Hunter’s Pardon

Almost a year ago I wrote a post strongly hinting that Joe Biden would pardon his son (Ignore the first part of the post, which is about something else). In a later post, on my view of the election, I wrote:

Biden may possibly be a decent human being but he is a terrible president — the opposite of my view of Clinton. He is quite obviously corrupt and the policies he follows are very bad for the country.

A commenter asked how it was possible for Biden to be both corrupt and a decent man. My response is that I judge someone’s personality mostly by how he treats the people immediately around him; people we interact with directly are more salient, more real, to us than distant people, even distant people affected by actions we take. Morally speaking, stealing from Walmart is the same offense as stealing from a friend or a colleague but it doesn’t feel the same and it leads to a different prediction of future behavior. Someone who steals from a friend will feel free to steal from Walmart if he thinks he can get away with it, but probably not the other way around. Someone who gives up his weekend plans to drive a friend to the hospital in a medical emergency and take care of his kids and pets until the emergency is over might do less good for the world than someone who donates ten thousand dollars to a well chosen medical charity but he has given better evidence of being a good person, someone friends can rely on. A decent man.

For Biden as Vice-President, selling access was at worst the emotional equivalent of stealing from Walmart, probably less. As an explicit transaction it might have been illegal, politically costly if discovered, but it was not a cost to any actual person he cared about.

It was not even as obviously wrong as stealing from Walmart. Hunter did not, so far as we know, offer to arrange for a representative of a Chinese or Ukrainian firm to have lunch with his father in exchange for fifty thousand dollars in cash. It was only an implicit contract: I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine. You pay me to be on your board and I will arrange a lunch with my dad. Joe did not, so far as we know, make explicit promises — but it was understood that if there was anything he could do for his son’s friend … . What he did for a friend, as VP and as the member of the administration in charge of Ukraine policy, might have substantial costs for Ukrainians or Americans, but costs to invisible victims are not, emotionally speaking, entirely real.

We don’t even know if there were costs, whether Joe did anything for people who paid money to his son beyond meeting with them. George Washington Plunkett, Plunkett of Tammany Hall, reports on one occasion receiving a bribe, in votes not cash, in exchange for agreeing to vote for a bill in the state legislature that he was planning to vote for anyway. Biden might have been doing the same — or told himself he was. How Biden treats his wife or children — his maid, if he has one — tells us more about what sort of person he is than what he did as President about Ukraine or Gaza or Covid. Or selling access.

Biden has now pardoned Hunter, as I expected. Watching responses online, on a forum where Biden supporters were a small minority, I observed that my apparently paradoxical attitude was pretty common. They included:

Any decent father should.

But it's the right thing for him to do.

Biden lied about this when he was running for election and now he's done the thing everyone knew he would do while he was lying. As he should have.

At least one Republican senator, Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), agreed:

Well, I’ll put it this way: If it was my son, I’d pardon him, too.

Others in the thread disagreed. They saw it as an issue in abstract morality: is it right for a man to do wicked things if he does them for the benefit of his child? Does the obligation to protect your son outweigh the obligation to keep your promises, maintain your principles, do your duty as President?

I saw it not as a question of what Joe should have done but of what the thing he did do tells us about what sort of man he is. A Joe Biden who cared enough about keeping his promises and preserving trust in the legal system, about his duty to the American people, to let the son he loved go to jail, would be a better man than the Joe Biden who pardoned his son — but that Joe Biden would not have taken millions of dollars of bribes funneled through his son to his family and this one did. A Joe Biden who let his son go to jail to spare himself the embarrassment, the loss of status, from pardoning him after repeatedly promising not to, would be a worse man than the Joe Biden who pardoned the son he loved. He would not be a decent man — and this one might be.

Or might not. The pardon not only covered the crimes Hunter had been convicted of but also any crime he may have committed from Jan. 1, 2014, to Dec. 1, 2024. The innocent explanation is that Joe feared further prosecution of his son after he was no longer in a position to protect him. The less innocent one is that Joe feared legal action against Hunter for offenses in which his father was a co-conspirator, leading to legal action against Joe.

Politics and the Legal System

There was one feature of Joe Biden’s action that did bother me a little: Biden’s explanation of why he did it.

Here's the truth: I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice

Politics infected the process in two ways, neither of which led to a miscarriage of justice. The Justice Department did its best to slow prosecution of Hunter until it became impossible to quietly continue doing so, but any resulting miscarriage was in Hunter’s favor. Hunter’s status as the President’s son got him attention that a random offender would not have gotten, making him more likely to be tried, convicted and, absent a pardon, sentenced. If someone else had lied on his application for permission to purchase a firearm by saying he was not a drug user and then admitted in his memoirs that at the time he was, very likely nobody would have noticed. If someone else had misrepresented his income by a million dollars or so and been caught, very likely the IRS would have been satisfied with full payment and a penalty — but not in a high profile case, which this was. Hunter was in fact guilty of both offenses, so convicting him and imposing the legal penalty was not a miscarriage of justice.

It is true, however, that raw politics has infested the judicial system during this administration. One supporter of Biden’s action was quoted as dismissing Republican criticism on the grounds that they had just elected a man convicted of 34 felonies. He did not mention that the 34 felonies were for a single offense, claiming a hush money payment as a business expense, on which the statute of limitations had already run. In a jury trial held in a city that had voted overwhelmingly against Trump, a city where a prosecutor had gotten elected in part on the promise to get Trump, a promise she fulfilled in a different case against him.

There is a word for Biden’s complaint about political influence on the judicial system.

Leo Rosten defines chutzpa as:

that quality enshrined in a man who having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.

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