Why Hunter’s Pardon Doesn’t Outrage Me

If anyone in America should be particularly outraged about President Joe Biden’s sweeping pardon for his son Hunter’s misdeeds – of which he’s been charged, convicted, or could otherwise be liable – I should. After all, I pleaded guilty to one of the offenses for which prosecutors in the Biden administration didn’t even dare charge Hunter – violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) – in an investigation that itself was later found to be based on misinformation. And while I will bear the felon’s mark forever, my fellow Georgetown alumnus and one-time American consultant in Ukraine, Hunter Biden, will walk scot-free. But if I’ve learned anything from my brush with the law in America, it’s that life isn’t fair.

I actually knew something about Ukrainian politics

Unlike Hunter, my work in Ukraine centered on my knowledge of the country and its politics. Unluckily for me, Paul Manafort, a man I worked alongside there, went on to steer Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, so when a feverish hunt descended on Washington to prove that the Russians installed Trump as the U.S. president, Paul – and by association I – became targets. Funnily enough, no one seemed to be suggesting the Russians helped Trump win when he did even more commandingly last month.

My violations of FARA involved drafting op-eds and talking points for the Ukrainian politician I was working for and then asking a small handful of friends on Capitol Hill if they’d meet with him when he visited Washington. By the prosecutor’s own admission, it was threshold-level stuff, like doing 56 miles per hour in a 55 MPH zone. These were nothing like trading on the name of my father, who happened to be vice president of the United States and in charge of America’s Ukraine policy, but technical violations of an arcane and seldom-enforced law all the same. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision not to charge Hunter for his work involving Ukrainians, Romanians, or Chinese nationals who also could be said to have fallen under the FARA statute’s purview was discretionary, as such decisions always are.

But despite this apparent unfairness, I am not particularly outraged. Rather, I am now better educated about how the system in my country really works.

The Biden pardon shows the country how the voters could have reelected Trump

If anyone in America is still wondering why the election turned out the way it did, Biden’s pardon of his son should put their consternation to rest once and for all. The drip, drip, drip nature of revelations about the first son’s shady dealings – and The Establishment’s furious insistence that any repetition of these was tantamount to sedition – steadily eroded the value of what the outgoing president called “my word as a Biden.” Trump’s first impeachment, after all, stemmed from his asking his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, to look into reports that the elder Biden sought the dismissal of a prosecutor there who’d been looking into the younger Biden’s business dealings.

Then there was the matter of Hunter’s potentially incriminating and certainly embarrassing laptop, which he’d forgotten to retrieve from a Delaware repair shop. More than 50 former intelligence officials swore its existence “bore all the markings of Russian disinformation.” Except it was real, we learned only after the 2020 election. Again, as Americans, we were told not to believe what we could see with our own eyes – lest we be branded rabid Trumpers or Russian agents. Opposing Trump required otherwise law-abiding Americans to overlook Hunter’s behavior and dare not consider whether it was somehow rooted in a wider circle of familiar corruption. As the Russians themselves have learned through bitter experience, such cognitive dissonance can be a soul killer.

With a broken system, sometimes a pardon is not worth having

Also unlike Hunter, I never sought a pardon. This is not just because my father isn’t the current president, nor because I enjoy no special affinity with the former and future president, but because doing so would intimate a belief that the rule of law in our country is, on the whole righteous and, by contrast, being a felon is unforgivable. The fact of the matter is that our justice system is broken, and no matter how many restrictions exist (for the record, something like 38,000) barring felons from full participation in American life, my bearing the scarlet letter is a reminder of how much needs to be fixed – as opposed to what might be forgotten.

Ironically enough, I have not been a Trump supporter. Yet I have come to recognize that his second election rights some wrongs, and whether you agree with this or not, Biden’s pardoning of his twice-convicted son makes it impossible to be puzzled about why it happened.

We all have a lot of work to do.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.