Hunter Biden's Excuse for His Pardon Is the Most Brazen Spin of the Year

Hunter Biden wants you to believe that his father only pardoned him because Donald Trump won the election. If you buy that, you probably think that his laptop was Russian disinformation, too.

In an interview that journalist Tommy Christopher's Substack released on Monday, the 55-year-old Hunter claimed the pardon never would have happened under "normal circumstances" while his appeals played out. "Donald Trump went and changed everything," he insisted, painting himself as a victim of political circumstance rather than his own criminal behavior.

Let's not forget what Hunter was convicted of. He pleaded guilty to evading $1.4 million in taxes that he owed to the IRS and was separately convicted on felony gun charges. These weren't minor infractions or trumped-up political prosecutions. These were serious crimes with serious evidence, including materials from that infamous laptop the media spent years pretending didn't exist.

Hunter's narrative requires some impressive mental gymnastics. "My dad would not have pardoned me if President Trump had not won, and the reason that he would not have pardoned me is because I was certain that in a normal circumstance of the appeals [I would have won]," he claimed. Right. Because Joe Biden, who spent months repeatedly and unequivocally insisting he would never pardon his son, suddenly had a change of heart purely out of concern for what Trump might do if he won? No equivocation, no hedging, just firm denials that he later completely abandoned.

The Trump excuse is particularly rich. Hunter suggested that Trump was planning a "revenge tour" against his father and that Hunter himself would be the "easiest target to just to intimidate and to not just impact me, but impact my entire family into, into silence in a way that at least he is not — it's not as easy for him to do [with] me being pardoned." This is from a man who got away with behavior that would have landed anyone else in prison years ago.

Let’s not pretend that this makes any sense. Especially after he dropped out, Joe had to be prepared for the possibility that Trump would win; according to some reports, he endorsed Kamala Harris immediately because he knew she couldn’t win. That means he had months to at least leave open the possibility of pardoning Hunter, framing it as a safeguard in the event Trump won. But instead, the pardon that was supposedly never going to happen blindsided everyone and turned into a political disaster for Democrats.

Interestingly, Trump himself said before the election that he wasn't ruling out a pardon for Hunter Biden. "I wouldn't take it off the books. See, unlike Joe Biden, despite what they've done to me, where they've gone after me so viciously, despite what — and Hunter's a bad boy,” he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt at the time. “There's no question about it. He's been a bad boy.”

Trump actually showed more nuance about the possibility than Biden did in his categorical denials.

Also, not even the Biden White House blamed Trump’s victory for the controversial pardon. Instead, then-White House Press Secretary Karine Jean‑Pierre shifted the blame to James Clyburn, claiming that Biden was reluctant to issue the pardon, but Clyburn’s intervention persuaded him.

Maybe Hunter should get his cover stories straight.

To his credit, Hunter at least acknowledged the obvious. "I realize how privileged I am," he said. "I realize how lucky I am; I realize that I got something that almost no one would have gotten." That might be the most honest thing he's said in years. But then he followed it up with more rationalization: "But I'm incredibly grateful for it and I have to say that I don't think that it requires me to make much of a detailed argument for why it was the right thing to do, at least from my dad, from his perspective."

Translation: Don't ask too many questions about why the rules don't apply to the Biden family.

Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is still ongoing, and polls are now showing Americans are increasingly blaming the Democrats for this mess, but we can’t let them spin their way out of it.

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