I must admit that I was surprised by at least one aspect of the Hunter Biden pardon: the fact that anyone else was surprised by it.
Few of us in the alternative media believed President Joe Biden when he promised, for years, that he would not pardon his son — even after Hunter was convicted earlier this year of lying on his gun purchase form. We never trusted Biden — a liar throughout his half-century in politics. We also expected that any father would do the same.
We also knew that President Biden would pardon Hunter Biden to cover up his own crimes, namely his involvement in an influence-peddling scheme that dates back to the Obama administration and perhaps even earlier.
Hunter took a position on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, in 2014, when his father was not only the Vice President of the United States but also President Barack Obama’s point man on Ukraine — a clear conflict of interest.
That was only one of several foreign business relationships that Hunter Biden cultivated, trading on his proximity to his father to rake in cash that, according to Hunter’s own claims, went back to his father and the family.
In an even more egregious example from 2017, documented on Hunter’s abandoned laptop, he set aside 10% ownership for the “big guy” in a joint venture with a state-linked Chinese company that later blew up (with Hunter taking the cash).
That is why President Biden’s pardon extended backwards in time to January 1, 2014 — long before the gun crimes, and some of the tax evasions (at least, those that were prosecuted — earlier years of alleged evasion had already run the statute of limitations, thanks to prosecutors who, far from singling Hunter Biden out, tried to protect him until their gambit was exposed). The president wants to keep a lid on his own role in the influence-peddling business.
None of this was a surprise to conservatives. We reported Hunter Biden’s odd ascent at Burisma in 2014. We noted, in 2019, reporting by John Solomon (then writing at The Hill) about Joe Biden’s bizarre boast in 2018 about how he had threatened to withhold $1 billion in crucial loan guarantees from Ukraine in 2016 unless the government fired an allegedly corrupt prosecutor who just happened to have jurisdiction over an active investigation into Burisma.
To conservatives, the 2019-2020 impeachment of President Donald Trump was as much about covering up the Biden family’s corruption as it was about removing or tarnishing Trump. We also believed that the efforts by the media, the tech companies, and the national security apparatus to censor stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop were part of a coordinated effort to cover for the Biden family and intervene on Joe Biden’s behalf in the 2020 presidential election.
But to Democrats, and to significant portions of the mainstream media, Hunter Biden was just a recovering addict; Joe Biden was cleaning up Ukraine when he demanded the prosecutor be fired; Donald Trump was abusing his power when he asked Ukraine to look into the Bidens; the laptop was (and still might be!) Russian disinformation; Joe never had anything to do with his family’s business interests; and Hunter was being unfairly targeted by nasty Republicans.
They believed all of that, because somehow they believed that Joe Biden was trustworthy; that he meant it when he ran on a slogan of “truth over lies”; and that he, unlike evil Trump, cared about “institutions” and the “rule of law.”
They didn’t believe it because Joe Biden fooled them. They believed it because they convinced themselves to believe it.
That was the real surprise. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been. Here are their names. Never trust them, if you ever did.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
