Joe Biden’s parting insult

President Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter almost looks like a fiendish prank on Washington — a Sunday night ambush designed to embarrass and shock.

That was presumably not Biden’s aim. But however unintentionally, the pardon is a kind of sabotage.

It is a rich gift to those who want to blow up the justice system as we know it, and who claim the government is a self-dealing club for hypocritical elites. It is a promise-breaking act that subjects Biden’s allies to yet another humiliation in a year packed with Biden-inflicted injuries.

The decision comes at a moment when the capital is girding for an assault on federal law enforcement institutions led by President-elect Donald Trump and his appointees.

In recent days, Trump has named ideological hardliners, political operatives and family retainers to powerful jobs atop the FBI, the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The incoming president’s opponents have begun to make the case against these appointments, describing the country’s institutions of justice as sacrosanct — and warning that Trump loyalists like Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard would ransack them.

It is hard to reconcile this reverence for the machinery of law enforcement with Biden’s decision to exempt his son from the justice they have delivered.

There is a case to make in favor of mercy for Hunter Biden. My colleague Ankush Khardori argued for a commutation — a lesser kind of clemency — in a recent column, stressing that the charges against Hunter Biden “probably would not have been brought against anyone else.”

“The reason we are here is because Trump and his Republican allies effectively — and successfully — pressured Joe Biden’s own Justice Department to prosecute his son,” Khardori wrote.

Yet when he came into office, Biden claimed he wanted to restore the Justice Department’s independence and took highly visible steps to place it outside his own control. It is why he appointed a sober former judge, Merrick Garland, as attorney general, rather than a legally accomplished Democratic politician like Deval Patrick or Doug Jones. It is why he left in place the U.S. attorney in Delaware, David Weiss, who was investigating Hunter Biden.

It is also why Biden and his aides told the American people, over and over and over, that a pardon for Hunter Biden was off the table.

These are steps Biden did not need to take if he did not want to let the justice system do its work.

Instead, countless hours of work and public dollars have gone toward securing indictments and verdicts that the president voided by fiat on a cold December evening.

Voters now know what his word as a Biden is worth.

In his announcement of the pardon, Biden asked the country to see it as the act of a father for a son who was “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.”

What parent of a convicted criminal would not want to extend the same grace to their child? How many others get the chance?

Biden has seldom possessed the gift of superb timing. The one great exception was his 2020 campaign, when the convergence of a fractious Democratic primary, a self-harming Republican president and a once-in-a-century pandemic vaulted Biden into the White House.

Before that, Biden ran for president repeatedly in years when he was unlikely to succeed and skipped several races he could have won. In 2024, he insisted on waging a doomed campaign for reelection just long enough to discredit the Democrats who closed ranks around him, then left the party with an unprepared presumptive nominee in Kamala Harris.

As president, Biden abandoned his past law-and-order record just in time for a national crime wave that Republicans used against him. He shed his Obama-era hesitations about pursuing titanic social policy to chase Rooseveltian greatness during an inflation crisis. He spent his first year as president agonizing over internal party politics just long enough to hand Republicans the governorship of Virginia, before abruptly moving to pass a popular infrastructure law that was stalled by Democratic infighting.

Now, Biden is exiting a presidency that he insisted was about saving democracy by delivering an ostentatious vote of no confidence in the institutions that his successor most obviously intends to attack.

There is poor timing and then there is this.

Last fall, as Hunter Biden headed for trial and Republicans threatened impeachment, Democratic lawmakers emphasized the distinction between son and father. (Democrats have mostly ignored that some of Hunter Biden’s alleged misdeeds — like collecting millions of dollars from overseas clients and avoiding tax payments — appear to have involved trading on his name.)

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat who is the party’s top member on the Judiciary Committee, called Hunter Biden “disturbed” and allowed that he may have done “improper things.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin, another top Judiciary Democrat, argued against Republican efforts to impeach Joe Biden by stressing that his son would face consequences.

“You can’t impeach Hunter Biden,” Raskin said, “but he will be prosecuted.”

What will these lawmakers say now?

Whatever it is, they will probably not be able to say it to Biden himself: He has left the country on a trip to Angola.