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Biden Pardons Hunter on all counts
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PAF
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"any and all federal crimes" Do these guys even think before they make such statements? Gee, I wonder, what does Matt Walsh think about Ed Snowden, or John Kiriakou
Voluntarist
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Since Merrick Garland appointed the special prosecutor and approved this prosecution, shouldn't some action be taken against him for pursuing a politically motivated prosecution? President Biden and most of the Democrats seem to be saying it was, after all, a politically motivated prosecution. The attorney General can be impeached. I can't see why any Democrat in Congress wouldn't vote for impeachment in the House and conviction in the Senate. Hold their feet to the fire and make them admit that it wasn't politically motivated.
=== Edited ===
I guess it's a good thing the Republicans held up approval for his appointment to the Supreme Court. You certainly wouldn't want a corrupt individual like that on the highest court in the land.
=== Second Edit ===
Call Joe Biden as a witness
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Matt Collins
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Invisible Man
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I need to learn to stop clicking on threads that Collins starts. They're always just links to videos without any comment.
TheCount
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You can't avoid them, they're also every post he makes in other people's threads.
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Been saying it for a year now. Biden will pardon a record number of people. Hunter is probably furiously selling pardons right now.
PAF
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In fairness to [MENTION=991]Matt Collins[/MENTION] , he provides a description in the title, and the synopsis is on the video itself. It is up to the reader to listen to the material in full context, and posting them in various threads is to provide cross-reference relevancy. I myself find it very useful, otherwise they might be missed among the various banter on the site.
Dr.3D
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10% for the big guy.
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Every big time fine artist needs an agent. 10% is a very reasonable commission...
TheCount
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The video is B roll of random Biden footage that plays while a voice over reads a news story to you. Unless you're blind, you could have read that news story in less than a tenth of the time it took to be read aloud to you.
It might be even more of a waste of time than dannno's Jordan Peterson videos.
Matt Collins
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Voluntarist
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Everyone is pardoned for what they do on the night of The Purge.
Matt Collins
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Hot take: I'm glad Hunter Biden got pardoned. Federal drug and gun laws are unconstitutional. The President should have also pardoned everyone else charged and convicted of similar federal crimes.
Invisible Man
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That's not a hot take. That's the take that everyone here has. The problem isn't pardoning him for those specific crimes. It's giving him a blanket pardon for every crime he might have committed against the US, including any that he hasn't been charged with yet.
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Three Cheers for Hunter’s Pardon
Three Cheers for Hunter’s Pardon
Ron Paul Institute
by Andrew P. Napolitano
Dec 5, 2024
My initial reaction to the issuance of a full pardon by President Joe Biden to his son Hunter was emotional. What father wouldn’t pardon his own son, if he could?
I suspect that the president has harbored these paternal thoughts even while he denied numerous times that he was planning on doing so. We have come to expect lying in politicians. When the president denied that he planned to pardon his son, he had every reason to believe that he’d be a candidate for reelection — and he wanted his son’s known sordid behavior off the table.
Here is the backstory.
Under the Constitution, the president can pardon any person for any federal crime. He does not need permission, nor must he offer a justification.
The essence of a pardon is mercy and forgiveness, not justice and punishment. How and when to forgive? That is an ancient question, the short answer to which is: when it is earnestly sought and least deserved. For if a pardon were deserved, it falls under justice, not mercy. Mercy is by its nature undeserved.
Did Hunter deserve a pardon? That is a trick question, since under the justice-is-deserved-but-mercy-is-undeserved rubric, no one deserves a pardon. Yet, our system of law enforcement often makes mistakes, and pardons can correct them. Answering the question about Hunter’s pardon brings us back to why was he prosecuted. What crimes did he commit?
Hunter pleaded guilty to failure to pay income taxes in a timely manner, and he was convicted by a jury of lying about drug use on an application to purchase a handgun. Yet, by the time of his guilty plea in the tax case, he had already paid his taxes, with interest and penalties. And the gun that he obtained after denying that he was a habitual user of drugs was never used. His girlfriend discarded it in a dumpster.
Should he have been prosecuted for these crimes? That question requires us to examine if these are in fact valid crimes, worthy of prosecution. Every classic definition of the concept of crime has three characteristics. The first is that the criminal behavior is proscribed by a legitimate authority. The second is that the behavior in question caused palpable harm. And the third is that the behavior in question produced an articulable victim.
Can Congress make criminal the late payment of taxes or lying on a piece of paper in order to exercise a natural right? The Constitution only permits the Congress to enact and prescribe two crimes: treason, which is defined in the Constitution as waging war on the states or giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies, and debasement of the money supply that is passing off a forged coin as if it were genuine gold or silver.
For all other crimes, Congress has given itself the power to articulate and punish.
Can Congress give itself powers that are not delegated to it by the Constitution? The Constitution itself says that it cannot. The 10th Amendment teaches that the powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states. Congress cannot just assume these powers.
Notwithstanding these basic principles of constitutional law, as of 2019 — the last time this was calculated — Congress had created 5,199 federal crimes.
The theory of the drafters of the Constitution was not that the new country would be anarchic, rather that crimes would be proscribed by the states, and not the feds. This is consistent with the idea that the federal government is one of limited powers, and the states – which, after all, created the federal government — would serve as a check on its power.
The U.S. didn’t even have a Department of Justice until after the War Between the States. Prior to that era, if the feds were victimized and harmed, they asked the governments of the states in which the acts that caused the harm occurred and in which the victim suffered to do the prosecution.
The most famous example of all this was the prosecution of farmers who refused to pay federal taxes on their whiskey in Western Pennsylvania in the early 1790s. Most were prosecuted in a Pennsylvania state court. Two were tried for treason in a makeshift federal court in Philadelphia’s old City Hall. How could a failure to pay taxes be made treasonous? It wasn’t and couldn’t, but the federalists running the government persuaded a federal judge and a jury that using force to resist a tax collector is the moral equivalent of waging war against the states.
The farmers who were convicted of treason were pardoned by President George Washington.
Now back to Hunter.
He harmed no one by his tardy tax payment with interest and penalties. And he harmed no one by falsely obtaining a gun permit and then discarding his weapon. Thus, the three components of crime — legitimate authority, palpable harm and articulable victim — are all absent in the Hunter Biden case.
When his farther pardoned him, he sounded like Donald Trump! He argued that raw politics had interfered with the ordinary processes of government, and this resulted in a miscarriage of justice. Stated differently, President Biden argued if Hunter’s last name were Jones instead of Biden, he’d never have been prosecuted.
I’m happy Joe pardoned Hunter. It has generated a debate about the rule of law in America. We need that debate as the Trump administration enters office. I hope the debate produces a commitment to the recognition and enforcement of constitutional principles that limits Congress to its constitutional role and limits prosecutions to those who have harmed others, as the drafters of the Constitution clearly intended.
But, if history is a guide, my hopes — along with those of Thomas Jefferson — are illusory. Jefferson predicted that in the long march of history, governmental power only grows and individual liberty only shrinks. Except when there is a revolution.
https://ronpaulinstitute.org/three-cheers-for-hunters-pardon/
Three Cheers for Hunter’s Pardon
Ron Paul Institute
by Andrew P. Napolitano
Dec 5, 2024
My initial reaction to the issuance of a full pardon by President Joe Biden to his son Hunter was emotional. What father wouldn’t pardon his own son, if he could?
I suspect that the president has harbored these paternal thoughts even while he denied numerous times that he was planning on doing so. We have come to expect lying in politicians. When the president denied that he planned to pardon his son, he had every reason to believe that he’d be a candidate for reelection — and he wanted his son’s known sordid behavior off the table.
Here is the backstory.
Under the Constitution, the president can pardon any person for any federal crime. He does not need permission, nor must he offer a justification.
The essence of a pardon is mercy and forgiveness, not justice and punishment. How and when to forgive? That is an ancient question, the short answer to which is: when it is earnestly sought and least deserved. For if a pardon were deserved, it falls under justice, not mercy. Mercy is by its nature undeserved.
Did Hunter deserve a pardon? That is a trick question, since under the justice-is-deserved-but-mercy-is-undeserved rubric, no one deserves a pardon. Yet, our system of law enforcement often makes mistakes, and pardons can correct them. Answering the question about Hunter’s pardon brings us back to why was he prosecuted. What crimes did he commit?
Hunter pleaded guilty to failure to pay income taxes in a timely manner, and he was convicted by a jury of lying about drug use on an application to purchase a handgun. Yet, by the time of his guilty plea in the tax case, he had already paid his taxes, with interest and penalties. And the gun that he obtained after denying that he was a habitual user of drugs was never used. His girlfriend discarded it in a dumpster.
Should he have been prosecuted for these crimes? That question requires us to examine if these are in fact valid crimes, worthy of prosecution. Every classic definition of the concept of crime has three characteristics. The first is that the criminal behavior is proscribed by a legitimate authority. The second is that the behavior in question caused palpable harm. And the third is that the behavior in question produced an articulable victim.
Can Congress make criminal the late payment of taxes or lying on a piece of paper in order to exercise a natural right? The Constitution only permits the Congress to enact and prescribe two crimes: treason, which is defined in the Constitution as waging war on the states or giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies, and debasement of the money supply that is passing off a forged coin as if it were genuine gold or silver.
For all other crimes, Congress has given itself the power to articulate and punish.
Can Congress give itself powers that are not delegated to it by the Constitution? The Constitution itself says that it cannot. The 10th Amendment teaches that the powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states. Congress cannot just assume these powers.
Notwithstanding these basic principles of constitutional law, as of 2019 — the last time this was calculated — Congress had created 5,199 federal crimes.
The theory of the drafters of the Constitution was not that the new country would be anarchic, rather that crimes would be proscribed by the states, and not the feds. This is consistent with the idea that the federal government is one of limited powers, and the states – which, after all, created the federal government — would serve as a check on its power.
The U.S. didn’t even have a Department of Justice until after the War Between the States. Prior to that era, if the feds were victimized and harmed, they asked the governments of the states in which the acts that caused the harm occurred and in which the victim suffered to do the prosecution.
The most famous example of all this was the prosecution of farmers who refused to pay federal taxes on their whiskey in Western Pennsylvania in the early 1790s. Most were prosecuted in a Pennsylvania state court. Two were tried for treason in a makeshift federal court in Philadelphia’s old City Hall. How could a failure to pay taxes be made treasonous? It wasn’t and couldn’t, but the federalists running the government persuaded a federal judge and a jury that using force to resist a tax collector is the moral equivalent of waging war against the states.
The farmers who were convicted of treason were pardoned by President George Washington.
Now back to Hunter.
He harmed no one by his tardy tax payment with interest and penalties. And he harmed no one by falsely obtaining a gun permit and then discarding his weapon. Thus, the three components of crime — legitimate authority, palpable harm and articulable victim — are all absent in the Hunter Biden case.
When his farther pardoned him, he sounded like Donald Trump! He argued that raw politics had interfered with the ordinary processes of government, and this resulted in a miscarriage of justice. Stated differently, President Biden argued if Hunter’s last name were Jones instead of Biden, he’d never have been prosecuted.
I’m happy Joe pardoned Hunter. It has generated a debate about the rule of law in America. We need that debate as the Trump administration enters office. I hope the debate produces a commitment to the recognition and enforcement of constitutional principles that limits Congress to its constitutional role and limits prosecutions to those who have harmed others, as the drafters of the Constitution clearly intended.
But, if history is a guide, my hopes — along with those of Thomas Jefferson — are illusory. Jefferson predicted that in the long march of history, governmental power only grows and individual liberty only shrinks. Except when there is a revolution.
https://ronpaulinstitute.org/three-cheers-for-hunters-pardon/
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I wouldn't hold tax evasion against my worst enemy.
Why are they trying to make me like & respect Hunter Biden?
https://twitter.com/paulsperry_/status/1673468736718663681
https://twitter.com/FreeStateNH/status/1704098158781878578
Last edited:
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"Adams wrote on X that Hunter can no longer refuse to answer questions before Congress."
LOL. Of course he can. What are they gonna do about it
Even if it wasn't just a dog-and-pony show for the purpose of providing red-meat outrage content for fund-raising letters and the like, the Republicans simply don't have the balls to do anything about it. (The Democrats might, though, if the roles were reversed ...)
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