Joe Biden Should Pardon Hunter
Joe Biden Should Pardon Hunter
Yes, I mean this. He's family.
Nearly every president exits office leaving a bushel load of pardons behind. Joe Biden will likely do the same. One of those people he should pardon is his son, Hunter.
[Uproar. Yelling. Screaming.]
Now that the hysterical reaction is dying down allow me to explain.
I said this about Bill Clinton: if you can’t pardon your own brother then who can you pardon?
The same goes for Joe and Hunter Biden. Hunter, like Roger Clinton, is a degenerate derelict. Hunter was also a deadbeat dad until the legal system caught up with him. There does not appear to be many positive things that can be said about Hunter. But he’s still Joe’s son. Joe’s own flesh and blood. No pardon for Hunter would make Thanksgiving meals really uncomfortable. In the end, family is important. It’s important even in dysfunctional families.
I will give Joe a pass on pardoning Hunter, just as I gave a pass to Bill pardoning Roger.
Would a pardon mean Hunter will have escaped justice? Possibly. But consider this. Hunter may not have escaped accountability for all previous criminal activity. The hammer may still fall … especially if Merrick Garland is no longer the attorney-general in 2025.
Let’s get back to Bill and his pardons.
No past president has ever gotten nearly as close to abusing the executive clemency process as did Bill Clinton.
Clinton received nearly 4,000 petitions for executive clemency from the day he took office until January 1999. Compared with every president since George Washington, Clinton was stingy in approving clemency requests. Of the 3,923 requests received during his first six years in office, every petitioner was left empty-handed except for 77.
The 56 clemency petitions Clinton approved during his first term were the fewest of any president since Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s third commander-in-chief, who issued a mere 45 clemencies. This is even more shocking considering Jefferson’s clemencies were given when the US had a population of only five million compared to the 285 million during Clinton’s first term.
Clinton was the first president since Washington to not issue executive clemency in two full years of a complete presidential term (1993, 1996). In contrast, the 334 pardons and commutations the 42nd president issued in his final 10 months in office were nearly three-quarters of all executive clemency he awarded throughout his entire presidency.
Clinton’s rejection rate during the first six years of his presidency was a stunning 98 percent. That is, until Hillary Rodham Clinton decided she wanted to run for the seat of New York’s retiring US Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Then, everything changed.
In his last two years as president, and after Hillary made the decision to run for the Senate, Bill doled out 380 pardons and commutations. This represented more than four of five pardons and commutations he tendered during his presidency. The 176 pardons and commutations (140 and 36, respectively) Clinton issued on his very last day in office was nearly two-thirds of all executive clemency awarded during all eight years he was president.
In the final two years of Clinton’s presidency, the entire Clinton clan treated executive clemency as if it were their personal property. Clemency was dished out in return for money, gifts, and influence. More than 50 clemency recipients, or those lobbying the Clintons for clemency on behalf of others, had direct ties to Hillary. Hillary stockpiled financial and political IOUs she cashed in when she ran for political office, including both the senate and the presidency.
Everyone got into the act. First brother, Roger Clinton, and Hillary’s siblings, Hugh and Tony Rodham, each made hundreds of thousands of dollars hustling executive clemency for felons who were willing to pay. Among the clemency recipients was Carlos Vignali, a cocaine drug kingpin. Hugh was paid more than $200,000 to ensure Vignali received a commutation from Clinton.
It had gotten so wild in the final months of the Clinton presidency that Roger was cold-calling applicants offering to get them clemency in return for cash. One applicant with whom I spoke and who wishes to remain anonymous, wondered how Roger Clinton knew they applied for clemency and how he got their private cell phone number. Bill must have given the information to Roger, the applicant speculated. The applicant refused to pay Roger the requested six-figure fee. They never received a pardon.
Of the 140 pardons Clinton issued on January 20, 2001, 47 completely bypassed the Justice Department, and 30 recipients had not even filed a petition. In those final hours of Clinton’s last day in office, the pardon attorney was frantically preparing clemency certificates for recipients whose names were misspelled or whose addresses were unknown. The pardon attorney was relegated to doing internet searches on people Clinton wanted pardoned. It was a free-for-all.
Some recipients were shocked they were given clemency because they never requested it. Another 14 recipients had previous petitions denied by Clinton and two were deemed ineligible under Justice Department guidelines. Another received a pardon before the Justice Department had completed its review of the petition.
Twenty-three recipients had Arkansas ties, and four were among the 14 Clinton business partners and friends who were convicted of illegal Whitewater activities. Among these was Susan McDougal, who spent months in jail on contempt charges for refusing to testify against the Clintons in the Whitewater scandal.
Several of Clinton’s pardon recipients never accepted responsibility for their crimes — a key tenet before executive clemency is awarded. Other recipients were recommended against receiving clemency by the Justice Department, the presiding judges and prosecutors, and even Clinton’s own White House counsel.
Two recipients, Roger Clinton and Glenn Braswell, were under FBI investigation for possibly committing additional crimes when they received their pardons. Braswell was later convicted of his additional crimes. Because Bill Clinton’s pardon wiped away Braswell’s first conviction, Braswell was treated as a first-time offender instead of a twice-convicted felon when he was convicted for his follow-on crimes.
Among the most notorious pardon recipients was billionaire Marc Rich and his partner, Pincus Green. Both were fugitives abroad from justice, did not serve any time, renounced their US citizenship, and had engaged in further illegal conduct when Clinton pardoned them. Their criminal activity included trading with Cuba while under US sanctions, engaging in trade with Iran while it held 52 American hostages, and executing commerce deals with state sponsor of terrorism Libya that was responsible for the Pan Am 103 bombing that killed 189 US citizens. Rich and Green also partnered with the brutal and totalitarian regime of North Korea, and with Iraq and the corrupt Oil-for-Food program.
The Clinton-Rodhams’ many pardons and commutations were so indefensible that long-time Clinton apologist and former adviser Lanny Davis could not bring himself to write even a single paragraph of spirited defense of the clemency decisions in his book.
Davis’s Scandal: How “Gotcha” Politics is Destroying America was a noble effort to excuse and explain away Clinton scandals, but when it came to the pardons, Davis took a pass. For that matter, Hillary, too, skipped the topic entirely in her Living History.
For his part, Bill Clinton made a meager effort to explain away his scandalous pardons. He devoted barely three pages out of his nearly 1,000-page autobiography My Life to the matter. Not surprisingly, his comments were replete with one lie after another.
It is apparent today that the Clintons’ two-decade pay-to-play scheme that amassed nearly a quarter of billion dollars for Bill and Hillary Clinton and billions of dollars for the Clinton Foundation began with these pardons.
Mark Hyman is an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, Parler, and Mastodon.world at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.
His books Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation and Pardongate: How Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Brothers Profited from Pardons are on sale now (here and here).
What do bill and joe have in common? Both are a piece of shit, and both are married to a piece of shit. Talk about setting the bar low on what it takes to be 'President'! And a low bar set on what it takes to be the 'First Lady', as well.