“The View” co-hosts attempted to justify President Joe Biden’s pardoning of his son, Hunter, by claiming Monday that the president took that action to protect him from President-elect Donald Trump.
Biden formally issued a sweeping pardon for his son relating to his conviction on three felony gun charges, the nine charges he faced in California for allegedly failing to pay $1.4 million in taxes between 2016 and 2019. The lame duck president’s pardon also effectively closes the door on any potential charges relating to his son’s time on a now-defunct Ukrainian gas company’s board and an alleged influence peddling scheme. Co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Ana Navarro argued Biden initially did not intend to pardon Hunter, but decided to do so in order to protect his son from Trump’s alleged plan of executing “retribution and vindictiveness” on his political opponents.
“It’s a precedent for all of us to open our eyes because we’ve elected someone who is in a similar situation [Trump], who didn’t have a drug problem, who knew what he was doing, who clearly stood and said ‘I can do this,’ and he did it,” Goldberg said. “So I think, for many, many reasons, this is very different than any other situation that we have ever dealt with because when we’re talking about who gets a pardon and who doesn’t get a pardon, this man, I think, Biden had no intention of pardoning Hunter. And I think the more stuff that went down, I think he said ‘well why am I busting my behind to stay straight and do this when no one else is doing it?’”
“I think what happened in the meantime that we have to be cognizant of is that Donald Trump campaigned on retribution, vindictiveness and vengeance,” Navarro added. “He has appointed people to law enforcement positions who have said ‘we are here for retribution and vindictiveness.’ So Joe Biden could not leave his son, Hunter, his only son, at the mercy of these people who are saying they’re going to take retribution.”
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Navarro, along with co-host Sunny Hostin, argued that Trump’s pardoning of his daughter Ivanka’s father-in-law, Charles Kushner, is far worse than Biden’s pardoning of Hunter. The president-elect pardoned Kushner in December 2020 after he had been convicted of tax fraud and other crimes in 2004.
“Trump did escape responsibility for all his crimes,” co-host Sunny Hostin said. “He’s nominating Charles Kushner, who he pardoned as you mentioned, as the ambassador to France. Do you know what nice, cushy job that any felon would like? And so, please with the hypocritical pearl clutching by this country. Eric Holder said it very well, ‘no U.S. attorney would have charged this case given the underlying facts that have been investigated for five years.’ Less than, get this, .09% of people are prosecuted, are indicted, charged and found guilty of lying on a gun form. The only reason that Hunter Biden was gone after and charged, indicted and found guilty is because his dad’s name wasn’t Joe Smith, it was Joe Biden. And that’s the truth of it.”
Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin said the pardoning sends the message that the nation’s institutions only benefit elites, and criticized Biden and the White House for repeatedly stating that Hunter would not receive a pardon from his father. Goldberg stated that Biden “can do whatever he wants to” because he is the president of the United States, leading Griffin to say that is a dangerous precedent.
Biden said in a Sunday statement that very few Americans get prosecuted for writing false information on a gun purchase form or for not paying taxes on time that they later paid back. A Delaware jury convicted Hunter on three felony charges in June for purchasing a Colt Cobra in 2018 while knowingly under the influence of drugs and for lying on his gun purchase form, and he further faced up to 17 years in prison over the six misdemeanor and three felony tax charges brought against him.
Trump referred to the pardoning as an “abuse and miscarriage of justice” in a Truth Social post Monday.
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