Biden Pardon Open Thread

From the New York Times:

President Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon of his son Hunter on Sunday night after repeatedly insisting he would not do so, using the power of his office to wave aside years of legal troubles, including a federal conviction for illegally buying a gun and for tax evasion.

In a statement issued by the White House, Mr. Biden said he had decided to issue the executive grant of clemency for his son “for those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024.”

He said he made the decision because the charges against Hunter were politically motivated and designed to hurt him politically.

“The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” Mr. Biden said in the statement. “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.”

NBC News is reporting that Biden “discussed pardoning his son with some of his closest aids at least since Hunter Biden’s conviction in June” and that “it was decided at the time that he would publicly say he would not pardon his son even though doing so remained on the table.”

As Biden was pondering this question internally, he telling reporters that he was absolutely not pondering it:

Slightly later, his press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, impatiently said the same thing at a White House press conference:

She repeated the denail even more emphatically in July …

… and once again, just a few weeks ago, in November:

Absolutely nobody was lying here, though.

I had the builders in today and they made a great deal of noise, which means that I don’t have much to offer you beyond pointing out this remarkable if routine exercise in political dishonesty. Aside from the lies, I find it hard to blame Joe Biden for pardoning his son; his party disgraced him by forcing him out of the race and he had no reason not to do it. This will also give Donald Trump the moral authority to follow through on his promise to pardon January 6 protestors, and otherwise I am grateful for every high-profile falsification of shallow political myths, especially those that Biden himself has been wont to peddle.