White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Angola on Monday that “no reasonable person” could have come to a conclusion other than that Hunter Biden deserved to be pardoned.
President Joe Biden pardoned his son on Sunday evening for crimes going back through 2014. Jean-Pierre had said for years — including as recently as November — that Biden would not pardon his son. Biden himself said the same.
Jean-Pierre changed her tune on Monday, claiming that Hunter Biden would not have been prosecuted if he had not been a person “who has the last name of the president,” and also claimed that he had been “singled out politically.”
“The president wrestled with this decision, he made the decision this weekend, and he decided to move forward with pardoning his son,” she said.
Journalists, incredulous, asked Jean-Pierre whether she was saying that the Department of Justice was politicized; if so, whether it was the president’s own fault, because of his appointees; and how many politicized cases there were.
Jean-Pierre declined to answer these questions, though she did say that President Biden was not going to demand the resignation of Attorney General Merrick Garland for the alleged singling out of his son in deference to Republicans.
She added that Biden did not agree with President-elect Donald Trump that the justice system has been weaponized.
“He believes in the Department of Justice,” she said, though “politics infected the process.”
She pointed to the fact that the plea deal negotiated by Hunter Biden’s attorneys had fallen apart.
That deal was derided by critics as unduly deferential to Hunter Biden, and the judge questioned an immunity clause that would have protected him from future prosecutions. The unprecedented clause had been concealed from the court.
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.
