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The pardon of Hunter Biden in the waning days of his father’s presidential administration was a bit of an overreach but not unexpected, Ellis said on American Family Radio Monday morning. The elder Biden released a statement late Sunday pardoning Hunter Biden for any offenses committed or possibly committed between Jan. 1, 2014, and Dec. 1, 2024.
The outgoing president’s decision is also a complete reversal from his earlier position that he would not pardon his son and interfere with the justice system.
Many will immediately focus on federal gun and tax convictions which have kept a possible prison sentence hanging over Hunter Biden, who lied about his drug use when he bought a gun. In September he pleaded guilty to federal tax-evasion charges.
The younger Biden was scheduled to be sentenced this month. Now the broad pardon means he won’t face jail for his convictions nor for any international business dealings – dealings that could implicate Joe Biden as well.
“For all of us who have been paying attention, here we are. Joe Biden has pardoned Hunter Biden,” Ellis said.
In May, a paid FBI informant told investigators that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden each received $5 million payments in return for using Joe Biden’s influence to have a Ukrainian prosecutor fired.
In 2016, prosecutor Viktor Shokin was investigating Burisma, an energy company for which Hunter Biden had been appointed a board member. Shokin’s investigation was making it hard for Burisma to buy a U.S. oil and gas company, something Hunter Biden had advised, according to Fox News.
Ultimately, Shokin was fired.
Joe Biden brags about firing
In 2018, Joe Biden spoke of the firing in public comments aired on C-SPAN, implicating then-Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko and another official in the process.
“Well, interestingly, it was in 2014 that Hunter Biden first sat on the board of Burisma. So, remember the whole Biden corruption crime family and the whole Burisma issue that when Biden was running, we had all of those whistleblowers,” Ellis explained. “This pardon now spans that entire length of when Hunter Biden was involved with Burisma. So, this isn't just about a father wanting to protect his son. This is an overreach of justice.”
Even some conservatives were saying that Hunter Biden’s gun and tax convictions amounted to “over-prosecution,” Ellis said. But with those convictions at the forefront, she added, the scope of the pardon is overlooked.
“It’s smoke and mirrors. Let’s just slide in this 11-year span that covers a lot more than” the convictions, Ellis said. “It’s going to be very fascinating to see if Joe Biden pardons himself on his way out of office.”
The timing of Biden’s pardon announcement also lines up with Trump justice appointments with tough-on-corruption reputations in Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi to head up the DOJ and, over the weekend, Kash Patel to lead the FBI.
Patel, who during Trump's first term advised both the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense, has previously called for stripping the FBI of its intelligence-gathering role and purging its ranks of any employee who refuses to support Trump as president, Reuters reported Sunday.
Ellis said the presidential pardon is the finish line of a multi-layered plan to use Hunter Biden to justify the Biden administration’s use of the Department of Justice to try and derail Donald Trump’s reelection bid.
“This was a setup from the beginning, not only to use Hunter as kind of the fall guy to say, ‘Hey, look, if the DOJ has set up a special prosecutor and a special counsel against Hunter Biden, then it's perfectly fair for us to go after Donald Trump with just as equal of nonsensical lawfare,” Ellis said.
But by allowing the prosecution of Hunter Biden to proceed, Democrats also were able to repeat their ‘No One’s Above the Law’ mantra,” Ellis said.
“They used that intentionally to then try to tell Republicans, ‘You can't complain about the lawfare against Trump because the president's son is also being targeted by the DOJ.’ That, of course, failed miserably.”
Joe said ‘no pardon’ not once, but twice
Joe Biden in June told ABC News he would not pardon his son. He said the same thing about a week later at a press conference around the G-7 summit in Italy. On Sunday, however, he said his own Justice Department had “selectively and unfairly prosecuted” his son.
There was a plea agreement in place, but a Trump-appointed judge in Wilmington, Delaware, thought it was too sweet and bemoaned its “form over substance” before throwing it out in late July.
Hunter’s dad issued the pardon in a defiant tone.
“People are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form. 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,” Joe Biden argued.
He called the convictions a miscarriage of justice. “I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision,” Joe Biden added.
Not buying it
Fox News legal analyst Jeanine Pirro doesn’t understand.
“People go to jail for this stuff all the time. If he really believed that the Department of Justice selectively prosecuted him, why didn’t he fire [his attorney general] Merrick Garland? I mean, why didn’t he say, ‘You know what, Merrick, this is it, you did something wrong,’” she said.
But Garland remained employed.
“Everybody knows that what happened here was a coverup from the get-go of the crimes. They had to get David Weiss in there. They had a corrupt plea deal that a judge uncovered, and he was going to jail. We’re talking about a two-time felony convict,” Pirro said.
Law professor and Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley has a similar reaction, describing the pardon as "a decision that lives in infamy in presidential politics." Turley writes:
"It is not just that the president used his constitutional powers to benefit his family. It is because the action culminates years of lying to the public about his knowledge and intentions in the influence-peddling scandal surrounding his family. Even among past controversies about the use of this pardon power, Biden has cemented his legacy for many, not as the commander in chief, but as the liar in chief."
