Like just a few of the key players in the hundreds of scandals large and small in American political history, Hunter Biden has finally achieved a kind of immortality.
By apparently convincing his father to pardon him for gun charges he had already been convicted of and tax crimes to which he had pleaded guilty — as well as any other federal crimes he may have committed over the past decade — the younger Biden will do just that. are now an icon of an era of corruption.
This does not include other types of ‘scandals’ in the sense of failed policies or dishonest distortions: the failed program that is swept under the carpet or the official double-speak that characterizes every government to some extent. An era of corruption is a time when power is routinely abused for personal ends.
The outgoing president’s defenders have rushed to compare Biden’s pardon to the corruption of the former and future Trump administrations in the person of Charles Kushner, the father-in-law of the president-elect’s daughter Ivanka. Donald Trump pardoned Kushner in 2020 for his crimes, which included hiring a whore to seduce his own brother-in-law to prevent the man’s wife, Kushner’s sister, from testifying in the real estate developer’s fraud trial. Now Trump has appointed Kushner, whose family business has made billions in Trump’s orbit, as ambassador to France. Zut alors …
Some Democrats have noted that Biden’s pardon “sets a bad precedent” that Trump is sure to exploit if he returns to power next month. But that’s not the problem. The precedent already existed. President Joe Biden ratified it, and worse, he did so after repeatedly promising that he would never abuse his power in exactly the way he just did.
The Biden administration had pledged to move away from the rampant corruption of Trump’s first term, when ethical lapses, self-dealing and shady revelations had been the norm. But Biden’s own family couldn’t stay out of trouble: Hunter always, but sometimes the president’s brother Jim, who had made a fine career for himself by selling access and influence.
The Biden family’s obscurity was hardly new in politics. Trading on a powerful family name is a proven form of political corruption, from William Franklin to the rotten Rodham brothers.
However, Biden’s pardon shifts the precedent a bit. Unlike Kushner and that other famous criminal from the first family, Roger Clinton, Hunter Biden never served a day for his crimes. He wasn’t even convicted. And the addition of a blanket amnesty for all other as yet unidentified crimes between 2014 and 2024 is the icing on the cake.
Democrats are undoubtedly right to fear that the president will fuel the coming geyser of executive abuse of power in the next Trump administration. Trump himself made it explicit in his statement about the Bidens, invoking his promise to pardon members of the mob of his supporters who ransacked the Capitol in an effort to prevent the certification of the 2020 election. And this week’s pardon was certainly a boon to Trump’s efforts to install right-wing provocateur Kash Patel as the next director of the FBI.
If President Biden can interfere with the justice system on the premise of fighting back against what he believes are politically motivated prosecutions, why not President Trump?
But one assumes that the most enduring abuses in the Trump administration will be of the venal, Kushnerian variety. Trump demands the submissive attention of the corporate rich and powerful, and all signs indicate that in his second term he plans to make the most of those relationships, without even some of the modest ethical boundaries that limited his first effort .
Yes, the 1920s will continue to roar, and as in the same decade of the last century, political corruption in Washington will remain endemic.
But if we were to mention that era or our own century of corruption, it would indicate that that is somehow not the case in any other era. Even governments not seriously marred by personal corruption have their stinkers.
“Biden’s pardon shifts the precedent a bit. …Hunter Biden never served a day for his crimes. He wasn’t even convicted. And the addition of a general amnesty for all other as yet unidentified crimes between 2014 and 2024 is the icing on the cake.”
The word itself suggests something that is a bit at odds with what we know about human nature. In politics, at least, we are generally not talking about corrupting something good, but about the inability to contain rotten impulses.
That is why it is important that public corruption is punished publicly, and severely. Hunter Biden made millions because of his father’s decades in power, but argued through his lawyers that it would be wrong for him to receive harsher sentences than another criminal because of his political fame. He wanted to be someone special when he harassed influence seekers at home and abroad, but when it came time to deal with the consequences, Hunter Biden wanted to be treated like anyone else. And when that didn’t work, he let his father save him again.
And yes, the lack of consequences for the younger Biden will undoubtedly make matters worse during the coming Trump term. If Trump had taken the oath of office while Hunter Biden was rotting in a cell somewhere, it might have been a bit of a yellow flag for Trump’s family members and hangers-on, imagining how many billions could be squeezed out of four years without a re-election campaign would take place. about.
But taming corruption cannot be done with fear alone. Good examples are also needed.
When Ronald Reagan’s diaries were published in 2007, one of the news reports was that the then-president had considered pardoning longtime aide Michael Deaver in January 1989. Deaver had left the White House in 1985 to make money as a lobbyist, but immediately ran afoul of ethics rules that required a two-year cooling-off period, and did so in spectacular fashion. An independent counsel was appointed to investigate the matter, and Deaver ultimately lied to investigators and to Congress. He blamed his alcoholism for the mistakes, but offered no defense in court and was convicted in 1987 of five charges of perjury: a large fine, three years of probation and no lobbying. It was a great shame for Reagan and his team, who worked hard to keep any idea of filth or personal corruption out of the government. Iran-Contra was certainly a scandal, but it was not about cashing in on public trust.
But the charges against Deaver were clearly also politically motivated. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee had hounded Deaver and eventually, with the help of a jury in Washington, D.C., tripped him up. It would have been natural for Reagan to want his loyal friend to be reinstated from a punishment that targeted the president more than his former aide.
Reagan struggled with the question, but in January 1989 Deaver made it easy for him: “Mike has made it known that he will not accept a pardon.”
And this, folks, is how it should be done.
Read more at De Uitzending
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