President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son was an “attack on the judicial system,” longtime Biden adviser Anita Dunn said Wednesday.
The statement reveals division within the Democrat party about whether or not the pardon was helpful to the future of the party.
“We saw some Democrats publicly criticizing the pardon,” journalist Mark Halperin said Wednesday on his 2Way show, “but not somebody like Anita Dunn, not someone who was a top staffer to both the President and the Vice President, and someone who’s been with him and loyal to him for a long time.”
“[It] reflects what I believe is more criticism that’s coming,” he added.
A majority, 51 percent, oppose the pardon, according to an Associated Press poll, while only 21 percent support it. Just 38 percent of Democrats approve, along with 12 percent of independents. A Monmouth poll, however, found most Democrats, 65 percent, support the president’s pardon.
Dunn was asked about the pardon while attending a New York Times roundtable event with Republicans and fellow Democrats.
Dunn stated she agreed with the decision but disagreed with the timing and attack on the judicial system. She also said the pardon was done in a way that undermines the president’s previous statements of respecting the judicial process. She claimed the president just simply changed his mind about the pardon after Biden alleged for months that he would not pardon Hunter Biden.
WATCH — White House Insisted Joe Biden Wouldn’t Pardon Hunter Right After Trump Won Election:
Dunn said:
I do not believe, and I don’t think most people believe, that Hunter Biden should go to jail, and that, you know, he had a serious addiction, that he broke the law, that he has pled guilty to that, that he has been held accountable and has actually been publicly pilloried in a way that very few people who commit these crimes have ever been pilloried, so he has paid a certain price. He’s also someone who has turned his life around, who has been sober now since 2019, who has a young child and is actually going to be a grandfather sometime next year. And had this pardon been done at the end of the term, in the context of compassion, the way many pardons will be done — I am sure many commutations will be done — I think would have been a different story. So, I will say I absolutely agree with the president’s decision here. I do not agree with the way it was done. I don’t agree with the timing, and I don’t agree, frankly, with the attack on the judicial system.
…
The president’s statement has to be taken at its face value, and clearly, like everybody else in the world, he has the prerogative of changing his mind, and that is indeed what he kind of said he did there. I think that you know, as you know, from a Democratic Party perspective, from a democratic perspective, as we were in the midst of the president-elect rolling out his nominees, and in particular, in the middle of a Kash Patel weekend, kind of throwing this into the middle of it was exceptionally poor timing, and that the argument is one that I think many observers are concerned about a president who ran to restore the rule of law, who has upheld the rule of law, who has really defended the rule of law, kind of saying, ‘Well, maybe not right now.’ So you know, Maggie, as I say, I agree with the decision to pardon. I absolutely think that Hunter deserves a pardon here, but I disagree on the timing, the argument, and sort of the rationale.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
