Raise your hand if you ever believed that Joe wasn’t going to pardon Hunter — and by extension himself — when he repeatedly gave his “word as a Biden” that he wouldn’t do so.
Me either.
For example, Biden said “yes” when asked by David Muir during a June ABC News interview whether he would “accept the jury’s verdict no matter what it is.”
A week later, when asked the same question by reporters at the Group of Seven summit in Italy after the Federal Court in Delaware found Hunter guilty of lying about his drug use when he bought a handgun in 2018, the president responded: “I said I’d abide by the jury decision. And I will do that. And I will not pardon him.”
All that was missing was his word as the Biden family’s Big Guy.
That certainly wasn’t Joe Biden’s first whopper.
Biden insisted during the 2020 presidential debate with Trump that Hunter had taken no money from China, something that his son later admitted to in federal court.
This lie was evident from a threatening July 2017 WhatsApp text message demanding payment from Henry Zhao, a Chinese Communist official, stating: "I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled," and "I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight."
The last sentences make two additional references to Biden the elder, "I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.”
Adding credibility to the threat, a Senate investigation found $5.1 million was sent to Hunter-linked companies from a subsidiary of Chinese company CEFC less than two weeks after the message.
The Washington Free Beacon reported Hunter’s laptop includes photographs of him at his father’s Wilmington, Delaware, home the day he sent the text message to Zhao.
Joe Biden also knew differently when 51 former intelligence officials, mostly Obama-Biden administration veterans, dismissed the existence of Hunter’s “laptop from Hell” in FBI possession for nearly a year as likely Russian disinformation just before the 2020 election.
Biden now claims that the justice system has been “infected” by raw politics in Hunter’s case.
Here he is right because his Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland assured that his boy got very special kid glove treatment.
House Ways and Means Committee whistleblower testimony by former IRS officials reveal that the tax evasion case against Hunter seemed to be “influenced by politics.”
Citing several examples, Gary Shapley Jr. who had supervised the IRS investigation said that "at every stage" of the probe, decisions were made that "had the effect of benefiting the subject of the investigation" with references to Hunter Biden's father.
"Among other things, we wanted to question Walker about an email that said: ‘Ten held by H for the big guy,’" Shapley said. "We had obvious questions like who was H, who the big guy was, and why this percentage was to be held separately with the association hidden."
Shapley charges that Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf "interjected and said she did not want to ask about the big guy and stated she did not want to ask questions about ‘dad.’"
The IRS also allowed the statute of limitations to expire for the most serious tax evasion charges along with a sweetheart plea deal designed to bury the evidence. It would have worked if not for honest Judge Maryellen Noreika exposing the caper with basic questions that caught the friendly rigged prosecution flat-footed.
Hunter pleaded guilty to nine federal tax evasion charges in September which would have landed you or me in the slammer for sure.
These offenses included claiming hundreds of thousands of dollars in false deductions for payments to escort services and dancers, a sex club membership, and his daughter Naomi’s law school tuition as business expenses.
The pardon was apparently timed to pre-empt Hunter’s sentencing scheduled for Dec. 12 on gun charges and Dec. 16 on tax charges.
The expansive breadth of the pardon allows Hunter to skate not only on crimes he is already convicted of, but also on any he may have committed in the past nearly 11 years … not coincidentally beginning around the time Hunter first got his remarkable no-show annual million-dollar board position with Burisma, a corrupt energy company under Ukraine government investigation.
Perhaps recall that then-V.P. Joe Biden publicly threatened to withdraw a billion-dollar Ukraine loan guarantee if they didn’t fire Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor.
Many unanswered questions remain regarding Biden family entanglements in Ukraine, China and other countries when Joe was vice president and the period after he left office after 2017.
Previous House Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means impeachment inquiry investigators have found more than $20 million from foreign sources allegedly paid to at least nine Biden family members through more than 20 shell companies with no identified services rendered.
Whereas according to Joe, his sweeping pardon of son Hunter for all convicted, admitted and potential crimes over the past decade is intended to correct “a miscarriage of justice,” a smell test suggests an opposite intent to block further self-incriminating investigations.
As he has repeatedly claimed regarding Trump, “No one is above the law.”
Let’s see if it turns out that he lied about that, too.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.