Michael Goodwin: Joe Biden’s corrupt last act as president proved his family hustle always superseded the truth, the law and the country

Imagine you are one of those gullible people who believed mentions of a Biden crime family was a Republican fever dream and a sinister plot to smear an honest, devoted father, his surviving son and other relatives. 

You refused to watch the congressional hearings showing vast sums of foreign money were deposited in Biden family checking accounts because the New York Times and CNN said there was nothing to see there. 

You also believed Joe’s claim that son Hunter’s abandoned laptop full of incriminating evidence was Russian disinformation because most of the media echoed him, but you were later surprised to learn the FBI had authenticated the contents a year earlier. 

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Still, you were stunned when Hunter was convicted of gun charges and pleaded guilty to federal tax charges under cases brought by Joe’s own Department of Justice. 

That gave you some doubts about the family, but you hung on to the slender thread of innocence because Hunter had been a junkie and you believed Joe was an honest public servant and family man. 

Besides, Donald Trump was evil and … then came Monday. 

That’s when the roof fell in. 

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Preemptive pardons 

It was bad enough that Trump was being inaugurated, but then you learned that Biden had taken the extraordinary step of the one he had granted Hunter last year. 

The beneficiaries were his two brothers, his sister, a brother-in-law and a sister-in-law — the same people who GOP probers said got big money from the family’s scheme to sell the Biden name to foreign nations and companies. 

Even though the Times and others predictably defended Biden’s pardons by saying he did it to protect his family against “retaliation” by Trump, it began to dawn on you that you’ve been played for a sucker. 

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By Tuesday, you could no longer escape the conclusion that Biden and the media had been lying to you all along. 

This, of course, was the same White House and media that lied to you to hide Biden’s rapid cognitive decline. 

It has you wondering what else they kept from you. 

Biden’s pardons for his family and a few others were his final act as president. And although he and Trump rode together to the inaugural ceremony, Trump said Biden never mentioned the pardons. 

No doubt Biden was ashamed because he knows it makes the recipients look guilty.

It was also something he had promised he would never do. 

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Then again, he also had promised he would never pardon Hunter. 

In 2020, Biden warned Trump against issuing preemptive family pardons before he left office, telling CNN, “It concerns me in terms of what kind of precedent it sets and how the rest of the world looks [at] us as a nation of laws and justice.” 

Trump didn’t do it, but Biden did. 

How’s that for a stab in the back on his way out the door? 

Shielding his kin 

Elections have consequences, and one consequence of Trump’s victory and the GOP gaining control of Congress is that Biden decided to shield his family from their misconduct or possibly be forced to see them face charges as the facts emerge. 

His pardons had nothing to do with fears of any unwarranted retaliation.

Any prosecution over the Biden family’s corrupt scheme would have been justified and he knows it. 

It’s also not a coincidence that the pardons Joe issued to his family, starting with Hunter, extend back to 2014.

That’s when Hunter joined the board of Burisma, the corrupt Ukrainian energy ­company, and big bucks started rolling in. 

Moreover, if his family faced charges, Joe might, too, since he benefited from the schemes.

The “Big Guy” wasn’t getting a 10% cut for no reason. 

And how exactly did Joe build a multimillion-dollar fortune, complete with expensive real estate? 

The former president’s lies about his family rank right up there with his claims that Biden­omics worked, the border was secure and the Afghanistan withdrawal was a success. 

Biden has always been a fabulist, with his stories about taking on a thug named Corn Pop and finishing first in his law school class false. 

But those tall tales and the plagiarism that ended his first run for president were relatively harmless in the grand scheme. 

The family hustle wasn’t innocent or harmless.

It was thoroughly corrupt and we don’t know the full extent of what he did for the foreign governments and businesses in return for the estimated $20 million the family got paid. 

He certainly did something for that kind of money.

But what? 

Although the pardons take prosecutions off the table, House Republicans should continue their probe into the Biden family.

It is more than a historical footnote to know whether a former president and vice president sold out his country to foreign adversaries. 

Americans can handle the truth. 

Wanted Don prosecuted 

There’s also another dimension to Biden’s blanket pardons.

As I wrote Monday, his protection for his family, Republican Trump’s pardon of some 1,500 people convicted in the Capitol riot. 

Justice cannot be a one-way street.

If it’s going to be partisan-based, as the Jan. 6 committee and its prosecutions were, it forfeits any claim to be impartial. 

Ditto for pardons.

What’s good enough for one side is good enough for the other. 

To be clear, this is not misconduct the two parties engaged in equally.

Trump’s first-term administration did not carry out any politically tainted prosecutions. 

He made it clear he did not want Hillary Clinton charged for her outrageous use of a private server to handle classified materials even though he had promised that during the campaign. 

“I don’t want to hurt the Clintons, I really don’t,” Trump said after defeating her.

“She went through a lot and suffered greatly in many different ways.” 

Biden took office with the opposite mindset.

He made it clear to aides, who surely made it clear to Attorney General Merrick Garland, that he wanted Trump prosecuted for Jan. 6. 

Garland obeyed, with a special prosecutor indicting the former president twice, including in
a separate, classified-documents case. 

Meanwhile, Democratic state prosecutors in Georgia and New York indicted Trump in criminal cases, and New York’s corrupt courts found him liable in two rigged civil cases. 

The clear goal was to knock Trump off the 2024 ballot or at least dirty him up so much that voters would run away. 

The plot failed, and the Dems’ dirty play helped Trump attract voters. 

But that’s no reason why the books should be closed on the Bidens.

They engaged in a pay-to-play scheme, and Congress and the Department of Justice must find out what they did for all that money. 

It’s not about retribution.

It’s about national security.