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).
You've omitted some salient facts. One is that Biden was caught on camera bragging that he forced Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma (an oil company that "hired" Hunter for a ridiculous amount of money) by threatening loss of American tax funds.
Another is that Hunter signed a book deal where he was going to tell all about his father's corruption if not pardoned.
Both of these corrupt quid-pro-quo deals are the kinds of things a Mafia boss would do. I submit that he is one.
I think a Mafia boss could be a decent man, would be more successful in that role if he was. Being a decent man, as I am using the term in the post, doesn't mean not doing immoral things. It means being the sort of person whom the people directly interacting with can trust. For a Mafia boss part of that is your people knowing that if one of them ends up spending a decade in prison, you will make sure his wife and children are taken care of.
There should be a word for the kind of person you mean, but I don't think "decent" or any other distinctly positive words can apply. Gus from Breaking Bad was "decent" in the way that you describe. He often works the counter at a fast food restaurant, and is extremely polite and friendly. But he's also a murderous leader of a murderous criminal gang.
There's also the question of whether someone acts good as a front to cover for their crimes, or because their temperament is actually that of someone who is generally kind. It seems unlikely that a person who routinely takes bribes and engages in unethical behavior is the same kind of person that is genuinely kind. Things may be great normally, but the fact that he might have you killed over a dispute counteracts all of the positives.
Still, I grant that Al Capone (who donated to charity, etc.) was better than someone who is outwardly rude and selfish in addition to their criminal activity. I don't know what word to use to describe someone like Capone, but don't think it can just be positive, even if we only mean within certain spheres.
I think it is useful to have ways of distinguishing between my moral judgement of a man and what I deduce about his future behavior from his past behavior. I think part of it is an implicit model of his mind. One model of the mind of someone who does bad things is "he doesn't care about other people." A different model is "he cares about people, will go to a good deal of trouble to help or avoid hurting them, but not everyone counts to him as a person." I think the latter pattern is much more common, very nearly the norm.
Consider, in a different context, choices about charity. If someone you know badly needs money you are much more likely to give it to him than to donate to foreign strangers, proverbially starving children in Africa, even if the latter people need it much more. People you know are real to you in a sense in which random strangers are not.
I get your point, and for most people I agree that this is how it works. Someone who is kind, even if only to people close to them, is a better person that someone who is mean generally and that we can use this information to better predict future actions.
But people who are known for being evil, like that's what they are famous for, being kind to people around them feels distinct from the normal situation. And I think this distinction is very relevant to the question of predicting future actions. For instance, as Chartertopia mentions, he believes that Joe Biden pardoned his son in large part because of a fear that he himself would face legal issues. If so, then [Pardoning Hunter] is not an act of kindness to a person near him, and should not cause us to update on future Joe Biden actions.
Similarly, a machine politician literally buying votes should not cause us to update that the same person would be giving poor people money generally - out of kindness or any other reason.
This analysis doesn't mean that Joe Biden is a bad person, necessarily. It's that I don't think the mere outward appearance of him being kind to people in his close circle is very much information about why he makes decisions. A transactional relationship, which seems quite likely here and in other cases of people known for being evil who sometimes do good, would not imply anything positive about future relations.
I'm picturing it from the perspective of a woman on a first date with someone she doesn't know. That the guy bought her dinner, was a good conversationalist, and showed an interest in her is a true positive set of signals (he's not a lunatic, can control how he speaks, etc.). It does not, however, tell her if he's actually a good person. His interest in her may easily be feigned in his attempt to get something from her (i.e. sex), which she would be well-advised to consider in her evaluation of his behavior.
The only real problem I have with your description of Biden as a decent man is not the word "decent". I think it's the wrong word but can't think of an improvement, and I think I know what you mean. It's similar to saying Hitler liked dogs and was a vegetarian, although not nearly the same degree.
What I don't agree with is applying that meaning to Biden's pardon. I believe the only reason for that pardon was to save himself. Saving Hunter from prison was just the gravy, the cover story for the public.
And then again, maybe I am mistaken in thinking I know what you mean. I don't make mistakes very often, but when I do, I make them in public.
That motive is possible, and I did mention it in the post. The point of the post is not really Biden, he is just the occasion for it. The point is the distinction between two ways of evaluating someone, how it is possible for someone to be both corrupt and a decent man.
RatMan29, I had not heard about Hunter's threat to disclose his father's corruption if he was not pardoned. What are your sources for this? I had also understood that the prosecutor whom he exerted pressure on was thought to be corrupt and wasn't actively investigating Burisma. Am I incorrect?
"Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus" covers this, I believe. Biden has been a liar since he was first elected, so anyone who believes anything he has to say, especially if there's any reward in it for him, is an idiot.
He lies prolifically and prodigiously, if not always very believably.
"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted the silver” is a good way to perceive Biden. An egotistical, narcissistic man of small virtue or honor.
He is, and always has been, corrupt. He has corruppted the system meant to apply to us all for his own personal benefit, in ways both large and small. As a non-believer, I hope his Catholicism is real and upon his death he reaps the appropriate fate.
I think neither Biden nor Trump cares whether what he says is true. Biden's claim that he wouldn't pardon Hunter was probably a deliberate lie, but I can imagine his making it without ever thinking seriously about whether it was true. It was, politically speaking, the right thing to do. That matters to him, whether it was true doesn't.
It's a nice line, but parents don't have perfect control over how their children turn out. Hunter could have committed the offenses he was convicted of in some way that didn't require any cooperation from his father.
Quite so. (That discussion thread does explore the idea further; you weren't alone in noticing this.)
FWIW, I took that response as a statistical observation - a decent father would be considerably less likely to be in the position of managing a wayward son.
Perhaps because I'm on the autistic spectrum, I'm not at all satisfied by someone who is merely honest, generous, etc. with people they know in person - or worse yet, people from whom they reasonably expect the same treatment. I do agree that someone who mistreats their family and friends is probably likely to treat other people at least as badly, whereas someone who mistreats strangers might be decent with their own friends and family, or even generous.
But I'm not at all happy with a person who, in a position of responsibility, bends the rules for just about any reason, except perhaps a general commitment to mercy. Biden has acted just about as badly as I expect from any highly successful American politician, maybe even a hair worse. That he has the excuse of favoring his kin doesn't make his behaviour better.
I believe in a government of laws not of men. That's in many ways not what we have, and even more so with Trump as President. So I expect "leaders" to act like barbarian tribal chieftains, . But I don't condone it.
Is Biden worse than other Presidents - probably not; he's not the first to issue pardons like this, and probably not the first to lie about his intentions in this matter. He doesn't seem to lie quite as frequently or blatantly as at least one of the others.
He actually is the first person to issue pardons like this. There have been other pardons, but none for such a direct relative, in a situation where the President himself is likely guilty, and not such a complete pardon.
Protecting your son through whom you funneled millions, using the justice system. This is worse than anything that happens in the most corrupt state of India, i.e. Bihar. There wouldn't be a legal way to do this in Bihar.
That makes this worse, I think.
But the reality is that the system of politics in America selects mostly for people this corrupt. It mostly weeds out others.
The argument against Trump is he is orders of magnitude worse. That's a complex argument to sell, for the Dems.
I don't think Trump is "orders of magnitude worse." Neither of them much cares whether things he says are true. We have better evidence that Biden, in office, was corrupt than that Trump was — consider not only the laptop evidence but Hunter's painting, which is hard to explain as anything other than open bribery.
Trump is more flagrant in his lying and he is covered by a much less friendly media.
The speech/painting/book deal/fake job is just an excuse to pay a bribe, and that seems obvious.
However, the thing is, this can be done legally. Easily.
Most politicians do it, both parties. They're not going to make it illegal because it's what motivates them all to enter politics. They're good at charming us into thinking they are there to serve us. If they have such a goal, it is way down the list.
But here's a noteworthy exception. Modi. Whatever you think of him, he's not personally corrupt. He has no wife or kids, and his extended family is still living a very ordinary life, same as before. He grew up dirt poor, selling tea. Even his political enemies give him credit for this. Annamalai, a politician from Tamilnadu state in India, is similar.
Their political opponents must be so puzzled because they have no imagination for why anyone would enter politics except to rake in the dough.
I expect lots of people enter politics for reasons other than money — status, power, or the desire to change the world. My impression of Romney is that his motives were probably a desire to do good.
The difference in India may well be cultural, a culture where the holy man/beggar image is respected.
The pardon power is a vestige of monarchy thinking and one of many American follies, from a European and perhaps Indian perspective. You're correct about the hard sell for the Democrats. Either way, Trump is setting out to turn the US into something that much more closely resembles Bihar.
Properly used, the pardon power is a good thing. A late friend of mine compiled a list of all the Presidential pardons through the time of his death in 2010 or so.
Many of the pardons were magnificient in their appropriate foregiveness. Some few were not, some were political and I didn't like them, some were even funny.
From memory (it may have been Teddy Roosevelt) a man had been convicted of murder for shooting and killing another man. He had been in prison for some time. In his request for a pardon, his wife noted that he had been shooting at her in anger, that he was a crack shot and so muct have missed her on purpose, and he had no idea the man killed was in the vicinity. He was pardoned after spending about the amount of time he would have for manslaughter.
But the use of such power for personal gain is probably probably very tempting (see: Marc Rich and Bill Clinton), so we really should at least pay attention to how it is used.
In many ways the power to pardon formalizes what would naturally exist anyway. It puts it into the public view so that we can know it happened. There's value to that. DACA was ruled as appropriate executive power because it was using discretion the executive was legally permitted to do. Biden could have ordered the DOJ to drop the case and destroy all the evidence. Probably completely legal, definitely hard to fight. We have "norms" against such behavior, but those are extremely weak if the people carrying out the orders are sympathetic to the one giving the orders.
If the pardon were weaker or could be rescinded, then presidents would use it less and get what they wanted through hidden back channels more often. Hunter wasn't going to jail, one way or another. Just like Trump wasn't going to be prosecuted if he won the election. Trying to do so would backfire badly against the Democrats and the prosecutors. So they just quickly dropped all the cases as soon as Trump won.
There's a traditional phrase for the sort of man who applies the law with full stringency against his own son: "a Roman judge." I would rather have that sort of man in power.
Heinlein addresses this in Space Cadet, when Matt Dodson is in a swivet about the prospect of nuking his home town, and his training supervisor tells him, first, that if that came up, the captain of his ship would relieve him of duty, and assign it to someone who didn't have the same personal conflict, and second, that if Matt COULD nuke his home and family, he would be too dangerous to serve as a Patrol officer. That seems to be an alternative institutional way to address such issues. Unfortunately there is no way to give the president that kind of oversight; only he can relieve himself of duty in that case (it doesn't seem to be an issue for either impeachment or removal for incapacity).
If you extend the alternate, it excuses the cop who won't arrest his son, the prosecutor who dismisses charges against his son, and the judge who directs an acquittal against his son. All would properly be called corrupt. Joe Biden pardoning his son is no different.
A commonplace method for bypassing that problem is recusal.
The matter of Hunter's pardon should arguably have been passed to VP Harris (or the Speaker, or...). If pardoning power isn't constitutionally transferable in that way, then that's an argument for amending the Constitution, and offhand, I see no strong arguments against doing so. (It's abuseable, but only to the same extent as any other transferable Presidential power.)
I just came here to say I'd missed that. Joe Biden had no recusal except for resigning, and that would mean choosing his replacement in ways that police, prosecutors, and judges can't.
There still is some corruption unless the recusal results in an outside replacement. There was a recent case in the Volokh Conspiracy involving a New Jersey law forbidding doxxing judges, where every New Jersey judge recused and a Texas judge was brought in (I may have the details wrong). I have read of state police investigating city police and sheriffs.
Even when outsiders sit in judgment, all these people are still on the same team. It's still government defining its own limits, even if indirectly.
Wouldn't the moral equivalent of recusal in this case have been for Biden to say that he can't make such a decision, being personally involved, and thus to let his son remain unpardoned?
That wouldn't suffice. Consider a hypothetical where the person in question looks very pardonable by the public's standards, but the President happens to be close family (or friend or whatever). Should that person be denied an otherwise lawful clemency?
I think they ought not; if that POTUS wanted to enable a pardon to be considered without the onus of nepotism, one way to do it is to delegate the pardon power to someone who's hopefully seen as impartial.
Leaving the decision up to the incoming president seems eminently reasonable as an alternative. In this case, it's very obvious that Trump has different goals and thoughts about Hunter than Joe Biden. That's probably a good indicator that "looks pardonable by the public's standards" isn't applicable here.
If a president's son was falsely accused and the public believed that to be true, I could definitely see the future president issuing the pardon. If for no other reason than to create/reinforce the idea that his own family would be pardoned under similar circumstances.
Deals described in the email on Hunter's laptop and Hunter, with no background as a successful artist, selling canvases at high prices to buyers whose identity was kept secret. Do you have a different explanation for the latter?
No email on the laptop that I'm aware of mentions Joe Biden being part of a business deal or getting paid while VP. (The "10 held by H for the big guy" deal, which fell through, was from 2017, when JB was a private citizen.) Am I missing something?
As for the art deals, there was supposedly a wall in place to prevent pay-for-play opportunities (if he doesn't know who's paying, he can't grant them favors). We now know the biggest buyer was Hunter's friend Kevin Morris, who spent $875,000 on 11 paintings. The most a single piece fetched was $85,000. The total art sold was roughly $1.5 million, of which Hunter got some portion, the gallery another. Why would he then give that money to his father? (The artwork itself was described by art critic Sebastian Smee, dismissively, as "abstract, pretty, well-made.")
So where's the evidence of "millions of dollars"? Where's the evidence that there were bribes? And what were they in exchange for?
> No email on the laptop that I'm aware of mentions Joe Biden being part of a business deal or getting paid while VP. (The "10 held by H for the big guy" deal, which fell through, was from 2017, when JB was a private citizen.) Am I missing something?
More accurately, I heard the dates "Feb-May 2017". That was as little as 12-40 days after Biden ended his term as VP. 12-40 days is a *very* short time to spend before setting up a $10 million investment.
Moreover, the speaker (Tom Bobulinski) claims he was approached about this as early as 2015 - well over a year (and possibly two) before Biden would finish his term. Bobulinski's contact referred to "one of the most prominent families in the US". Presumably this was the Bidens, as they are who it ended up being.
One possibility - based only on Bobulinski's account - is that Hunter and perhaps Joe's brother Jim were the only two initially involved, and Joe was largely unaware of the plan until Feb 2017. This, AFAIK, would be effectively legal. Another possibility is that Joe was aware as early as 2015, possibly being approached by his son and brother for seed investment, and agreeing to put up actual money after his term, but also willing to use connections to ensure that venture would be ready to go. This would violate the spirit of the conflict of interest rule while being technically compliant. There are multiple possibilities somewhere between these.
It's not clear which possibility is most likely, but the content of Bobulinski's phones would probably inform that.
Agree with this. I've known drug addicts who would say or do anything for money. Hunter may have been enriching himself without actually involving his father. Would need a more thorough investigation to say that biden was involved. Certainly is suspicious though.
The problem is why anyone would give Hunter money, especially more than once. I think pretty much everyone agrees that Hunter was offering connections to his father. Any alternative is not credible.
The open questions are:
1) Did Joe know about these offers?
2) Did Joe participate?
If Joe participated, then this would be blatantly illegal, even if he himself didn't benefit financially (which is an open question and the Biden family finances are intentionally convoluted enough to hide it if he did). If he knew, there were some serious optics issues and quite possibly also legal issues. Former business partners have gone on record to say that Joe both knew and participated. The record of people giving Hunter large sums of money, including repeated payments (Burisma stands out, but some Chinese interests do as well) strongly implies that the payers did not think Hunter was working on his own and scamming them. Here's the .gov House Oversight findings on it (*https://oversight.house.gov/the-bidens-influence-peddling-timeline/) - lots of smoke, do you think there's the possibility of fire to go with it?
I detest Joe Biden for the corrupt lying politician he has always been, but there are very few politicians who I don't consider corrupt liars.
I would have had some little sympathy for Joe's predicament had he waited until Jan 20 11:59 a.m. so Hunter would have served at least a month of his sentence, and if the pardon were only for the gun charges. But he threw in the tax convictions, and he made it cover everything going back to before Burisma to protect his own image. Pardon the puns, but Joe's pardon was for his own sake, not Hunter's, and not a decent father's action for his son. I cannot forgive him.
I look forward to the political classes investigating themselves with Hunter's testimony front and center, and his contempt of court and perjury proceedings on the sidelines. Perhaps they will all be too busy blaming each other to pass the usual nonsense legislation.
I could agree that some of the actual charges against Hunter would have played out differently under other circumstances. He should not have been charged with the gun crimes, as almost no one would have been. But on the other hand, no one in their right mind thinks that "friends" would have paid off Hunter's tax fraud debt absent the connection to Joe, so Hunter would have actually had to make a sacrifice to pay off those debts under normal circumstances.
Making it retroactive until 2014 also comes across as very self-serving. Even with the "Republicans may go after him" excuse - that's the opposite argument they were making about Trump not a month earlier. If anyone saw Hunter's pardon as anything other than self-serving, the whiplash from changing perspective that quick would be devastating. I don't know that very many people truly believed both that Trump had to be prosecuted because no one is above the law but also Hunter should be pardoned to avoid a political witch hunt.
I tend to believe the idea of "moral perfectionism" is flawed, but I'm not prepared to defend that right now. And I've noticed a decided tendency to claim morality as "what I'd like to think and do" rather than an actual set of rules.
Anyway, Hunter's laptop has thousands of pieces of evidence of multiple crimes, so I don't imagine Joe could have specified all of them even if he knew them all and wanted to.
Why did you wait for the pardon to write this post, rather than write it when the commenter asked, back in August? In particular, that is after Biden had made a public promise not to pardon.
I don't think the object level is interesting. I am more interested in the topics of people doing an about face on the pardon and people claiming to believe the promise.
Can someone explain to me how they got Trump on a crime for which the statute of limitations had run? My knowledge of the legal system is bad, at best, but that doesn’t sound like something that should be possible. What am I missing?
I strongly disagree that this is sound legal theory, but my understanding of it is:
Trump's accused crime was a misdemeanor beyond the statute of limitations. If that misdemeanor was committed in the furtherance of a felony, it becomes a felony, and would be within the statute of limitations again. The jury was not required to agree on what the original felony was or could be, nor did he need to be convicted of said felony before this misdemeanor was in "furtherance" of that felony.
This last part I think is patently unjust, and hope it's not a good legal standing for the claim (but don't know NY law, so unsure).
The best summary I could find to jog my memory was CBS News:
> In Trump's case, prosecutors said that other crime was a violation of a New York election law that makes it illegal for "any two or more persons" to "conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means," as Justice Juan Merchan explained in his instructions to the jury.
> What exactly those "unlawful means" were in this case was up to the jury to decide. Prosecutors put forth three areas that they could consider: a violation of federal campaign finance laws, falsification of other business records or a violation of tax laws.
> Jurors did not need to agree on what the underlying "unlawful means" were. But they did have to unanimously conclude that Trump caused the business records to be falsified, and that he "did so with intent to defraud that included an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof."
Let's posit that Hunter Biden was the victim of unjust prosecution. The charges against him were massively increased when the plea bargain fell through. It's routine for accused people to accept plea bargains, whether they're guilty of anything or not, because they'll face more serious charges if they go to trial. They have to ask themselves if they feel lucky.
This happens to lots of people. Most of them don't have parents to pardon them. By pardoning his son, he was using his position to give special treatment to his son, which few other people get. This was a gross abuse of his office. It gives Trump a precedent for abusing his pardon power, a precedent which it's effectively certain he'll take advantage of. We now have not just sovereign immunity for presidents but, for all practical purposes, for their families as well.
I’m curious: now that Hunter has been pardoned, if he is called to testify before Congress about Joe’s dealings, he can no longer plead the 5th, correct?
If so then perhaps The Biden Admin (I doubt Joe is the one making *any* calls, even this one) may have been too clever by half, no?
It confirms that for the most relevant Barisma and Chinese dealings, where there is no reasonable state prosecution (any statute of limitations would surely be gone now), Hunter could not plead the 5th.
And lying and saying “I don’t recall” to Congress *would* then subject him to prosecution.
I agree in part. Robert Sapolsky gives an excellent account of the psychology of morality with all the underlying psychobiology in "Behave" that I can recommend highly. So yes, pardoning next of kin if one can isn't something most people could forego. One might expect it from a George Washington, perhaps, but not from Joe Biden. Biden has always been a liar, albeit not the worst kind, and I agree that he has a decent side to him. I had a hunch that the post would end with the false equivalency of Trump and Biden both being unethical liars, based on the silly "lawfare" notion, singling out the one case of overreach in NY. Which was merely legal overreach, not inventing crimes that weren't committed. Thousands of psychologists and psychiatrists have not come out and warned the public about Trump's psychopathy because they're all a bunch of leftists but because the difference between the two men is categorical, not merely dimensional, and morality is at it's core.
That might be true — I don't know how Trump treats those emotionally close to him. But I expect that, assuming your thousands of psychologists and psychiatrists claim is true, the overwhelming majority of them voted Democratic in the past and none of them had actually interacted with Trump.
The 1964 election, where various psychiatrists claimed that Goldwater, whom none of them had actually examined, was crazy, produced the "Goldwater Rule:"
7. 3. On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement. (Section 7.3 in the Principles of Medical Ethics with Annotations Especially Applicable to Psychiatry)
So, by your account, those thousands were in violation of the professional ethics of their profession.
You've omitted some salient facts. One is that Biden was caught on camera bragging that he forced Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma (an oil company that "hired" Hunter for a ridiculous amount of money) by threatening loss of American tax funds.
Another is that Hunter signed a book deal where he was going to tell all about his father's corruption if not pardoned.
Both of these corrupt quid-pro-quo deals are the kinds of things a Mafia boss would do. I submit that he is one.
I think a Mafia boss could be a decent man, would be more successful in that role if he was. Being a decent man, as I am using the term in the post, doesn't mean not doing immoral things. It means being the sort of person whom the people directly interacting with can trust. For a Mafia boss part of that is your people knowing that if one of them ends up spending a decade in prison, you will make sure his wife and children are taken care of.
What is the evidence for the book deal threat?
There should be a word for the kind of person you mean, but I don't think "decent" or any other distinctly positive words can apply. Gus from Breaking Bad was "decent" in the way that you describe. He often works the counter at a fast food restaurant, and is extremely polite and friendly. But he's also a murderous leader of a murderous criminal gang.
There's also the question of whether someone acts good as a front to cover for their crimes, or because their temperament is actually that of someone who is generally kind. It seems unlikely that a person who routinely takes bribes and engages in unethical behavior is the same kind of person that is genuinely kind. Things may be great normally, but the fact that he might have you killed over a dispute counteracts all of the positives.
Still, I grant that Al Capone (who donated to charity, etc.) was better than someone who is outwardly rude and selfish in addition to their criminal activity. I don't know what word to use to describe someone like Capone, but don't think it can just be positive, even if we only mean within certain spheres.
I think it is useful to have ways of distinguishing between my moral judgement of a man and what I deduce about his future behavior from his past behavior. I think part of it is an implicit model of his mind. One model of the mind of someone who does bad things is "he doesn't care about other people." A different model is "he cares about people, will go to a good deal of trouble to help or avoid hurting them, but not everyone counts to him as a person." I think the latter pattern is much more common, very nearly the norm.
Consider, in a different context, choices about charity. If someone you know badly needs money you are much more likely to give it to him than to donate to foreign strangers, proverbially starving children in Africa, even if the latter people need it much more. People you know are real to you in a sense in which random strangers are not.
I get your point, and for most people I agree that this is how it works. Someone who is kind, even if only to people close to them, is a better person that someone who is mean generally and that we can use this information to better predict future actions.
But people who are known for being evil, like that's what they are famous for, being kind to people around them feels distinct from the normal situation. And I think this distinction is very relevant to the question of predicting future actions. For instance, as Chartertopia mentions, he believes that Joe Biden pardoned his son in large part because of a fear that he himself would face legal issues. If so, then [Pardoning Hunter] is not an act of kindness to a person near him, and should not cause us to update on future Joe Biden actions.
Similarly, a machine politician literally buying votes should not cause us to update that the same person would be giving poor people money generally - out of kindness or any other reason.
This analysis doesn't mean that Joe Biden is a bad person, necessarily. It's that I don't think the mere outward appearance of him being kind to people in his close circle is very much information about why he makes decisions. A transactional relationship, which seems quite likely here and in other cases of people known for being evil who sometimes do good, would not imply anything positive about future relations.
I'm picturing it from the perspective of a woman on a first date with someone she doesn't know. That the guy bought her dinner, was a good conversationalist, and showed an interest in her is a true positive set of signals (he's not a lunatic, can control how he speaks, etc.). It does not, however, tell her if he's actually a good person. His interest in her may easily be feigned in his attempt to get something from her (i.e. sex), which she would be well-advised to consider in her evaluation of his behavior.
That's what I should have written :)
The only real problem I have with your description of Biden as a decent man is not the word "decent". I think it's the wrong word but can't think of an improvement, and I think I know what you mean. It's similar to saying Hitler liked dogs and was a vegetarian, although not nearly the same degree.
What I don't agree with is applying that meaning to Biden's pardon. I believe the only reason for that pardon was to save himself. Saving Hunter from prison was just the gravy, the cover story for the public.
And then again, maybe I am mistaken in thinking I know what you mean. I don't make mistakes very often, but when I do, I make them in public.
That motive is possible, and I did mention it in the post. The point of the post is not really Biden, he is just the occasion for it. The point is the distinction between two ways of evaluating someone, how it is possible for someone to be both corrupt and a decent man.
What is the evidence for the book deal threat?
RatMan29, I had not heard about Hunter's threat to disclose his father's corruption if he was not pardoned. What are your sources for this? I had also understood that the prosecutor whom he exerted pressure on was thought to be corrupt and wasn't actively investigating Burisma. Am I incorrect?
"Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus" covers this, I believe. Biden has been a liar since he was first elected, so anyone who believes anything he has to say, especially if there's any reward in it for him, is an idiot.
He lies prolifically and prodigiously, if not always very believably.
"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted the silver” is a good way to perceive Biden. An egotistical, narcissistic man of small virtue or honor.
He is, and always has been, corrupt. He has corruppted the system meant to apply to us all for his own personal benefit, in ways both large and small. As a non-believer, I hope his Catholicism is real and upon his death he reaps the appropriate fate.
So, no, he is not a "decent man."
I think neither Biden nor Trump cares whether what he says is true. Biden's claim that he wouldn't pardon Hunter was probably a deliberate lie, but I can imagine his making it without ever thinking seriously about whether it was true. It was, politically speaking, the right thing to do. That matters to him, whether it was true doesn't.
An interesting response I saw to "Any decent father should":
"A decent father wouldn't have to."
It's a nice line, but parents don't have perfect control over how their children turn out. Hunter could have committed the offenses he was convicted of in some way that didn't require any cooperation from his father.
Quite so. (That discussion thread does explore the idea further; you weren't alone in noticing this.)
FWIW, I took that response as a statistical observation - a decent father would be considerably less likely to be in the position of managing a wayward son.
Perhaps because I'm on the autistic spectrum, I'm not at all satisfied by someone who is merely honest, generous, etc. with people they know in person - or worse yet, people from whom they reasonably expect the same treatment. I do agree that someone who mistreats their family and friends is probably likely to treat other people at least as badly, whereas someone who mistreats strangers might be decent with their own friends and family, or even generous.
But I'm not at all happy with a person who, in a position of responsibility, bends the rules for just about any reason, except perhaps a general commitment to mercy. Biden has acted just about as badly as I expect from any highly successful American politician, maybe even a hair worse. That he has the excuse of favoring his kin doesn't make his behaviour better.
I believe in a government of laws not of men. That's in many ways not what we have, and even more so with Trump as President. So I expect "leaders" to act like barbarian tribal chieftains, . But I don't condone it.
Is Biden worse than other Presidents - probably not; he's not the first to issue pardons like this, and probably not the first to lie about his intentions in this matter. He doesn't seem to lie quite as frequently or blatantly as at least one of the others.
But he's not a good person for favoring his son.
I didn't say he was a good person or a good president. Neither is what I mean by a "decent man."
He actually is the first person to issue pardons like this. There have been other pardons, but none for such a direct relative, in a situation where the President himself is likely guilty, and not such a complete pardon.
Protecting your son through whom you funneled millions, using the justice system. This is worse than anything that happens in the most corrupt state of India, i.e. Bihar. There wouldn't be a legal way to do this in Bihar.
That makes this worse, I think.
But the reality is that the system of politics in America selects mostly for people this corrupt. It mostly weeds out others.
The argument against Trump is he is orders of magnitude worse. That's a complex argument to sell, for the Dems.
I don't think Trump is "orders of magnitude worse." Neither of them much cares whether things he says are true. We have better evidence that Biden, in office, was corrupt than that Trump was — consider not only the laptop evidence but Hunter's painting, which is hard to explain as anything other than open bribery.
Trump is more flagrant in his lying and he is covered by a much less friendly media.
The speech/painting/book deal/fake job is just an excuse to pay a bribe, and that seems obvious.
However, the thing is, this can be done legally. Easily.
Most politicians do it, both parties. They're not going to make it illegal because it's what motivates them all to enter politics. They're good at charming us into thinking they are there to serve us. If they have such a goal, it is way down the list.
But here's a noteworthy exception. Modi. Whatever you think of him, he's not personally corrupt. He has no wife or kids, and his extended family is still living a very ordinary life, same as before. He grew up dirt poor, selling tea. Even his political enemies give him credit for this. Annamalai, a politician from Tamilnadu state in India, is similar.
Their political opponents must be so puzzled because they have no imagination for why anyone would enter politics except to rake in the dough.
I expect lots of people enter politics for reasons other than money — status, power, or the desire to change the world. My impression of Romney is that his motives were probably a desire to do good.
The difference in India may well be cultural, a culture where the holy man/beggar image is respected.
I think Trump's openness about some of his crimes is the new thing in politics. It's disorienting. And fundamentally corrosive.
It would be interesting if Hunter were to take up painting again. Would have been interesting if he'd taken up painting in prison too.
The pardon power is a vestige of monarchy thinking and one of many American follies, from a European and perhaps Indian perspective. You're correct about the hard sell for the Democrats. Either way, Trump is setting out to turn the US into something that much more closely resembles Bihar.
Properly used, the pardon power is a good thing. A late friend of mine compiled a list of all the Presidential pardons through the time of his death in 2010 or so.
Many of the pardons were magnificient in their appropriate foregiveness. Some few were not, some were political and I didn't like them, some were even funny.
From memory (it may have been Teddy Roosevelt) a man had been convicted of murder for shooting and killing another man. He had been in prison for some time. In his request for a pardon, his wife noted that he had been shooting at her in anger, that he was a crack shot and so muct have missed her on purpose, and he had no idea the man killed was in the vicinity. He was pardoned after spending about the amount of time he would have for manslaughter.
But the use of such power for personal gain is probably probably very tempting (see: Marc Rich and Bill Clinton), so we really should at least pay attention to how it is used.
In many ways the power to pardon formalizes what would naturally exist anyway. It puts it into the public view so that we can know it happened. There's value to that. DACA was ruled as appropriate executive power because it was using discretion the executive was legally permitted to do. Biden could have ordered the DOJ to drop the case and destroy all the evidence. Probably completely legal, definitely hard to fight. We have "norms" against such behavior, but those are extremely weak if the people carrying out the orders are sympathetic to the one giving the orders.
If the pardon were weaker or could be rescinded, then presidents would use it less and get what they wanted through hidden back channels more often. Hunter wasn't going to jail, one way or another. Just like Trump wasn't going to be prosecuted if he won the election. Trying to do so would backfire badly against the Democrats and the prosecutors. So they just quickly dropped all the cases as soon as Trump won.
There's a traditional phrase for the sort of man who applies the law with full stringency against his own son: "a Roman judge." I would rather have that sort of man in power.
The classical example being Lucius Junius Brutus. They are not very common.
Heinlein addresses this in Space Cadet, when Matt Dodson is in a swivet about the prospect of nuking his home town, and his training supervisor tells him, first, that if that came up, the captain of his ship would relieve him of duty, and assign it to someone who didn't have the same personal conflict, and second, that if Matt COULD nuke his home and family, he would be too dangerous to serve as a Patrol officer. That seems to be an alternative institutional way to address such issues. Unfortunately there is no way to give the president that kind of oversight; only he can relieve himself of duty in that case (it doesn't seem to be an issue for either impeachment or removal for incapacity).
If you extend the alternate, it excuses the cop who won't arrest his son, the prosecutor who dismisses charges against his son, and the judge who directs an acquittal against his son. All would properly be called corrupt. Joe Biden pardoning his son is no different.
A commonplace method for bypassing that problem is recusal.
The matter of Hunter's pardon should arguably have been passed to VP Harris (or the Speaker, or...). If pardoning power isn't constitutionally transferable in that way, then that's an argument for amending the Constitution, and offhand, I see no strong arguments against doing so. (It's abuseable, but only to the same extent as any other transferable Presidential power.)
I just came here to say I'd missed that. Joe Biden had no recusal except for resigning, and that would mean choosing his replacement in ways that police, prosecutors, and judges can't.
There still is some corruption unless the recusal results in an outside replacement. There was a recent case in the Volokh Conspiracy involving a New Jersey law forbidding doxxing judges, where every New Jersey judge recused and a Texas judge was brought in (I may have the details wrong). I have read of state police investigating city police and sheriffs.
Even when outsiders sit in judgment, all these people are still on the same team. It's still government defining its own limits, even if indirectly.
Wouldn't the moral equivalent of recusal in this case have been for Biden to say that he can't make such a decision, being personally involved, and thus to let his son remain unpardoned?
That wouldn't suffice. Consider a hypothetical where the person in question looks very pardonable by the public's standards, but the President happens to be close family (or friend or whatever). Should that person be denied an otherwise lawful clemency?
I think they ought not; if that POTUS wanted to enable a pardon to be considered without the onus of nepotism, one way to do it is to delegate the pardon power to someone who's hopefully seen as impartial.
Leaving the decision up to the incoming president seems eminently reasonable as an alternative. In this case, it's very obvious that Trump has different goals and thoughts about Hunter than Joe Biden. That's probably a good indicator that "looks pardonable by the public's standards" isn't applicable here.
If a president's son was falsely accused and the public believed that to be true, I could definitely see the future president issuing the pardon. If for no other reason than to create/reinforce the idea that his own family would be pardoned under similar circumstances.
I thought chutzpah was Anglicized with an h on the end, but otherwise I agree with all of it.
I also kinda like you basically describing Joe Biden as Tony Soprano. Good to those around him, but corrupt.
I initially wrote it with an h, but when I checked for the Rosten quote he spelled it without the h so I went with that version.
What is the evidence that Joe Biden took “millions of dollars of bribes funneled through his son to his family”?
Deals described in the email on Hunter's laptop and Hunter, with no background as a successful artist, selling canvases at high prices to buyers whose identity was kept secret. Do you have a different explanation for the latter?
No email on the laptop that I'm aware of mentions Joe Biden being part of a business deal or getting paid while VP. (The "10 held by H for the big guy" deal, which fell through, was from 2017, when JB was a private citizen.) Am I missing something?
As for the art deals, there was supposedly a wall in place to prevent pay-for-play opportunities (if he doesn't know who's paying, he can't grant them favors). We now know the biggest buyer was Hunter's friend Kevin Morris, who spent $875,000 on 11 paintings. The most a single piece fetched was $85,000. The total art sold was roughly $1.5 million, of which Hunter got some portion, the gallery another. Why would he then give that money to his father? (The artwork itself was described by art critic Sebastian Smee, dismissively, as "abstract, pretty, well-made.")
So where's the evidence of "millions of dollars"? Where's the evidence that there were bribes? And what were they in exchange for?
> No email on the laptop that I'm aware of mentions Joe Biden being part of a business deal or getting paid while VP. (The "10 held by H for the big guy" deal, which fell through, was from 2017, when JB was a private citizen.) Am I missing something?
The original source I found for that quote is a press conference recorded on CSPAN. https://www.c-span.org/video/?477307-1/tony-bobulinski-statement-hunter-biden
More accurately, I heard the dates "Feb-May 2017". That was as little as 12-40 days after Biden ended his term as VP. 12-40 days is a *very* short time to spend before setting up a $10 million investment.
Moreover, the speaker (Tom Bobulinski) claims he was approached about this as early as 2015 - well over a year (and possibly two) before Biden would finish his term. Bobulinski's contact referred to "one of the most prominent families in the US". Presumably this was the Bidens, as they are who it ended up being.
One possibility - based only on Bobulinski's account - is that Hunter and perhaps Joe's brother Jim were the only two initially involved, and Joe was largely unaware of the plan until Feb 2017. This, AFAIK, would be effectively legal. Another possibility is that Joe was aware as early as 2015, possibly being approached by his son and brother for seed investment, and agreeing to put up actual money after his term, but also willing to use connections to ensure that venture would be ready to go. This would violate the spirit of the conflict of interest rule while being technically compliant. There are multiple possibilities somewhere between these.
It's not clear which possibility is most likely, but the content of Bobulinski's phones would probably inform that.
Agree with this. I've known drug addicts who would say or do anything for money. Hunter may have been enriching himself without actually involving his father. Would need a more thorough investigation to say that biden was involved. Certainly is suspicious though.
The problem is why anyone would give Hunter money, especially more than once. I think pretty much everyone agrees that Hunter was offering connections to his father. Any alternative is not credible.
The open questions are:
1) Did Joe know about these offers?
2) Did Joe participate?
If Joe participated, then this would be blatantly illegal, even if he himself didn't benefit financially (which is an open question and the Biden family finances are intentionally convoluted enough to hide it if he did). If he knew, there were some serious optics issues and quite possibly also legal issues. Former business partners have gone on record to say that Joe both knew and participated. The record of people giving Hunter large sums of money, including repeated payments (Burisma stands out, but some Chinese interests do as well) strongly implies that the payers did not think Hunter was working on his own and scamming them. Here's the .gov House Oversight findings on it (*https://oversight.house.gov/the-bidens-influence-peddling-timeline/) - lots of smoke, do you think there's the possibility of fire to go with it?
I detest Joe Biden for the corrupt lying politician he has always been, but there are very few politicians who I don't consider corrupt liars.
I would have had some little sympathy for Joe's predicament had he waited until Jan 20 11:59 a.m. so Hunter would have served at least a month of his sentence, and if the pardon were only for the gun charges. But he threw in the tax convictions, and he made it cover everything going back to before Burisma to protect his own image. Pardon the puns, but Joe's pardon was for his own sake, not Hunter's, and not a decent father's action for his son. I cannot forgive him.
I suspect the very broad pardon was necessary to protect the Biden crime family and Joe himself.
If Hunter were to be tried after 20 January after the fix was foxed, who knows to whom the discovery process might lead.
I look forward to the political classes investigating themselves with Hunter's testimony front and center, and his contempt of court and perjury proceedings on the sidelines. Perhaps they will all be too busy blaming each other to pass the usual nonsense legislation.
I could agree that some of the actual charges against Hunter would have played out differently under other circumstances. He should not have been charged with the gun crimes, as almost no one would have been. But on the other hand, no one in their right mind thinks that "friends" would have paid off Hunter's tax fraud debt absent the connection to Joe, so Hunter would have actually had to make a sacrifice to pay off those debts under normal circumstances.
Making it retroactive until 2014 also comes across as very self-serving. Even with the "Republicans may go after him" excuse - that's the opposite argument they were making about Trump not a month earlier. If anyone saw Hunter's pardon as anything other than self-serving, the whiplash from changing perspective that quick would be devastating. I don't know that very many people truly believed both that Trump had to be prosecuted because no one is above the law but also Hunter should be pardoned to avoid a political witch hunt.
I just wrote a Substack on exactly this question! https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/joe-biden-is-not-a-moral-saint-is?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios
I tend to believe the idea of "moral perfectionism" is flawed, but I'm not prepared to defend that right now. And I've noticed a decided tendency to claim morality as "what I'd like to think and do" rather than an actual set of rules.
Anyway, Hunter's laptop has thousands of pieces of evidence of multiple crimes, so I don't imagine Joe could have specified all of them even if he knew them all and wanted to.
Why did you wait for the pardon to write this post, rather than write it when the commenter asked, back in August? In particular, that is after Biden had made a public promise not to pardon.
I don't think the object level is interesting. I am more interested in the topics of people doing an about face on the pardon and people claiming to believe the promise.
I think I wrote the post when I did because the pardon got a lot of people paying attention to the issue.
Can someone explain to me how they got Trump on a crime for which the statute of limitations had run? My knowledge of the legal system is bad, at best, but that doesn’t sound like something that should be possible. What am I missing?
I strongly disagree that this is sound legal theory, but my understanding of it is:
Trump's accused crime was a misdemeanor beyond the statute of limitations. If that misdemeanor was committed in the furtherance of a felony, it becomes a felony, and would be within the statute of limitations again. The jury was not required to agree on what the original felony was or could be, nor did he need to be convicted of said felony before this misdemeanor was in "furtherance" of that felony.
This last part I think is patently unjust, and hope it's not a good legal standing for the claim (but don't know NY law, so unsure).
I thought the felony it was argued to be in furtherance of was concealing a campaign expenditure, but I could be mistaken.
The best summary I could find to jog my memory was CBS News:
> In Trump's case, prosecutors said that other crime was a violation of a New York election law that makes it illegal for "any two or more persons" to "conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means," as Justice Juan Merchan explained in his instructions to the jury.
> What exactly those "unlawful means" were in this case was up to the jury to decide. Prosecutors put forth three areas that they could consider: a violation of federal campaign finance laws, falsification of other business records or a violation of tax laws.
> Jurors did not need to agree on what the underlying "unlawful means" were. But they did have to unanimously conclude that Trump caused the business records to be falsified, and that he "did so with intent to defraud that included an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof."
Let's posit that Hunter Biden was the victim of unjust prosecution. The charges against him were massively increased when the plea bargain fell through. It's routine for accused people to accept plea bargains, whether they're guilty of anything or not, because they'll face more serious charges if they go to trial. They have to ask themselves if they feel lucky.
This happens to lots of people. Most of them don't have parents to pardon them. By pardoning his son, he was using his position to give special treatment to his son, which few other people get. This was a gross abuse of his office. It gives Trump a precedent for abusing his pardon power, a precedent which it's effectively certain he'll take advantage of. We now have not just sovereign immunity for presidents but, for all practical purposes, for their families as well.
I’m curious: now that Hunter has been pardoned, if he is called to testify before Congress about Joe’s dealings, he can no longer plead the 5th, correct?
If so then perhaps The Biden Admin (I doubt Joe is the one making *any* calls, even this one) may have been too clever by half, no?
He can still plead the Fifth on state prosecution grounds, and "I don't recall" is always useful.
Volokh has a useful quick post.
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/12/02/can-the-just-pardoned-hunter-biden-claim-privilege-against-self-incrimination-if-questioned-about-his-crimes/
Thx for that.
It confirms that for the most relevant Barisma and Chinese dealings, where there is no reasonable state prosecution (any statute of limitations would surely be gone now), Hunter could not plead the 5th.
And lying and saying “I don’t recall” to Congress *would* then subject him to prosecution.
I agree in part. Robert Sapolsky gives an excellent account of the psychology of morality with all the underlying psychobiology in "Behave" that I can recommend highly. So yes, pardoning next of kin if one can isn't something most people could forego. One might expect it from a George Washington, perhaps, but not from Joe Biden. Biden has always been a liar, albeit not the worst kind, and I agree that he has a decent side to him. I had a hunch that the post would end with the false equivalency of Trump and Biden both being unethical liars, based on the silly "lawfare" notion, singling out the one case of overreach in NY. Which was merely legal overreach, not inventing crimes that weren't committed. Thousands of psychologists and psychiatrists have not come out and warned the public about Trump's psychopathy because they're all a bunch of leftists but because the difference between the two men is categorical, not merely dimensional, and morality is at it's core.
That might be true — I don't know how Trump treats those emotionally close to him. But I expect that, assuming your thousands of psychologists and psychiatrists claim is true, the overwhelming majority of them voted Democratic in the past and none of them had actually interacted with Trump.
The 1964 election, where various psychiatrists claimed that Goldwater, whom none of them had actually examined, was crazy, produced the "Goldwater Rule:"
7. 3. On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement. (Section 7.3 in the Principles of Medical Ethics with Annotations Especially Applicable to Psychiatry)
So, by your account, those thousands were in violation of the professional ethics of their profession.