By Daily Mail (U.S.) | Created at 2025-01-23 00:36:45 | Updated at 2025-01-23 04:02:11
3 hours ago
Joe Biden saved his greatest disgrace for last.
On Monday, he pre-emptively pardoned his three siblings and their two spouses for any potential crimes they may have committed over the last decade.
You know, standard stuff.
In truth, it's one final embarrassment for those who supported the man as if he were honest and decent.
It's one final insult to the American people, who are not above the law.
And the last-second timing of the announcement - released minutes before Trump's swearing-in and as the crowd, including the outgoing President, was already seated in the Capitol Rotunda - was an affront to democracy.
'If you're going to do it, have the courage to do it in the light of day and explain it to the American people,' said CNN's John King on Monday. 'It's a stain on his legacy to do it like this.'
All that is undeniable. There's hardly anyone left willing to defend Biden.
The last-second timing of the announcement - released minutes before Trump's swearing-in and as the crowd, including the outgoing President, was already seated in the Capitol Rotunda - was an affront to democracy.
On Monday, he pre-emptively pardoned his three siblings and their two spouses for any potential crimes they may have committed over the last decade. (Pictured: Valerie Biden Owens, the sister of Joe Biden, and James Biden, the brother of Joe Biden in October 2024)
But the public is left to ponder: Why did Joe feel the need to pardon his family? Could it have anything to do with his son's crimes? Could it have had anything to do with Joe, himself?
The ex-president, of course, claims that he had no choice but to give several generations of Bidens blanket immunity from prosecution.
'My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me — the worst kind of partisan politics.' he said in a statement, echoing the language he used when he pardoned Hunter.
Though, of course, it was Biden's own Justice Department (very reluctantly) who prosecuted Hunter for felony gun and tax evasion charges – and a jury that convicted him.
That's the way it's supposed to work.
If Biden truly believed that the US justice system was so thoroughly corrupt then why didn't he do anything or say anything about it during his entire four years in office?
There's something else going on here – and President Donald Trump put his finger on it in an interview on Wednesday.
'You know what the funny thing, maybe the sad thing, is? He didn't give himself a pardon. And you look at it, it all had to do with him,' Trump said.
Indeed, Biden was really pardoning himself.
Like the executive dispensation that Joe gave Hunter, the pardons of his siblings and their spouses protect them from prosecution for possible crimes stretching back a decade.
We all know why Biden reached so far back in his leniency: that's when the family's foreign influence-peddling business really took off.
After a prolonged legal battle, the National Archives finally released pictures in December showing then-Vice President Biden and Hunter meeting with Chinese businessmen in Beijing in 2013.
They are the same Chinese businessman that Hunter leaned on to launch his firm Bohai Harvest Equity, an investment fund controlled by the Bank of China. (Pictured: Biden meets with Hunter's Chinese business partner in Beiking in 2013)
After a prolonged legal battle, the National Archives finally released pictures in December showing then-Vice President Biden and Hunter meeting with Chinese businessmen in Beijing in 2013. (Pictured)
They are the same Chinese businessman that Hunter leaned on to launch his firm Bohai Harvest Equity, an investment fund controlled by the Bank of China.
Then in 2014, Hunter joined the board of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, started doing business with a Kazakhstani oligarch and was indirectly wired $3.5 million by Russia's richest woman, Yelena Baturina.
Business was booming!
More critically, the Beijing trip wasn't the only meeting that Joe had with Hunter's business partners.
A House Republican investigation in 2023 found that Joe met more than two dozen times with his son's well-paying clients. And we know – at least some of – what they were paying for.
Hunter's ex-business partner Devon Archer testified to Congress in 2023 that foreigners, like Ukrainian energy firm owners, believed that they were buying access to the highest reaches of the US government.
It seems likely that Hunter Biden, at the very least, was also violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires Americans to register with the Justice Department if they work for foreign entities.
Hunter did not register. Neither have any members of the Biden family.
Then in 2014, Hunter joined the board of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, started doing business with a Kazakhstani oligarch and was indirectly wired $3.5 million by Russia's richest woman, Yelena Baturina. (Pictured: Vladimir Putin with Yelena Baturina in 2019)
Yet House investigators have traced between $10 million and $30 million, much of it from shady foreign sources, that has flowed through twenty different Biden family shell companies over the past few decades.
Biden's siblings, along with Hunter, were key recipients and conduits for those payments. Jim and Sara passed along hundreds of thousands to Joe himself, including $40,000 from a Chinese company that Jim recorded as a loan repayment.
Follow the money, they say.
Biden needed a pardon himself.
How fitting that even his last official act was dishonest.
