On Monday’s CBS Mornings Plus, they brought out former Lyndon Johnson assistant Doris Kearns Goodwin to assess Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter. The 81-year-old Democrat was promoted as a nonpartisan expert, as a “Pulitzer Prize-winning historian” with six best-sellers. They oddly compared the Hunter pardon to Gerald Ford pardoning President Nixon and Abraham Lincoln pardoning deserters from the Union Army in the Civil War.
TONY DOKOUPIL: So let's talk about Joe Biden's pardon of Hunter. You know, I think if there hadn't been so much sanctimony around sort of, this was a miscarriage of justice and this was a raw politics at play, if he just said, I'm a dad, I've already lost one son, I'm 80-something years old, I'm not going to lose another to prison time, so I'm doing it. How would it go over if he did that?
This framing completely overlooks the fact that Hunter Biden was a cash cow for the entire Biden family. It pretends there was no self-interest in Biden's actions beyond being nice to his troubled boy. But she agreed:
DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: I couldn't agree with you more. If he simply did it as an act of mercy and people understood his family situation, how much they'd been through and that it was a crime that not normally would be one of going to jail, a gun that you didn't even use during addiction, people would have understood it. But I think adding to it the statement that this was a miscarriage of justice and the Justice Department had selective prosecution, it makes the mistrust again in institutions. That's our problem today in the country.
TONY DOKOUPIL: That is the problem.
DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: We need trust in a democracy in our institutions. We used to have overwhelming numbers of people believe that government did the right thing at the right time way back in 1978 [sic], 1980s.
It started going with Watergate, it started going with Lyndon Johnson and the [Vietnam] credibility gap and now it`s down to less than 20% at some points and you can't run a democracy on that. So to add to the distrust and allow talking points now for President Trump to talk about the January 6th criminals is a complicated thing.
Dokoupil surprised a little by adding: “Although wouldn’t pardoning them restore the tranquility of the country a la Hamilton and how might history, it's hard to say, we`re living right through it right now.”
Goodwin joked: “To prognosticate about what would happen if he does pardon the January 6th, this is one of the things that Lincoln tells you, better to remain silent and appear a fool than to speak up and remove all doubt.” She repeated "I think it's a very complicated issue."
Democrats now at this late date lament the pardon only because it offers a talking point to Trump for pardoning people who committed "crimes" like walking into the Capitol for ten minutes and taking a selfie for Facebook.
