Mises
On Sunday night, President Biden issues a broad and sweeping pardon for his son Hunter Biden, covering “those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”
Hunter Biden was due to be sentenced this month for federal tax and gun crimes. This pardon removes the possibility of any further legal action in those cases. This pardon comes after many months of the President claiming that “no one is above the law,” and after repeated claims by the President that he will not use the power of the presidency to protect his son from the possibility of any punishment for the crimes for which he was convicted. These latter claims were apparently lies, as Biden has now issued a pardon for his son that goes far beyond even the crimes of which he has been convicted.
As Politico reported today,
Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.
“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues. “Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.
Why such a long time-frame and non-specific list of offenses for this pardon? This decade-long get-out-of-jail-free pass for Hunter Biden covers the period during which he has been accused of influence peddling through a variety of “business” dealings in eastern Europe and central Asia. Most notably, it was during this period that Hunter Biden joined the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Hunter Biden was paid $1 million per year for his “work” on the board, in spite of having no professional history that would qualify him for such a role. Overall, the House Oversight Committee accuses the Biden family of acceping over $20 million from foreign entities like Burisma and similar organizations. The pardon seeks to ensure that Hunter cannot be charged for any of the questionable activities tied to his many “deals” made with foreign governments.
No one should be surprised that the president did this. Of course Biden used his power to protect himself and his family members. At this point in history, it should go without saying that being at the highest levels of state power is extraordinarily helpful in protecting and enriching one’s self, one’s family, and one’s friends. Thus, we should absolutely expect the sorts of people who go into politics—mostly people with few moral scruples—to use the system to benefit themselves and their friends.
Nor should we be surprised when we are presented with yet more evidence that there are two legal systems in America: one for the regime and its friends, and another for everyone else. (By “regime,” we mean the permanent administrative government and its attendant ruling class.)
How the Regime’s Friends Protect Themselves
The Biden pardon is admittedly crude in how it simply declares the relative of a sitting president immune from prosecution. In practice, however, this is no different from what routinely goes on behind the scenes in the meeting rooms of the regime’s elite elected officials and bureaucrats. The pardon was probably a last resort of a weakened presidency since, normally, the way that the ruling class escapes prosecution for any of its misdeeds is by ensuring that no district attorney—a regime employee, of course—is willing to prosecute. The trick is to hire prosecutors and “law enforcement” personnel who have no interest in ever turning the powers of the state on the regime’s loyal soldiers.
So, it wasn’t at all surprising, for example, when James Comey declared that Hillary Clinton would face no serious legal trouble for her repeated violations of federal laws covering classified material. Comey even claimed that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against Clinton. President Biden was also absolved of all guilt by the Department of Justice when Biden, as vice president, was found to have mishandled classified material that he kept in his garage. Biden, like Clinton, faced no punishment for acts that would likely bring significant penalties for ordinary people or for people the permanent government doesn’t like, like Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, regime personnel frequently commit perjury with impunity as federal prosecutors look the other way. It is hard to deny that Anthony Fauci lied, for example, about his actions in covering up evidence of US regime participation in virus research in Wuhan. Similarly, James Clapper lied about the NSA’s spying activities.
We can count on federal prosecutors to turn a blind eye to powerful bureaucrats who simply are not subject to the same kind of legal scrutiny as ordinary taxpayers.
Another tactic employed to cover up crimes by loyal regime personnel is to simply define criminal acts as not criminal. This was employed repeatedly in the days of George W. Bush as key legal personnel offered novel interpretations of the law designed to provide loopholes for elected officials. For example, Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo under George W. Bush repeatedly re-defined torture as not torture so as to offer legal cover for Yoo’s bosses. In effect, Yoo declared that the US president is not restrained by any treaty or law when it comes to fighting “terrorism.” What constitutes terrorism, of course, is defined by the regime itself. Bush’s AG apparently agreed.
When Barack Obama targeted and murdered American citizens without any due process, his AG, Eric Holder, simply declared that the law allows such things, and the Bill of Rights doesn’t mean what it says.
We could contrast this sort of impunity with what happens to regular people who commit far more benign infractions of federal law. For example, at about the same time James Comey was declaring that it was perfectly fine for Hillary Clinton to mis-use dozens of classified documents, a low-level Navy sailor, Kristian Saucier, was sentenced to six months house arrest for taking a few photos on board a US submarine.
Similarly, it has become routine for federal whistleblowers to serve time in prison while those who actually commit the crimes exposed by the whistleblowers face no punishment at all. Chelsea Manning is one such case, as is John Kiriakou who exposed the CIA’s illegal torture programs. Kiriakou is the only person connected with the CIA’s criminal conspiracy who has ever faced any legal sanction.
And, of course, there are the cases of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. Snowden was forced to flee to Russia to avoid prosecution for telling the truth of the regime’s widespread violations of our basic property rights. Assange, who exposed various federal lies about war crimes in Iraq, finally escaped a federal prison cell only after the American state took its pound of flesh. The American intelligence “community” conspired for years—with the help of Trump, Biden, and Obama—to rob Assange of years of freedom while he holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy or fought extradition from a British prison.
Time and again, we are reminded that obtaining a high-ranking position in the US regime means having access to a special kind of “justice” reserved to allies of the technocracy’s permanent government.
This Is What States Do
In this respect, the US state is like most every other state in human history. States are organizations that are generally characterized by secrecy and institutions that are well-guarded and offer only very limited access to the levers of true power. There is therefore a clear distinction between the productive private sector and the parasites that run the state itself. This is, as the old classical liberals used to call it, the distinction between the state and “society.”
The two groups have mutually exclusive interests, and the relationship is one of exploitation. The state parasites extract resources from those who actually produce the wealth. The state uses these resources to serve its interests and the interests of its favored elites.
Fortunately for the state, the public schools and media have succeeded in convincing the masses that this is fine. Subjected to endless propaganda about the US being “the greatest country in the world,” and how democracy means “the government is us” many Americans still indulge fantasies about how the beneficiaries of state privilege are engaged in “public service.” In reality, state agents are not at all interested in serving “the public” except to the bare minimum extent necessary to convince the credulous masses that the state actually cares about the public. The real priority of the state, of course, is the state itself and the privileged few who are able to break into the highest echelons of state power.
For those lucky few, provided they don’t do anything to actually endanger the power of the incumbent ruling class, they will be granted all the usual privileges offered to loyal state agents, regardless of political party. After all, the Bushes, Faucis, and Clintons of the world go to the same parties, their children go to the same schools, and they all show up at memorials and funerals to speak well of each other. They all enjoy the same privileges. They all know that they’ll never face any punishment for their crimes.
The Biden pardon is just the latest reminder of this grim reality.
Originally Posted at https://mises.org/
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