Should President Biden have granted that pardon?

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2024

Marcus and Todd and our American Babel: Should President Biden have granted that pardon to his son, Hunter Biden?

A wide range of basic questions are involved in any assessment of this topic. Conceivably, the whole thing starts with some basic questions about Joe Biden's apparently permissive attitude, down through the years, toward his apparently grifter son and his possibly grifter brother.

Among the various assessments we've seen observers offer, Chuck Todd's assessment stands out. We can't tell you if his assessment is right or wrong, but he seems to be trying to see a larger forest instead of a couple of trees.

He spoke with Chris Cillizza. As you can see at Mediaite, here's part of what he said:

TODD (12/2/24): I followed the Hunter Biden trial very closely. I read every transcript, all the testimony, because that’s what you—all that was made public. 

And there is—you want to, you want to read, you want to get angry, just as somebody in all these mixed emotions? You read the Hallie Biden transcript, and that’s Beau’s widow. 

CILLIZZA: Yes.

TODD: And essentially, he turned her into a crack addict. And this was all happening in 2017, 2018. And Joe and Jill Biden were so concerned about their family that they decided to run for president.  

CILLIZZA: Yup!

TODD: I just—so when you talk about the word "selfish," I— It’s almost like the word doesn’t— I mean— Their decision to run for president put the entire Democratic Party, and the United States of America, in the position that it’s in now.

Chuck seems to feel that Joe Biden's decision to run for president was, under the circumstances, extremely unwise. He seems to feel the decision has ended very badly for Blue American interests.

We have no idea how to evaluate that assessment. That said:

For ourselves, we have increasingly wondered about the way Joe Biden dealt with these family matters down through the years, back to and including the years when he served as vice president.

For better or worse, Todd was attempting to assess a forest, not just a handful of trees. In this column for the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus carefully assesses a more limited set of legal and political matters.

In Marcus' view, the pardon was justified on the merits. This is the heart of her legal analysis:

Biden had good reason to pardon Hunter. Except he promised he’d never do it.

[...]

Hunter Biden was convicted in June on three felony charges involving his lying on federal gun-purchasing paperwork about his drug use and illegally possessing a gun. He pleaded guilty in September to nine federal charges stemming from his failure to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes. Sentencing in both cases was scheduled for later this month, and the tax case in particular exposed him to the threat of significant prison time, up to 17 years.

Neither of these cases should have gone as far as they did. “Addict in possession” gun cases are not often brought as stand-alone charges, absent other, serious misconduct. Hunter Biden had the gun for all of 11 days and never used it. The tax charges stemmed from a period when he was suffering from a serious drug problem; two years before the charges were filed, he repaid the taxes owed plus associated interest and penalties. Far more serious and willful tax offenses have been settled without resorting to criminal charges.

But Hunter Biden was an attractive target for his father’s political opponents; more precisely, he made himself an attractive target with unsavory consulting arrangements that traded on the family name. Those deals, though, didn’t yield criminal charges, and the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for Delaware, David Weiss, was left with the gun and tax cases. Those should have been resolved by a plea agreement under which Hunter Biden would have been sent to a pretrial diversion program, but when Republican members of Congress erupted over what they called a sweetheart plea deal, Weiss proved too weak to resist the pressure. As the president said in his statement, his son was “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.”

For the record, Marcus is a graduate of Harvard Law School, though she turned directly to a career in journalism after receiving her law degree.

At any rate, that's Marcus' assessment of the way these prosecutions went down. In her view, President Biden was right on the merits when he said that Hunter Biden was “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.”

Sadly, also this:

Along the way, Marcus also takes note of the role allegedly played by Hunter Biden's "unsavory consulting arrangements that traded on the family name." It's those arrangements, and Joe Biden's apparently permissive attitude toward such behaviors, that have helped sour us on the president's role in our failing nation's recent political history.

Then too, there's this! Here comes the judge, saying this, as reported today by NBC News:

Judge in Hunter Biden tax case calls president's pardon statement an attempt to 'rewrite history'

The judge who presided over the California tax fraud case against Hunter Biden called out the president for mischaracterizing and minimizing the charges against his son in announcing why he was pardoning him.

"The Constitution provides the President with broad authority to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history," U.S. District Judge Mark C. Scarsi wrote in a ruling late Tuesday. 

The NBC report continues, with Judge Scarsi seeming to hit President Biden hard. We have no idea of Judge Scarsi's assessments are right.

Our final observation on this general matter is this:

Like many other important matters, this matter turns on many technical points—in this case, on legal points which non-specialists will be poorly equipped to assess. Given the arrangements our nation has chosen, people watching the Fox News Channel will hear one set of claims about those technical legal matters, while people watching MSNBC will hear a completely different set of assessments.

Never the twain shall meet! We live in a tightly segregated type of journalistic Babel. In various types of cases, "experts" holding diametrically opposite views will never meet in a neutral forum where they can be seen attempting to battle it out.

Under this arrangement, it's very, very, very hard to get a clear view of the actual facts in endless arrays of major disputes. As a general matter, citizens will simply repair to their respective tribal corners, where they will be served their approved tribal point of view. 

In our experience, members of both American nations, Red and Blue, do get misled in the process.

Can a large modern nation really function this way? The evidence seems all too clear whenever we look around!

Two additional points: In our view, Marcus is both sane and sharp. We also regard her as a "straight shooter." 

Is her assessment right in this matter? How in the world should we know? 

It's ever thus under current arrangements! But this is the nation our corporate news orgs, and some of their best-known employees, have quite relentlessly chosen.

Regarding the pardon, this:

We don't think someone should go to jail for the offenses as we understand them. We're a bit of a squish on such matters. 

That helps explain why we, like tens of millions of others, were negatively impressed when Blue America's opinion leaders spent so much time, and so much energy, trying to lock Trump up. 

Our tribunes talked about it day and night, ignoring almost everything else. Quite a few Others noticed!

Is that one of the ways we Blue Americans may have managed to earn our way out? We'll have more on that vital question in the eons ahead. 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and we chose incarceration!