The California federal judge overseeing Hunter Biden’s tax charges issued a scathing five-page ruling in response to President Joe Bid...
The California federal judge overseeing Hunter Biden’s tax charges issued a scathing five-page ruling in response to President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son, saying that the president justified his pardon with reasons that are false and offensive.
Judge Mark C. Scarsi wrote Tuesday that the reasons listed in “the President’s statement” for pardoning his son “stand in tension with the case record,” and while the president has the power to pardon, “nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history.”
“The President asserts that Mr. Biden ‘was treated differently’ from others ‘who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions,’ implying that Mr. Biden was among those individuals who untimely paid taxes due to addiction. But he is not… Mr. Biden admitted that he engaged in tax evasion after this period of addiction,” the judge wrote.
“According to the President, ‘[n]o reasonable person who looks at the facts of [Mr. Biden’s] cases can reach any other conclusion than [Mr. Biden] was singled out only because he is [the President’s] son.’ But two federal judges expressly rejected Mr. Biden’s arguments that the Government prosecuted Mr. Biden because of his familial relation to the President,” he wrote. “And the President’s own Attorney General and Department of Justice personnel oversaw the investigation leading to the charges. In the President’s estimation, this legion of federal civil servants, the undersigned included, are unreasonable people.”
He excoriated Hunter for filing a motion demanding that the indictment be dismissed because he was pardoned, when no government agency had even notified the court of it, and Hunter did not include a copy, instead attaching only a link to the White House press release describing the reasons why Joe Biden reneged on his promise not to pardon his son. “A press release is not a pardon,” he wrote.
The judge also was surprised at the unusually broad nature of the pardon, which covered all acts from 2014 through December 1, the day it was signed—seemingly giving Hunter a free pass to commit crimes later in that day. The judge said the president cannot pardon people for future acts, but to avoid a constitutional issue, he would assume he did not mean it that way.
Special prosecutor David Weiss also filed an opposition to Hunter’s demands that the indictment be dismissed as a result of the pardon, and made similar points, including that 10 judges appointed by six presidents all rejected Hunter’s claims that he was unfairly targeted. He said he was following the precedent of the Biden DOJ, which after President Donald Trump pardoned Steve Bannon on his last day in office, resisted granting such relief.
Weiss argued that a pardon was an act of mercy for a guilty person, notan erasure of fact, underscoring that a long record of evidence showed that Hunter was, in fact, properly indicted by a grand jury, and was not unfairly targeted.
President Biden had repeatedly claimed he would not pardon his son, who was convicted of gun charges in Delaware and pleaded guilty to tax charges on the eve of trial in California.