ANDREW McCARTHY: The real reason Hunter Biden's pardon goes all the way back to 2014

An intriguing aspect of President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter – which was utterly predictable, and predicted, notwithstanding the president’s repeated, indignant insistence that it would never happen – is the sweep of the clemency order.

Biden didn’t limit his son’s insurance against future prosecution to the two cases – criminal gun and tax prosecutions – on which he’s been found guilty (by a jury in the former and a judge who took his guilty plea in the latter). The pardon covers all potential federal crimes in which he may have culpability from Jan. 1, 2014, through Sunday night (Dec. 1, 2024).

Why 2014?

Well, the most damning evidence of the Biden family influence-peddling business occurred in the last years of Joe Biden’s term as vice president – specifically, 2014 through 2016. That, of course, is when the Burisma hijinks began. Indeed, Hunter’s board seat on the corrupt energy company’s board was so manifestly tied to his father’s political influence that, as soon as Biden left office in 2017, Burisma slashed Hunter’s compensation in half. 

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Not only that. The two lucrative schemes tied to the Chinese Communist Party – the Bohai Harvest RST investment enterprise and CEFC through which the Bidens netted several million dollars – also began in that 2014-16 time frame. So did the scheme in which Hunter collected a cool million from Romanian businessman Gabriel Popoviciu. 

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The Joe Biden vice-presidency phase also included the big Café Milano dinner in Washington, at which the then-VP rubbed elbows with a number of Hunter’s foreign business partners (the ones Joe Biden, when not making no-pardon vows, told us again and again he had nothing to do with because he never discussed business with Hunter). The guest list for that dinner included Eleana Baturina, the billionaire widow of Putin crony Yuri Luzhkov (the former mayor of Moscow) who also had a multi-million dollar transaction with Hunter.

As I’ve detailed, the Romanian scheme mirrors the Burisma scheme: As the VP anchoring Obama administration foreign policy, Joe Biden publicly harangued governments in Bucharest and Kyiv to intensify their anti-corruption efforts; that paved the way for his enterprising son to earn millions from those governments’ corruption targets (such as Popoviciu and Burisma’s Mykola "Nicolay" Zlochevsky) by using the specter of the then-VP’s political influence in seeking favorable treatment from those governments. And who can forget then-Vice President Biden’s threat to the fledgling Ukrainian regime that a billion dollars in desperately needed U.S. funding would be withheld unless Kyiv fired the prosecutor who just happened to be investigating Zlochevsky and Burisma. 

Naturally, among the questions raised by all this is why Hunter and those in cahoots with him were not prosecuted for failing to register as foreign agents – the FARA law about which the Biden Justice Department touts its enforcement efforts. 

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Moreover, if we had a one-tiered justice system in which everyone was treated equally, we couldn’t help but notice that the facts of the Biden foreign business arrangements are remarkable similar to those arising from the Ukrainian business activities of Paul Manafort, President Trump’s one-time 2016 campaign chairman. 

Special counsel Robert Mueller and his staff, which included several activist Democrats, threw the book at Manafort – not only tax and FARA charges but bank fraud, money laundering, etc. By the time he was convicted, Manafort was 69; and the charges against him had nothing to do with the focus of Mueller’s probe, the bogus claim of Trump "collusion" with Russia; the prosecutors were squeezing him in hopes that they’d give him something – anything – on the then-president.

President Biden and Hunter Biden head toward Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House, July 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

Because of that and many other examples of our two-tiered system, there have been some aggressive statements from the Trump camp that his election means the tables have turned. I suspect that this is hot rhetoric that will blow over, at least with respect to the Biden family. The period from 2014 to 2016 was a long time ago. Even if the Trump Justice Department were interested in pursuing new charges – again, I doubt that – the relevant statutes of limitations (five years for most federal crimes, six for some relevant tax crimes) have already expired. 

Still, President Biden is taking no chances. After all, an aggressive, creative prosecutor (perhaps in the mold of Jack Smith, but this time a zealous Republican) could cobble together a theory that Hunter and his cohorts – perhaps including the president and his brother Jim – were in a conspiracy that continued after 2016, perhaps even into 2020 and beyond. The proof for that might not be strong, it might even be non-existent. But in light of the evidence – including the evidence developed by the House Oversight Committee, which found that the Bidens reeled in over $27 million from foreign persons and entities from 2014 to 2019 – there would certainly be a sufficient basis for a criminal investigation. 

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And as people in the Trump orbit who’ve been hounded by Democratic prosecutors and committees can tell you, investigations are ruinous. They cost a fortune in legal fees, they dry up business opportunities, and they impose tremendous anxiety on suspects and their families.

The breathtaking expanse of Hunter’s pardon – nearly 11 years for someone the president repeatedly told us had done nothing wrong – is clearly an effort to foreclose any further investigation of the president’s son over the 2014-16 period from which the Biden Justice Department quite intentionally averted its eyes.

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