by Joseph Ziegler and Gary Shapley at Wall Street Journal
The White House’s story on Hunter Biden keeps changing. The president supposedly had no knowledge of his son’s business, then no involvement in it, then no financial benefit from it. The goal posts moved as more facts came to light. Before the election, Joe Biden promised he would respect the legal process and issue no pardon or commutation to his son. This week he went much further than pre-emptively commuting any sentence to keep his son from prison. He issued a broad pardon for any and all crimes over a nearly 11-year period.
He gave his son the sweeping immunity to which career prosecutors refused to agree as part of an aborted plea deal. When that deal collapsed in July 2023, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel. Despite his testimony to Congress in March 2023 that Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss had full authority over the matter, Mr. Garland granted special charging authority to Mr. Weiss.
These dizzying narrative shifts happened because the two of us blew the whistle and exposed the preferential treatment the Biden Justice Department gave to a powerful political family. Our story never changed—because we told the truth.
President Biden’s pardon is an insult to every honest taxpaying American. He claimed that his own Justice Department unfairly targeted his son. On the contrary, we produced mountains of evidence and testified under oath about the machinations his Justice Department, including Mr. Weiss, used to shield the Biden family from a thorough investigation of alleged corruption in Ukraine, Romania and China.
This year, a jury found Hunter Biden guilty of federal gun charges in Delaware and he pleaded guilty to willful tax felonies in California. The president’s letter falsely suggests that his son was merely late in filing and paying his taxes because of serious addictions. He wrote that in such cases, when back taxes are paid with penalties and interest, they are often resolved without criminal penalties, but his son was treated differently. That’s malarkey.
The American people need to know,…
Continue Reading