If you’re the type that stays abreast of the current discussion regarding former President Joe Biden’s mental fitness — or rather, the progressive lack thereof — during his time in office, you’re undoubtedly aware of the discussion regarding who was at the tiller when a raft of post-election pardons were doled out.
Naturally, discussion on this matter has centered around the possibility of corruption — Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett has raised the idea that it wouldn’t be difficult to offer a staffer illicit enticements to put a pardon or commutation through the autopen wringer — and questions about just who was in charge of deciding on who was deserving if we had a president incapable of making decisions for himself. (Certainly, pardons and commutations for triple murderers and corrupt judges who sent minors to jail in exchange for cash.)
However, that all obscures one question: Who exactly thought it was a good idea to pardon Hunter Biden?
And the second question practically asks itself: Did Hunter Biden pardon himself?
So, the just-the-facts-ma’am version of the Hunter Biden pardon knowing what we knew at the time: After his son was convicted of three felony gun charges in June 2024 and pleaded guilty to tax charges in September — with decades of prison time possible — President Joe Biden promised that he wouldn’t pardon Hunter. Then, he did.
“Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter. From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,” the lame-duck president said in the Dec. 1 pardon.
“Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, 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.
“The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election. Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the court room — with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases,” it continued.
“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.”
Most of this is pretty much bogus for obvious reasons, the first naturally being he and his people literally promised not to do it over and over.
Not only that, but it was a sweeping pardon that went all the way back to a very specific starting point, which even Politico couldn’t help but notice was oddly advantageous to Hunter:
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
Keep in mind that this all transpired when the general consensus was that, while Joe Biden wasn’t well enough for a second term and arguably hadn’t been for a first term, he could still be roused to attention, sorta, if the moment absolutely required it. Pardoning your kid when he was facing decades in jail for crimes he obviously committed definitely required him to rise to the occasion and think it through. Say what you will about Joe Biden, we at least thought the buck stopped with him on that one.
Now, there’s ample evidence even that may be too much to hope for — and that opens the very real possibility that Hunter Biden may have pardoned himself.
Of all the Now The Truth Can Be Told™ books that have tumbled out onto the shelves filled with plenty of suddenly chatty Biden administration insiders, none is as thorough and as damning as “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson.
For those of you who haven’t read it, I’ll save you the trouble and repeat what I’ve said elsewhere in The Western Journal: The whole premise is kind of in the title, and there’s nothing in there that doesn’t confirm what your worst suspicions were, but there is a definite thoroughness to the confirmation it provides and awfulness to the suspicions it confirms.
The TL;DR version of one of the book’s premises is that even before his 2020 campaign, Biden’s health — especially mental — was definitely a cause for real concern. To shield Joe, he had a team of people around him that garnered the internal nickname “the politburo” because it functioned just like the USSR’s version whenever a leader like Konstantin Chernenko or Yuri Andropov was on death’s door and incapable of making decisions when decisions needed to be made, but when the world also couldn’t know about that fact.
“The politburo,” the book says were the “ultimate decision-makers” as things got progressively worse. Among those named as members of it were Jill Biden — sorry, Dr. Jill Biden — aides Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, and Bruce Reed, and (this is where it gets problematic) Hunter Biden.
Moreover, the book makes it clear that Hunter’s legal woes were a blow to Biden’s mental wellnesss — such as it was still extant — during the 2024 campaign:
Top aides point to Hunter Biden’s plea deal falling apart — and the very real fears that he would go to prison — as an inflection point, like the months following Beau’s death, where the president suddenly and steeply declined…
The Bidens went into panic mode. Hunter was now likely headed for two trials. And possibly prison time. As someone close to the family noted, Hunter could have told the family that he was going to face this all as an adult, and the family should not worry about him. That wasn’t his approach. He would talk about how his opponents were after him, how it was a grand conspiracy. He was angry that the White House wasn’t doing more to protect him. Why weren’t they?
‘They’re trying to kill me,’ Hunter would say. ‘They’re pushing me to relapse, knowing it will inflict devastating pain on my father. They’re only doing this to me to go after him!’
It wore on the president’s soul. He lived in fear that he would lose a third child.
Things were so bad, in fact, that there was talk of putting him in “a wheelchair.” One aide said to Thompson that all they needed was to “show proof of life every once in a while” in a second term for Joe Biden. Thompson himself told Fox News the re-election campaign “included sometimes doing undemocratic things.”
“Well, this person went on to say that when you’re voting for a president, you’re voting for the aides around him. But these aides were not even Senate-confirmed aides. These are White House aides,” Thompson said.
“These were unelected people. And one of the things that really I think comes out in our reporting here is that if you believe — and I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy — you can rationalize anything, including sometimes doing undemocratic things, which I think is what this person is talking about.”
Let’s rewind to February, when Lindy Li — a former Democratic National Committee operative who was on the outreach team for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign but has become both a Republican and a vocal critic of Biden’s administration — appeared on Shawn Ryan’s podcast to talk about Biden’s decline.
“I should also mention that, after the debate, Hunter basically commandeered the White House,” she alleged. “He sat in on all White House the top level meetings. You had a former cocaine addict sitting in on the most sensitive meetings of the most consequential and important government in world history … without security clearance, mind you, no security clearance.”
And, indeed, this tracks with what NBC News reported in the aftermath of the June 27, 2024 debate debacle: “Biden has joined meetings with President Joe Biden and his top aides since his father returned to the White House from Camp David, Maryland, on Monday evening, according to four people familiar with the matter,” the outlet reported on July 2.
“While he is regularly at the White House residence and events, it is unusual for Hunter Biden to be in and around meetings his father is having with his team, these people said. They said the president’s aides were struck by his presence during their discussions.”
The Tapper and Thompson book also states that after the debate, Hunter and his stepmother were the most vociferous voices urging Biden to stay in the race.
The book tells the tale of Democratic Rep. Annie Kuster of New Hampshire, who said sending him out for the debate “was malpractice.” She had stayed in contact with Louisa Terrell, former legislative director for the White House.
Kuster was relieved to hear that the Biden family was going to Camp David for the weekend. She thought, ‘Phew, surely the family will arrive at the conclusion that it isn’t possible for the president to continue.’
Instead, the Associated Press reported that Biden family members continued to think “he’s the best person to beat the Republican presumptive nominee. They also believe he is capable of doing the job of president for another four years.” Among the most vocal family members were Jill and Hunter. “The family questioned how he was prepared for the debate by staff and wondered if they could have done something better,” sources told the AP.
Hunter privately talked about it as being the family against the world. People sensed a more manic quality in him post-debate. He was determined to save his dad.
And then, despite all that talk about letting the judicial process play out and not pardoning Hunter Biden, Joe Biden apparently had a change of heart once he was a lame duck and couldn’t hurt Kamala Harris’ chances. Except … we now know that there was a “politburo” doing “undemocratic things” in the White House because the president himself had deteriorated to the point where he’d been reduced to a figurehead who would only need to “show proof of life every once in a while.”
This is not a man capable of making the groundbreaking decision, therefore, to pardon his own son. So, who’s responsible?
At least two popular X conservative personalities seem to think it’s Hunter himself:
The new Hunter Biden script just dropped. ???? pic.twitter.com/wQ896ET8eE
— ℝ (@_randallrantz) May 28, 2025
This isn’t “A Beautiful Mind”-style yarn-and-notecard kind of stuff. President Joe Biden made the weighty and precedent-setting decision to pardon his own son, a move he said he wouldn’t make, when he was in no condition to handle matters weighty or precedent-setting. So diminished was his condition, in fact, that “the politburo” was apparently the group of people running the show, since that’s who the aide said you were voting for. And a member of said politburo — increasingly present in the months following the debate — was … Hunter Biden, the man who received the pardon.
It’s not rocket science, people: If Hunter didn’t pardon himself, he had too much influence on a group that ended up making that decision for a president who definitionally couldn’t. And after President Donald Trump’s people get done reading this book and looking at the body of evidence, expect to see a far greater amount of scrutiny given to a lot of pardons Joe issued — but especially his son’s.
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