A left-leaning MSNBC analyst was left speechless by President Joe Biden’s surprise decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden, who was convicted of federal gun and tax evasion charges earlier this year.
“Molly – fast and furious, what do you think of this new news?” MSNBC guest host Melissa Murray asked Sunday night as news broke of the president’s decision.
“I just heard it,” MSNBC contributor Molly Jong-Fast, also a special correspondent at Vanity Fair, said with a nervous laugh. “I have to process it. I don’t have an attitude. I’m sorry.”
Murray had to spin around and try to get some comments out of another analyst: “Anyone?”
Michelle Goldberg, a left-wing opinion columnist at The New York Times, jumped to the president’s defense.
“Hunter Biden was prosecuted for a crime that a normal person who had committed the same crime almost certainly wouldn’t be prosecuted for, and Joe Biden bent over backwards to show, you know, how much respect for norms that he was, unlike Donald Trump,” Goldberg said.
“I certainly understand why, you know, why he wouldn’t want to lose his son’s future and his life to charge a bunch of rates that are going to go up in smoke,” she added.
Biden signed a pardon for his son Hunter on Sunday night, three days after Thanksgiving, in a sharp reversal after repeatedly claiming he would not use his executive powers to exonerate his son. Biden said his about-face was because of Hunter’s unfair treatment.
“From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere in the decision-making of the Department of Justice, and I kept my word even as I watched my son be prosecuted selectively and unfairly,” Biden said in a statement. on sunday. . “No reasonable person looking at the facts of Hunter’s cases could come to any conclusion other than that Hunter was singled out just because he’s my son — and that’s wrong.”
The president said there was “an attempt to break Hunter,” who has remained sober for five and a half years despite “relentless attacks and selective prosecution.”
In June, Hunter was convicted in Delaware federal court of three felonies for purchasing a gun in 2018 after prosecutors said he lied on a federal form claiming he did not use or was addicted to drugs.
Hunter was set to take the stand in a California trial in September over allegations he failed to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes, but he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor and felony charges in a surprise last-minute move as the selectman jury duty would begin. .
The Democratic president had repeatedly claimed he would not pardon his son, in an effort to contrast himself with President-elect Donald Trump.
In June, Biden said he would stand by the jury’s decision and not pardon his son.
Most recently, a few days after Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in November, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded to reporters’ questions about a possible apology: “We’ve been asked this question many times. Our answer stands, which is no.”
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