The head of news at Politico, Alexander Burns, is upset over Joe Biden's blanket pardon for his son Hunter. Forget Hunter's crimes. Burns is irked is because the Biden pardon now makes it much more difficult to oppose President-Elect Donald Trump's appointments on moral and legal grounds because of the sleazy pardon. A situation which Burns whined about in his story on Monday, "Joe Biden’s Parting Insult."
Before you even get to the body of the text, the subtitle keys the reader in to what Burns finds to be his reason as to what really disturbs him about the pardon: "The president delivered a vote of no confidence in a justice system preparing for siege."
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.
"An assault on the federal law enforcement institutions" -- which translates into reforming a politically weaponized federal justice system.
Burns then expresses his frustration that just at the moment there could have been an effective opposition to Trump's appointees, Biden had to ruin everything with his pardon of son Hunter on Sunday night.
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.
Of course, this whole pardon problem for Burns really boils down to his intense hatred for Trump which is shared by many/most at Politico:
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.
Ugh! Joe's no good because he helped Orange Man Bad.
