Since Sunday night’s announcement of an expansive pardon for Hunter Biden, a generous gift from a wayward father to his wayward son, the press has been full of commentary ranging from serious to comical, from approval to horror.
“How dare he abuse the pardon privilege,” some say, “a privilege intended for rare moments of generosity and compassion, and for times when deserving convicts were clearly the victims of a miscarriage of justice.” Whether one agrees or not, this is a worthy discussion to have, as the development of a welfare state, a secular society, lawless cities, and open borders has added layers of complexity to our criminal justice system.
“It’s proof that the pardon privilege should be reformed through constitutional amendment,” say others, who believe that in an era in which corrupt politicians can attain the levers of power, those levers require more constraints than our thoughtful but idealistic Framers thought necessary. That is another worthy discussion, as our political class has indeed sunk far below the standards held in the days of Washington, Morris, and Jay.
Then there are the chronic forgivers, who think it unreasonable to set any standards for behavior and are happy to give anyone a second chance. “A generous father rightly used his office to give his son a break,” they say. “What caring father wouldn’t?” Such a generous, forgiving expression calls to mind Frank Sinatra’s famous zinger when asked why he had married a naïve starlet 30 years his junior: “I finally found a broad I could cheat on!”
But of all the commentary, the line of thought that strikes this consumer of news as the most interesting is this comment, uttered in many ways by all sides of the political and nonpolitical spectrum for several years now: “But for his father, after all, where would Hunter be? Without this pardon, and without the connections that kept the IRS and FBI from fully prosecuting this reprobate, he’d be stuck in either a jail cell or a gutter.”
Perhaps that’s true.
But perhaps it’s not.
Among the many crimes exposed by house investigations, criminal cases, published books, and the famous laptop, Hunter Biden is guilty (one doesn’t even need to say “alleged” in this case) of an array of crimes ranging from tax evasion to acting as an undeclared agent of foreign nations, from money-laundering to the selling of access to a federal politician.
For such crimes as these, any normal person would be in federal prison for a long time.
Other crimes have been exposed, however, that aren’t as exciting. In fact, these are at the bottom of the cultural barrel: Hunter Biden has been exposed as a frequent user of hard drugs and possibly an addict, a cretin who carried on an affair with his late brother’s wife and fathered a child with a stripper. His drug and gun crimes alone would land an unconnected man in a miserable jail cell until he finally earned his reward in a potter’s field.
So, yes, without his father’s name, his father’s connections, his father’s protection, and now his father’s pardon, he’d likely be an unknown convict for life with a wardrobe of orange jumpsuits.
But when one looks at a what-if scenario, one should be open-minded enough to look at both sides of the situation. If it weren’t for Joseph Robinette Biden, would young Hunter have needed all those breaks? Would he have needed the hands-off orders, the generous courts, and the eventual pardon?
In short, were it not for the fact that Hunter Biden is the son of the notoriously corrupt, dementia-ridden party hack unjustly ensconced in the White House these past four years, would Hunter Biden ever have become a criminal at all?
Throughout his political career — that is, for his children’s entire lifetimes — Joe Biden was always a two-faced user. He took the train back and forth from Delaware every day to build a network of donors and cronies. He brought family members on foreign trips to enable them to be cut in on foreign deals. He raised Hunter to be a lawyer so that he could become a “consultant” in foreign countries where businessmen could share American foreign aid in the form of consultancy fees and insider investments.
Nobody ever accused Joe Biden of genius, but he did always have a special talent for the shell game, whether it was the skill of relating contrary issue stances depending on the audience or the skill of moving money around among companies to hide the actual origins and final dispositions of all those investments and consultant fees. (Again, there’s no need to say “alleged,” since Rep. James Comer’s committee exposed it all on the floor of the U.S. House, with the assistance of hundreds of suspicious activity referrals by private banks in recent years.)
What must it be like to be a son, raised by a father like that?
Every American — especially Americans of Hunter Biden’s age group — grew up with a deep understanding of organized crime; mafia movies were a special genre in Hollywood, with The Godfather having been released the very same year Joe Biden was first elected to the U.S. Senate, when Hunter was two years old.
A special characteristic of the Mafia — especially as presented in the Godfather series — is the idea of making criminality a family business, raising one’s children in it, ensuring that brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles all got a piece of the action.
Whether conscious of the similarity or not, Joe Biden spread his financial shenanigans around his family for years and years, with brothers and sisters and kids and friends all playing a part in the shell companies, the foreign junkets, the corporate officer rosters, the multiple bank accounts. Once in, you can’t get out; just like the Mafia, the strings tying you to the criminal enterprise are too complex for a person with a twang of remorse to extricate himself from it.
No wonder we see gangsters and their molls turn to drugs, alcohol, sex, and other escapist vices to blunt the pain of realization that they have fallen into a life of crime.
Might that be the real reason for Hunter’s acting out? Might that have been the unconscious motivation, deep down, to leave the bombshell of an evidence trove — The Laptop — where it could be irresistibly and irretrievably revealed?
One is left to wonder: if Hunter Biden had been born into another family — a family headed up by anybody else but a mean-spirited, greedy, crooked politician like Joe Biden — the kid might have turned out okay. Without the temptations of wealth as a privileged senator’s son, without the almost unlimited access to millions of dollars in ill-gotten cash, might Hunter Biden have actually become a decent middle-class family man?
Please indulge me once again if we close with one more movie reference. In the classic 1980s comedy Trading Places, two villainous brothers — Duke and Duke — let an experiment play out (for a one-dollar gentlemen’s bet) concerning whether “nature or nurture” plays a greater role in human behavior.
Imagine taking Hunter Biden out of the Biden family from the start and giving him a decent, honest father instead, removing him from not only Biden’s “family business,” but all the corollary, illicit temptations that a weak soul might find irresistible.
Were Hunter Biden never a Biden in the first place, free of the corruption inherent in both his genes and his circumstances, he might in fact have turned out all right, never needing friendly prosecutors, gentle judges, or a presidential pardon at all.
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, and speaker. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his nonfiction book on the 2024 election, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped).
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