President Joe Bidlen’s pardon of his son Hunter has been savaged by Republican politicians and conservative pundits since it was announced Sunday evening.
It’s been attacked by even big-name Democrats as a “bad precedent that could be abused.”
On Tuesday, the federal judge overseeing Hunter Biden’s tax trial weighed in — and it was ugly for the president.
In his order, District Judge Mark Scarsi shredded the elder Biden’s statement about the pardon, which claimed that his son had been the subject of political prosecution. (Even Biden’s own Justice Department didn’t agree with that.)
“But two federal judges expressly rejected Mr. Biden’s arguments that the Government prosecuted Mr. Biden because of his familial relation to the President,” Scarsi wrote.
“And the President’s own Attorney General and Department of Justice personnel oversaw the investigation leading to the charges. In the President’s estimation, this legion of federal civil servants, the undersigned included, are unreasonable people.”
Scarsi, who was confirmed to the federal bench in 2020 as a nominee of then-President Donald Trump, also laid into parts of Joe Biden’s statement that implicitly blamed Hunter’s criminal behavior on his addiction to drugs and alcohol.
“Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given non-criminal resolutions. It is clear that Hunter was treated differently,” Biden’s statement claimed.
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Scarsi wasn’t buying it — because the facts didn’t back it up.
“Upon pleading guilty to the charges in this case, Mr. Biden admitted that he engaged in tax evasion after this period of addiction by wrongfully deducting as business expenses items he knew were personal expenses, including luxury clothing, escort services, and his daughter’s law school tuition,” Scarsi wrote. [Emphasis in the original.]
“And Mr. Biden admitted that he ‘had sufficient funds available to him to pay some or all of his outstanding taxes when they were due,’ but that he did not make payments toward his tax liabilities even ‘well after he had regained his sobriety,’ instead electing to ‘spen[d] large sums to maintain his lifestyle’ in 2020.”
(The president’s pardon statement neglected to mention Hunter Biden’s spending on “escort services” for some reason.)
The Constitution gives the president the power to pardon, Scarsi wrote, “but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history.”
It also doesn’t give a president the power to pardon acts committed in the future, which Biden’s actually did for Hunter Biden — at least for a few brief hours.
Scarsi noted that the official pardon language stated that it covered offenses Hunter “has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024 …”
Considering the pardon was issued on Dec. 1, that would technically mean Hunter had a pass to keep on committing crimes until midnight — and that wouldn’t be constitutional.
In legal terms, “the warrant may be read to apply prospectively to conduct that had not yet occurred at the time of its execution, exceeding the scope of the pardon power,” Scarsi wrote.
After some discussion of that aspect, Scarsi eventually considered it not relevant — at least not relevant enough to challenge the validity of the pardon as a whole.
“The warrant explicitly brings the charges in this action within the ambit of the pardon, indicating presidential intent for the pardon to apply to this case even if it is unconstitutional in other respects,” he wrote.
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