The Hunter Biden pardon gives Donald Trump powerful new political cover—>
This isn’t a political blog, but a personal blog. And personally I care about politics. So even though my goal wasn’t to talk about politics here, I am going to because I care about it. Especially in today’s crazy political climate.
The article linked above is so fucking frustrating to me. Not because I disagree fully with the headline, but that it should say Trump not Biden, and how Trump pardoned his son-in-laws father, Charles Kushner, when Trump was president. Clinton also pardoned his half-brother during his presidency but no one talks about it.
My biggest is issue with the article though, is how it starts with Biden and what he did but then subtly mentions Trump pardoning his own cronies towards the end of the article and also subtly mentions how pardoning them also protected Trump from being wrapped up in their crimes:
Trump, to be sure, took a freewheeling approach to pardons in his first term, granting clemency to cronies like former national security adviser Mike Flynn, longtime adviser Roger Stone, 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort and White House aide Steve Bannon. All of those pardons, though, were tied to specific investigations and crimes those men had been accused or convicted of. (Tellingly, the men also were all connected to investigations that could have implicated Trump himself.)
Pardoning Hunter helped Hunter, not Joe Biden. You can say it made Joe feel better, but he didn’t do it to protect himself like Trump did with his own pardons. Him saying he wasn’t going to do it is annoying, but after so many flip flops from the other side I wish Joe Biden would have just owned it instead of the more measured and defensive response he provided.