After blithely accepting an obvious lie with no skepticism at all, even those who are now critical of the President focus their fire primarily on Donald Trump, fearing he may use the same power exactly as he promised on the campaign trail.
Personally, I can’t really blame President Joe Biden for pardoning his son Hunter. I know this isn’t a popular opinion, especially in conservative circles, but I think most of us in his position would’ve done the same. Believe it or not, I was telling my family and friends that President-elect Donald Trump should consider a pardon himself as a gesture of goodwill after taking office. Nor can I really blame President Biden for lying about it previously, claiming he would respect the jury’s verdict over and over again because he believes in the rule of law. For better or worse, politicians of both parties sometimes have a strained relationship with the truth and it’s not all that surprising when a President ends up insisting they’ve suddenly changed their mind on something important. The same benefit of the doubt cannot be extended to the media, however. We should reserve a special scorn for those who readily repeated the President’s insistence he’d never, ever pardon his son despite how obviously inevitable the outcome was with absolutely no skepticism and then promptly proceeded to use the President’s own talking point as a weapon against their once and future nemesis, Donald Trump. Repeatedly, they insisted conservatives were categorically wrong, if not downright crazy, for claiming a pardon would be forthcoming despite the President’s assertions otherwise. As CNN’s Laura Coates put it at the time, he promised to “put the law before family,” “letting the world know that he will not wipe away the decision of twelve of his son’s peers.” Anyone who said otherwise was effectively shouted down, barely even worthy of contempt. When Chris Wallace, not exactly a Trump-stooge, politely pointed out, “let’s see what happens if he loses,” he was informed in rather exasperated fashion, “yeah, but he said it” as though President Biden was the caricature of George Washington who could never tell a lie rather than a man with a troubled truth-telling history all his own. Laura Fink, a Democrat strategist, apparently believed that the real challenge for the President “was to continue to live up to his values when it’s really personal and he did that today.” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins added to that ultimately false assertion, claiming it “takes new weight when we see what Trump is saying about the outcome of his trial, when we’re hearing from other Republicans who say they won’t accept the verdict.” On the same panel, the former conservative and now avowed Trump-hater, S. E. Cupp claimed the contrast “is profound. To sit there and say, I’m not going to intervene in the legal process and I wouldn’t pardon my son. On one side, Democrats and Joe Biden are protecting the justice system and Republicans, protecting Donald Trump.” Perhaps John Harwood put it best on X, “people who insist Biden will pardon Hunter after specifically ruling it out are telling on themselves…they can’t imagine someone acting on principle and keeping his word.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, most of this blithe acceptance followed by attacks on his opponent was immediately forgotten the moment President Biden revealed himself to be a liar, did what he promised he wouldn’t do, and issued an almost shockingly broad pardon. Not only did he pardon Hunter for the crimes he was convicted of, but for any and all crimes he might have committed over an entire decade, even those unrelated to any current investigation. While many weren’t pleased to their credit, even in the mainstream media, a disturbing number did what they always do and promptly blamed President Trump for actions he had absolutely nothing to do with. The notoriously anti-Trump The Bulwark for example, acknowledged that some of the criticism was “fair” while mounting an immediate defense of the indefensible. Without evidence of any kind, they claim “Biden bent over backwards to keep his hands off this prosecution, at considerable cost to his family,” something that flies in the face of what multiple whistleblowers insisted. They continue to parrot his own insistence that no one is ever charged with these crimes, and Hunter was only prosecuted because he was a Biden. Despite attempting to defraud the government of over a million dollars in taxes, much of it earned by being an illegal, unregistered foreign agent, they focussed on the gun crime almost exclusively, declaring these “are piddling charges that would not have seen the light of day but for the fact that Hunter Biden is, well, Hunter Biden.” Pay no attention to the judge who rejected the sweetheart plea deal that would have let him completely off. Instead, it all comes down to Donald Trump, as it always does to the Trump-deranged. Although the President-elect hasn’t mentioned Hunter once, has graciously greeted President Biden himself at the White House, and given no indication that he plans to pursue any kind of vendetta against him, The Bulwark insisted, “for all those attacking President Biden for this decision, I’d urge you to look at the bigger picture here. The landscape has changed considerably since June when he ruled out a pardon for Hunter. Not only did Trump—rather than Biden or his vice president, Kamala Harris—win the White House, but the president-elect is clearly hellbent on following through on his promises of retribution and revenge, indicating through his nominations an intention to weaponize the FBI and the Justice Department.” Apparently, it never occurs to them that the rule of law follows the results of elections. President Biden didn’t add the caveat I won’t pardon Hunter unless Trump wins, making a mockery of their entire argument.
Beyond accepting the idea that the President suddenly changed his mind rather than lied, even as NBC News reported he’d been considering the pardon since June, they concluded that the “breadth of Hunter’s pardon suggests that his father knows that a Bondi-led DOJ and Patel-led FBI could throw the proverbial book at him on additional charges if given the chance. And should Hunter have faced jail time at sentencing (unlikely, though the possible sentencing range climbs to 25 years), Trump would have sat atop the day-to-day fate of Joe Biden’s son under the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Ghastly.” Time Magazine rationalized something similar if less dramatically, claiming “when you take a look at Biden’s choice—making use of a power guaranteed in the Constitution with very few limits—it starts to make some sense.” They too believe President Trump is at least partly to blame, saying he “has made no secret of his desire to keep going after the Bidens,” the “cases were handled differently” because of Hunter’s last name, adding that they were “novel” in some undefined, inexplicable fashion. More bizarrely, they insisted that “Inaction was never, really, an option” even as the President himself said inaction was exactly what he would do, blaming the voters this time because they “rendered their verdict on Biden’s by-the-books approach when they chose to return Trump to power.” Somehow, they manage to say this even after acknowledging that President Biden was lying the entire time, “Privately, those close to him believed that the President would eventually intervene and end the federal prosecutions against his son,” meaning there was never a “by-the-books approach” to begin with. To them, the decision ultimately represented a collision of sorts between President Biden’s two overarching ideals, of course as Biden himself sees them, fidelity to the rule of law and fidelity to family, which they describe as “central” to his “brand.” In this view, the poor President was suffering an existential crisis, transformed suddenly into Hamlet, “Joe Biden spent his half-century in politics insisting that politics had no place in the judicial system, but that belief ran head-first into a competing precept that family stands above all other concerns.” Besides, no one should really care anyway, when “Hunter Biden has been incredibly open about his battles with addiction, and has seemingly turned around his life in the years after some admittedly poor choices. A lengthy jail term would do little to teach Hunter Biden any lessons he hasn’t already internalized. That argument appeared to help Joe Biden get to yes,” and beyond any meaningful punishment, political or otherwise, “the pardon is not going to stay front of mind for most Americans, and Trump is likely to find a way to hijack the public discourse as Team Joe runs down the clock.”
Even those who have criticized the President have done so making it obvious that their real concern is Donald Trump. The New Yorker, for example, was fairly harsh in their critique, but then went into a full broadside against the President-elect, accusing President Biden of “once more losing sight of his overriding objective: to diminish Donald Trump’s capacity to do violence to the liberal-democratic institutions which Biden claims his Presidency centered on upholding” even as he undermined them for purely personally reasons. They continued, “The Trump team must surely be pleased today, because every conceivable argument it could make for allowing a man like Kash Patel to lead the F.B.I. may now sound just a bit more convincing to any wavering Republican. (This should not, of course, be an excuse for any senator who votes for Patel, or any other unqualified and dangerous Trump nominee.) More broadly, Biden’s decision allows Republicans to engage in the same cynicism about the system being rigged and corrupt, and Trump being no different than any other politician, that they have engaged in for nearly a decade. This couldn’t be further from the truth—especially the part about Trump’s corruption and self-dealing being no different from the norm—but Biden is doing the work of people who want to wreck the best aspects of America’s democratic ethos. The pardon now gives Trump and his allies the opportunity to call Biden a hypocrite and proceed having their own way with the law” – of course, right after President Biden had his own way. CNN’s Stephen Collinson fretted about something similar, believing that the “political impact of Sunday night’s drama could be profound. Already, Republicans are arguing the Hunter Biden pardon shows that the current president, and not the next one, is most to blame for politicizing the system of justice by meting out favorable treatment to his son. Their claim may not be accurate, but it can still be politically effective…This could be especially significant as Trump comes under pressure from supporters in the coming months to pardon those convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021, mob attack on the US Capitol — many of whom are still in jail.” The idea that the Democrats have lost the “moral high ground” has also been floated in conjunction with these claims, as if they ever had it based on lies to begin with.
A few have even used it as an opportunity to renew claims that the pardon power itself should be removed or greatly limited, potentially subject to Congressional review, all while studiously ignoring that the real problem is the incessant lying, repeated by the media with no skepticism, not really the pardon itself. Indeed, President Trump’s campaign promise to free the J6 protestors and rioters he believes were unfairly prosecuted is a case study of why the power exists in the first place. If nothing else, the Founders were keenly aware of the threat of political prosecutions, having been targeted themselves. The Bill of Rights provides protections under the first, second, fourth, fifth, sixth, and eighth amendments against such prosecutions, but even more fundamentally, there is nothing in our system of government that isn’t subject to review or overturning if necessary. The President has veto power over Congress, but Congress can override a veto. The Senate has advise and consent power over presidential appointments, but the President can make appointments during recess. The pardon power is of a piece with this thinking, giving the President the ability to overturn a conviction, exactly as President Trump has promised. If it is abused, impeachment and other political responses are applicable. To reach the conclusion that President Trump would be abusing his power and acting corruptly should he overturn the J6 convictions, they need to studiously avoid he ran on that very outcome as a campaign promise. If he comes under pressure to do so, it is only because he said he would – exactly as the Constitution and our democratic norms provide for. Setting aside the histrionics and the usual whataboutism that accompanies Donald Trump, we are really confronted with yet another choice between whether the supposedly enlightened, discerning, and educating media class is either complete morons or shameless liars. At the risk of repeating myself, what’s the old expression about fooling me once and fooling me twice?
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 