() District Judge Mark Scarsi issued a harsh rebuke on Tuesday to President Joe Biden after he pardoned his son Hunter, noting the false pretenses put forward in president’s excuse for clemency, which was delivered through a hyperlink to a press release rather than through the formal process.
Biden gave his son a broad “unconditional” pardon for any and all crimes he committed over the past decade. The president claimed Hunter was unfairly singled out for prosecution.
“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son—and that is wrong,” Joe Biden said in a statement.
However, Scarsi, who oversaw Hunter Biden’s tax case in California, said the president’s pardon didn’t change the facts of the case and couldn’t rewrite history.
“Two federal judges expressly rejected Mr. Biden’s arguments that the Government prosecuted Mr. Biden because of his familial relation to the President,” he noted.
“The Constitution provides the President with broad authority to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history,” Scarsi wrote.
He further debunked Joe Biden’s claim that Hunter’s tax evasion was the result of drug addiction, saying the facts in the case did not bear it out, and that the two crimes were mutually exclusive of one another.
Hunter Biden pleaded guilty over the summer to federal charges of failing to pay $1.4 million in taxes from 2016 to 2020.
In June, a jury in Delaware convicted Hunter of illegally buying and owning a gun while using crack cocaine.
He was set to be sentenced on Dec. 12 in the federal gun case in Delaware and on Dec. 16 in the tax-evasion case in California.
The pardon also pre-emptively covered events dating back through 2014, immediately prior to when Hunter joined the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
Both Joe and Hunter Biden, as well as other members of the Biden family, have been implicated in an influence-peddling scandal in which the company leveraged its connection to force the Ukrainian government to drop a corruption probe.
Although then-President Donald Trump’s call for newly-elected President Volodymyr Zelensky to reopen the corruption probe triggered an impeachment trial led by House Democrats who claimed that Trump was targeting his political enemies, the scope of Biden’s pardon—and its tacit admission of guilt—suggests that Trump’s reasons for reopening the corruption probe may have been valid.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
