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President Joe Biden didn’t pardon Hunter because he’s a loving father who thinks his drug addict son was treated unfairly by the Justice Department. He pardoned Hunter to help cover up his own crimes, just as he’ll likely pardon other members of his family before he leaves office in January. He’s trying to protect himself, and this is one of the only ways he has left to do it.

After all, President Biden is the one at the center of the influence-peddling and bribery schemes that Hunter ran while Biden was vice president. Joe, not Hunter, was the one being bribed. It was his influence, not Hunter’s, that was being purchased by Ukrainian oligarchs and Chinese businessmen, both during and after Biden was vice president. There’s no Biden family business without “the big guy.” Focusing on Hunter’s crimes, and his pardon, is a distraction from the far more serious crimes his father committed.

Even Hunter’s prosecution wasn’t really about him or his misdeeds. The tax and gun charges were about protecting him from being indicted for more serious charges that would have implicated the president and forced him to answer questions about his involvement in Hunter’s overseas business deals. That’s why Special Counsel David Weiss never indicted the younger Biden for failing to register as a foreign agent, allowing the statute of limitations to expire on that and other serious crimes, and then trying to engineer a sweetheart plea deal that would have granted him blanket immunity — immunity he’s now gotten from his father in the form of a pardon that covers a jaw-dropping eleven years.

Why did Weiss do this? Because Hunter’s real tax crimes stem from failing to disclose the tens of millions he and his family raked in from the Biden family’s overseas influence-peddling operations in Ukraine and China. Weiss scrupulously avoided any investigation into those business dealings, and the tax fraud that resulted from them, because such an investigation would have obviously implicated President Biden.

Indeed, Hunter would have escaped any charges at all if the IRS whistleblowers Joseph Ziegler and David Shapley hadn’t come forward. Weiss only indicted Hunter after Ziegler and Shapley revealed that federal prosecutors in Washington and California had refused to bring charges despite ample evidence of crimes. So far from Biden’s claim that his son was “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,” Hunter received special treatment from Biden’s DOJ.

As Margot Cleveland noted in these pages on Monday, “the whistleblowers’ testimony established that Hunter Biden wasn’t unjustly targeted, but instead received unfair preferential treatment: The DOJ refused to authorize a search at his father’s house because of ‘appearances,’ witnesses were tipped to the FBI’s impending questioning of them, federal prosecutors allowed the statute of limitations to expire on the most serious criminal charges, and the DOJ entered into a sweetheart plea agreement calling for no felony charges pursuant to a deferral agreement that was so unusual, the federal judge asked for briefing on the propriety of the deal.” 

Hunter’s guilty plea on felony tax charges suggests that a presidential pardon from his father was part of the plan once Weiss’s hand was forced by the whistleblowers, both of whom have said it was clear that Joe Biden was implicated in Hunter’s overseas business dealings, that he was “the big guy” mentioned in Hunter’s emails. The pardon, which extends back to January 2014 — far outside the purview of the straightforward tax and gun cases brought against Hunter — serves not just to keep Hunter out of prison but also to end the possibility that his influence-peddling scheme in Ukraine and elsewhere will ever be properly investigated.

Keep in mind, too, that getting to the bottom of the Biden family business in Ukraine was what then-President Trump was trying to do in 2019 when he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to look into Hunter’s business arrangement with Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company that was paying him an $83,000 monthly salary (despite his lack of experience in the energy sector). Trump understandably wanted to know more about then-Vice President Joe Biden’s role in the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating Burisma, which Biden himself bragged about after threatening to withhold aid to Ukraine unless the prosecutor was fired.

For that, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats impeached Trump. Put another way, the Democrats impeached Trump for wanting to investigate the alleged crimes for which Biden just pardoned Hunter. 

Pelosi would probably not have gone to such lengths simply to protect Hunter. No, the real subject at the heart of all this—the impeachment, the slow-walked investigation of Hunter, the lesser criminal charges brought against him, the thwarted plea deal, and finally the pardon—was Joe Biden. All of this has been to protect him. His son has just been collateral damage in that effort.

In the end, the president might keep his son and other family members out of jail with last-minute pardons, but once the truth comes out, as it inevitably will, Biden will likely go down in history as one of the most corrupt presidents in American history. 

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.