Presidents on their way out of office typically pick one of two times to hand out controversial pardons, and December 1 isn’t one of them.
Notwithstanding his denials, most of us expected Joe Biden to do something for his son Hunter on the way out the door. Andy McCarthy has warned for months that Joe would pardon Hunter; I thought the only question was whether he might just commute his sentences for his tax and gun convictions to spare him prison time, and then claim that he technically kept his promise not to pardon him entirely. Andy was right that Joe would go all the way on this one.
One of the interesting questions is: Why now? Presidents on their way out of office typically pick one of two times to hand out controversial pardons: either on or immediately around Christmas, when Congress and the press are all home with their families and in a lenient mood, or right on the eve of vacating the office. Biden instead dropped this news right at the end of a long weekend at the start of December, timing guaranteed to ensure that it will dominate the news for this week.
It’s enough to make me wonder if Joe is genuinely concerned about making it all the way to January 20, and wants to ensure that he signs off on this now while he still can. It can’t just be to keep Hunter’s mind at ease entering the holiday season, because that could just as well have been accomplished by drafting the papers and showing them to Hunter, but keeping them in a desk. Perhaps, like Donald Trump’s ill-starred choice of Matt Gaetz to be attorney general, this was just a matter of Hunter getting his dad alone over Thanksgiving without the White House aides around, but it’s not as if there’s much of anybody left to stop Joe Biden from doing whatever he wants now, and this is what he wants above all else.
Why else now? There are two other potentially overlapping theories. One is simply that Joe knows there will be a firestorm over this, and wants to get it out of the way as early as possible so that it will be older news by the time Democrats are gearing up to complain about things Trump does from the day he reenters office. The other is that there are even worse pardons coming behind this one.