The logic of the corrupt Hunter Biden pardon made additional corrupt pardons inevitable.

In my post this morning about what was then the latest round of President Biden’s scandalous pardons, the preemptive pardons for public officials, I began by telling you:

I don’t believe President Biden is done quite yet with his gross abuse of the pardon power. As this is written, there are still about three hours left in his presidency — plenty of time to pardon key players in the Biden family business of selling Ol’ Joe’s political influence to the Chinese Communist Party, Ukrainian oligarchs, and other agents of corrupt and anti-American regimes.

I was able to say this confidently this morning, as I have been saying it for a long time, for two reasons. First, there was the structure of the Biden family business. There were too many Biden family members and confidants involved — it was never solely about Hunter Biden. Second, there was the rationale for the Hunter pardon back in December. In a post we titled, “Brace Yourself for More Biden Pardons,” I surmised that Hunter’s pardon made sense only if now-former President Biden was planning more pardons as he went out the door:

It looks to me like the extraordinary pardon, blanketing Hunter in immunity from prosecution for any and all conceivable federal crimes for a period of nearly eleven years, is intended to discourage the Trump Justice Department from investigating. If no crimes can possibly be prosecuted, there is no point in investigating, even on the lawfare pretext that something prosecutable might emerge.

But here’s the thing: This strategy [of immunizing Hunter from prosecution, going back eleven years] only works if Hunter is just the first of the pardons. Otherwise, Hunter’s pardon is an enticement, not a discouragement, for the Trump DOJ.

Why is that? Immunity.

Because of the sweeping pardon, Hunter no longer has a viable Fifth Amendment privilege from self-incrimination. He is immune from prosecution for any further Biden crimes related to influence-peddling. Hence, he may not refuse to testify if summoned by a grand jury to answer questions about the potentially criminal activities of others — and if the Trump prosecutors were to conclude that Hunter had lied in grand jury testimony, he could be prosecuted for perjury. (A pardon does not cover future crimes, such as perjury allegedly committed after the pardon.)

Hence, if the Trump DOJ decided to play the lawfare game that Democratic prosecutors — including the Biden-Harris DOJ — played so aggressively against people in Trump World, prosecutors could subpoena Hunter into the grand jury, tell him to bring every financial and personal record he has that might be relevant to their inquiry, and grill him about the activities of himself, Jim Biden, their business partners in the “Biden brand” activities, and President Biden himself. Hunter would have no choice: He’d have to testify; he couldn’t take the Fifth.

Consequently, the only way I can see President Biden preventing such an investigation from happening, or at least trying to prevent it, would be to pardon other participants in the influence-peddling — giving them the same sort of expansive pardons that Hunter got.

Would Biden have to pardon himself? I don’t think he’d do that. It would be taken as an admission of guilt. He will soon be an 83-year-old former U.S. president, and a Justice Department prosecutor has already concluded that his deteriorated condition counsels against prosecution(over his unlawful retention of classified information). During the Democrats’ lawfare crusade against him, Trump said many times that no former president should ever have to go through what he went through. One hopes that he meant that.

That said, though, I read Hunter’s pardon as an indication that President Biden and his advisers are very concerned that the Trump Justice Department will investigate the aspects of the Biden influence-peddling scheme that the Biden Justice Department assiduously ignored. If I am right about that, one has to assume that there will be more sweeping pardons of Biden family members and associates implicated in the scheme.

And so there were. Corruption is usually not rocket science, it more often relies on our erroneous assumption that there is a low beneath which public officials won’t go.