A bit less than six months ago, former CNN White House correspondent John Harwood wrote that “people who insist [Joe] Biden will pardon” his son Hunter Biden “after specifically ruling it out are telling on themselves” because “they can’t imagine someone acting on principle and keeping his word.”
Earlier this week, Biden went ahead and pardoned Hunter. The president’s son had admitted to illegally acquiring a gun (by lying on a federal form about whether he was a drug user) and pled guilty to various tax charges. There’s a case to be made that a more compassionate criminal justice system would be more lenient with people who’d committed similar offenses across the board — whether their fathers lived in trailer parks or the White House. If Biden had wanted to make that point, there’s no shortage of people sitting in federal prisons because of similar violations whom he could have pardoned along with his son. But the message sent by pardoning Hunter, and only Hunter, was crystal clear: laws like these are only supposed to apply to little people.
American Indian Movement (AIM) activist Leonard Peltier has been in prison since the 1970s. He’s accused of killing two FBI agents during a confrontation between AIM and the FBI at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Next year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the alleged crime. During that half-century, millions of people around the world have petitioned for his release.
When the Soviet Union existed, it extended an offer of political asylum to him when he got out. In 2022, the…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
