When I’m asked what I think of Biden granting a pardon to his son for offences, which Biden himself has spoken openly about as deserving of prison, I don’t have much to say. On the same day, I see criticism of China because a senior military official has been removed from his post and is under investigation. The two things are about as incompatible as it gets.
China has a rule of law. Break it and you get punished.
The USA has a rules based order under which the powerful get more so and the weaker get more downtrodden through it.
The truth is, Biden is now a lame duck, that’s not an opinion, that’s the wording the US uses to describe a president who has been defeated at the polls and who has a couple of months left to milk the system, enrich his cronies, create havoc for the incoming president and generally make sure that the world is left in a worse state of affairs by ramping up everything that he’s done wrong over the preceding 46 months.
There is ample evidence that a transition of power, which, under any form of democracy is vitally important, if the president wanted the best for his country this is the time to invite his opponent in, talk about what can be done and how systems can be set up to reverse the rot. The truth is, this president, and the one before him, who happens to be the same one coming next, have proven time and time again that they care nothing for the good of the American people, they care only about their own power bases. In this Biden is no better and no worse than Trump – Trump himself pardoned many people – about 150, including a white slave trafficker, several drug traffickers, an arsonist and some murderers as well as a few violent criminals. I’m not kidding, look it up. Here is the the link. More than 122 of them were in the lame duck period and one of them was Charles Kushner, his daughter’s father in law.
Nepotism isn’t new in the USA. And of course, neither is abuse of the law.
I very much doubt Hunter Biden paid his dad for a pardon, but there’s no doubt he could afford to. According to some websites he’s worth $330 million, according to others he’s worth 10 million and there are many sites with numbers in between, either way, it’s obvious again that being the President’s son isn’t a bad job.
Biden Junior was due to be sentenced in only 4 days, so the timing was perfect, but the announcement that this was done because he was a victim of a political campaign and harassment holds absolutely no water whatsoever. Biden, who is a recovering addict, has admitted his guilt, the fact that he is the son of a sitting president doesn’t make the guilt go away. It’s possible he was pursued, harassed or even charged and convicted (he pled Guilty in September) does not mean he’s any less guilty than the son of a welder or a banker – he’s guilty, political enemy or not. This is nothing more than nepotism, elitism and favouritism. He wasn’t convicted of his crimes because he’s the son of a president, He’s getting away with them because he’s the son of a president.
While the political consequences of a pardon might create a problem for some politicians, that won’t bother Joe Biden one little bit. Gerald Ford lost an election and many analysts believe that it was his pardon of Nixon which cost him the top job, we’ll never know but it’s quite likely. But Joe is done, he’s a lame duck in more than one sense, he’s going to be useless on the political after dinner speaking market, he’ll be useless as a lobbyist and he’s not going to help any future Democrat with his endorsement, he’s simply going to fade away into the retired life that he so richly needs, so the consequences of breaking his word mean nothing – if they ever did mean anything!
The bottom line is, no matter how angry people get, especially the victims of the criminals that have somehow managed to wheedle a pardon out of a lame duck, there are no consequences. No one will care, Biden, if he knows anything at all, will know it was wrong, every person who voted for him will know it was wrong but in the end, it makes no difference to the electoral process and simply produces another miscarriage of justice, further confirming to the American people, particularly the 3% of US citizens who have served or are serving in prison for similar offences that the system works only for the elites.
Many people are thinking, this is great, it sets a precedent and now Trump can pardon himself.
But he can’t, the President can only pardon offences committed under Federal Law and his problems are in New York State. So he can’t pardon himself, but it would be a brave judge who sentences a sitting president, or even a President elect to prison. I think for that to happen Trump will need to be impeached.
But that’s nothing new, he’s already been impeached twice.
I don’t know enough about US laws to understand how this is possible, and won’t pretend to, I doubt many people do. But to me, the entire system is skewed to favour the elites. And the Biden family and the Trump family both qualify as elites, whether we agree with that or not.
The bottom line is this:
This is not unexpected. No one will be surprised. It simply proves that the gap between a “rules based order” which the US and some allies love so much, and a system of rule by law which exists very strongly in most other countries, is very wide.
Jerry Grey is a former British Police officer who was a general manager in a multi-national security company based in Australia for 17 years. He has lived, worked, travelled extensively and studied in China for almost two decades. He holds a Master Degree in cross cultural change management. Jerry Grey is a freelance writer living in Southern China's Guangdong province.
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