Hunter Biden’s pardon proves that you can get away with anything if you’re connected enough. If your father is the president, there’s absolutely nothing that can’t be done, up to and including alleged influence peddling. Biden’s pardon–the pardon he promised wasn’t coming–covers a lot more than him illegally buying a firearm.
But that’s in the mix, and so now Hunter is going to walk despite his conviction.
Now, understand that while a lot of people have claimed that 4473 violations aren’t prosecuted all that often, we need to remember a few things. First, they’re not caught all that often, which is part of why they’re not commonly prosecuted. Plus, they’re prosecuted some, which means there’s no way Hunter not being prosecuted wasn’t going to be a political nightmare for the Biden administration.
Not that it matters now, and that’s a problem for the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms , who released this statement on Monday.
The weekend pardon of convicted firearm felon Hunter Biden by his father, President Joe Biden—who had repeatedly vowed not to exercise this executive power—was a despicable exercise of the political double standard for which the Bidens and other political elitists are infamous, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said.
“This pardon is an affront to all the people who have been convicted and or served prison time for falsely filling out the same federal form that Hunter Biden did,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “Especially those who committed a non-violent crime as a young adult and were never told that they lost the right to own a gun and had no intention of lying.
“President Biden lied when he said he would not pardon his son Hunter,” Gottlieb added. “To use a famous quote from Biden himself, the President is ‘a lying dog face pony soldier.’”
For months, the president or his spokespersons have maintained there would be no presidential intervention in the outcome of Hunter Biden’s legal troubles. The “first son” was convicted of three federal firearms felonies earlier this year, and then in September he pleaded guilty to tax law violations in a separate case. The pardon, while predicted by most Biden critics, still amounts to a political and legal sucker punch.
“Joe Biden’s exercise of his pardon power is an outrage,” Gottlieb said. “He will leave office with his reputation in tatters, and his only lasting legacy will be one of deceit. His history of dishonesty is well established, so not even his most faithful allies will be able to gloss this over in the months and years ahead.
“The man who declared in his pardon message that he has followed a simple principle throughout his career to ‘just tell the American people the truth,’ has shown he’s nothing more than a pathological liar,” Gottlieb said. “Hunter Biden’s unconditional pardon is an insult to millions of American gun owners who have endeavored to follow increasingly restrictive gun laws which Joe Biden championed while his son violated them.”
Harsh.
It’s not wrong, mind you, but harsh.
When you’re the man in power, you can often do what you want, but if you want to avoid looking like you will do what you want, then your children need to be held to a higher standard. They need to be more accountable for their actions than someone else might be. If prosecutors decline to prosecute some rando, no one screams about favoritism. When they decline to prosecute the child of some powerful elected official, it’s impossible not to scream it.
Hunter Biden nearly avoided prosecution for his gun charges, was eventually prosecuted when the public outcry over favoritism got so loud, got convicted of multiple felonies, and through it all, President Biden said he wouldn’t pardon him. That lasted right up until Sunday when he did.
At that point, it became clear that if you’re part of the Biden family, the rules really don’t apply to you. What’s more, it set a precedent that will be brought up again. Those who are well-connected don’t have to follow the rules.
So I get exactly where Gottlieb is coming from and agree completely.
This is such an absolute travesty of justice. It’s not because I think the 4473 is a good thing, but because I’m sick of double standards, of “rules for thee but not for me.”
Yet CCRKBA wasn’t the only gun rights group to voice an opinion. The NRA, in a piece over at America’s 1st Freedom, had this to say:
In his statement, Joe Biden said it was clear that his son had been “treated differently” by the Justice Department and was “singled out only because he is my son—and that is wrong.”
Joe Biden even said, “There has been an effort to break Hunter—who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me—and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”
Given all of the actual lawfare that was used against incoming President Donald Trump (R) by members of Biden’s political party, it must have taken a lot of self-control for Trump to call the pardon a “miscarriage of justice.”
…
So, even as President Biden continues to argue that America needs new gun bans and other gun-control laws, he has pardoned his son for illegally purchasing and owning a handgun. The hypocrisy and elitism infused in this intricate and scandalous story is so rich it feels hyperbolic to spell it out.
In other words, a double standard was at play.
Shocking, I know. It’s funny how hypocrisy seems to be the common thread here. Maybe because it’s so blatant and obvious?
No one else was going to get pardoned for this, even if the prosecution were politically motivated. That’s because no one else facing these charges was the child of the current president.
Biden has done it, and since he’s done in politics anyway, there aren’t really any repercussions for him going forward. It’s not like he can lose an election or anything.
Read the full article here