have lied about it, because no one who knows anything about Trump would expect anything different than for him to pardon his family and friends while proudly chasing down each and every one of his enemies, meaning anyone brave enough to stand up to him. 

I don’t know if she would accept a blanket pardon, but I’d start with Liz Cheney if I were handing out pardons. Or maybe Fiona Hill. Or Christopher Wray. Or Adam Schiff. Or Cassidy Hutchinson. Or those in prison with long sentences for using crack. Or those aged or disabled, for whom jail no longer serves any purpose. 

I assume Trump will start pardoning those who were found guilty of assaulting the Capitol on Jan. 6 and then begin prosecuting those involved in prosecuting the rioters.

Of course we know what Trump will do. He’s already done it. In his last term, Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, Ivanka’s father-in-law, and now has said he will be his ambassador to France, much of which, as I understand it, is nicer than most jail cells. He pardoned a very large handful of Trump henchmen. If he ever leaves office, Trump will likely pardon more.

So, this is not to compare Biden the man to Trump the man. Biden is essentially a good man, I think, who has made a mistake — one that is a terrible coda to Biden’s troubling last year in office.

Trump, meanwhile, is a singular threat to American democracy, a threat to decency, a threat to norms and mostly a threat to what we used to think of as the American way of life. And I’m sure of all that.

But there is a larger point here, a much larger point. The reason Joe Biden was elected president in 2020 was to rid the White House of Trump and bring the return of honesty and decency to the job. And in this last season of Biden, when he could have stepped aside much earlier — in the way that he had hinted in 2020 that he would be a “bridge” to the next generation —- he didn’t, even at the cost of honesty and decency.

He knew he was personally unpopular, knew that the state of the economy, whatever the numbers showed, made him politically radioactive, knew that his age and level of cognition had become the defining issue in the campaign and should have known that the most important thing was not to be re-elected but to do everything he could to ensure there would be no Trump restoration.

Instead, he believed that he has always been underrated, and that of course he, being Joe Biden, could beat Trump. I think we can call that hubris. (For Trump, we can stick with malignant narcissism.)

Even after the disastrous debate, which Biden wanted so badly because he was certain it would prove he had no cognitive issues, it took a month, and then only by the grace of Nancy Pelosi’s brave persistence, for him to step aside. 

There was never any point, it seemed to me, that he graciously accepted the facts of the matter. And as far as I could tell, there was never a time, as Kamala Harris made sure to publicly show her respect for Biden to the end, when Biden would tell her that politics ain’t beanbag, that he’s a big boy, and that Harris should remove herself from his legacy as much as she needed to.

Biden’s resistance to stepping aside was, at bottom, a selfish act and turned upside down the rationale for his presidency. For that matter, you should know the pardon wasn’t just your basic off-the-shelf pardon. It was a blanket pardon covering any crimes, known or unknown, that Hunter may have committed from 2014 to 2024 —  in other words to include the time of his shady job in Ukraine working for Burisma. Bill Clinton, who made some very questionable pardons, did pardon his half-brother, but only after he had served his sentence.

Let’s remember how Biden, in his third run for the presidency, won the Democratic nomination in 2020. After finishing no higher than fourth in either of the two primary-season-opening contests, Biden seemed to be all but done. He was rescued in South Carolina, when the respected Black congressman, James Clyburn, endorsed him, and the Black vote overwhelmingly followed. 

Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, Biden’s two main rivals in the Democratic moderate lane, dropped out before the large-scale Super Tuesday vote, throwing their support to Biden against the liberal-lane candidates, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. They dropped out knowing that Sanders would be Biden’s main competition and were concerned that he could not beat Trump. Neither was going to win by that point, but Buttigieg and McCaskill still took one for the team.

And Biden?

If he had stepped aside far earlier, allowing for a Democratic primary in 2024, who knows what might have happened? Biden beat Trump because the memories of Trump’s failures on COVID and much else were fresh, not because Biden ran a miraculous campaign. When it was clear to everyone, except maybe Biden, that he couldn’t win this year, Harris eventually got the nomination. But she won it without going through the nominating process and without the time needed for her, or possibly another candidate, to fully prosecute the case for themselves and against Trump.

I’m not going to argue that Biden’s pardoning decision opens any doors for Trump to walk through. That’s not a serious argument. He had walked through all the doors already. He’s been convicted and adjudicated, shown to have cheated and lied, but still, as I’ve heard said, more voters were more concerned about the price of eggs.

And now it’s Trump who is opening the doors, without any need of permission, even before the Biden pardon, for Kash Patel et al.

Certainly, that’s not all Biden’s fault. Every president makes mistakes. But in pardoning his son, after promising everyone he wouldn’t, this mistake only reflects all the others that Biden made while desperately trying to hold on to power instead of doing his all to hold off the danger. 

And so Trump wins. And so Democrats are now left to explain, even as they rightly attack Trump for past transgressions and those yet to come, how they’re not complete hypocrites.

And that they really, truly believe — no matter what Biden might have done — no man or woman is above the law.

Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.

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