Outgoing president Joe Biden has just pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, for unspecified crimes going back to 2014. We won’t pretend to be surprised. We aren’t. This is perhaps the most perfect conclusion to one of the most sordid, corrupt presidencies of modern times; a presidency which tried to gaslight us even about the fact that there was no actual president because the person holding the position was practically a mummified effigy. Jonathan Turley has described Biden as a “liar-in-chief,” and certainly, no better closing argument could be made for that indictment than this pardon.

That being said, it has been fun to watch the media try and fail to explain why they swallowed Biden’s pretense that he wouldn’t do this so credulously.

What’s more, it’s great sport to point to the multiple instances where the Biden White House denied they would do this, while expecting the rest of America to treat Biden like the second coming of George Washington simply because he refused to place his own family above the law.

However, once you cut through the schadenfreude and the obvious lies, there is one sticking point that we think everyone is overlooking. Because we think the alarming part of this story is not that Biden pardoned Hunter. Right or wrong, what father wouldn’t save his only surviving son from prison, given the power? Nor do we find Biden’s transparent special pleading about how the trial was “politicized” (ask the Trump family about that, Joe) particularly concerning, though it certainly is contemptible.

No, we think the far more disturbing part is the scope of the pardon. That is to say, while Biden could have pardoned his son only for the crimes he was convicted of this year, he instead opted to pardon Hunter (in his own words) for “those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”

There are two things about that sentence which we find very troubling, indeed. First, the time frame: why go all the way back to 2014? Well, not to be ungentlemanly, but according to the emails found on Hunter Biden’s “laptop from Hell” (remember that?), Hunter Biden was already on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, with a retainer of $80,000 per year despite his total lack of background in energy policy, as far back as May of 2014. In this position, despite not registering as a foreign agent, he tried to secure deals for Burisma in the US and in Ukraine, despite the company being under investigation by the Ukrainian government. Or at least, it was, until his father intervened to force the Ukrainians to fire the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma, in an act straight out of a mob movie. And Burisma wasn’t Hunter’s only foreign client; the Romanians got in on the act, too. We bring this up because, based on the time frame, this pardon looks to be much less concerned with wiping away a single “politicized” prosecution, and instead with covering up any way of pressuring the one witness who could tie his own sketchy behavior to the Big Guy, perhaps in exchange for more lenient treatment from the incoming administration’s Department of Justice. In other words, it’s not Hunter who Joe Biden is really saving with this pardon; it’s himself.

Which doesn’t even touch on the other disturbing part of the pardon: the fact that it pardons Hunter for not just what he did do wrong in the last ten years, but anything he may have done in the past ten years. Effectively, this wipes away ten years of Hunter Biden’s life from the federal government’s legal notice. And, while state courts could conceivably fill the void, the separation of powers makes them far from ideal as protectors of America’s national security. In short, effectively, what the House Republican caucus already branded the “Biden crime family” just put the only lead to their crimes through the metaphorical paper shredder.

Now, we know there are Leftists just waiting to leap on this argument. “Donald Trump is a literal convicted felon,” they will shout from under their streaming, fluorescent locks, “you Republicans don’t get to complain.” And they’d be right, if the cases against President-elect Trump were anything like as open-and-shut as the case against Hunter Biden. They are not. At all. All of what Trump has been charged with is either based on highly novel legal theorizing, or is what Joe Biden himself has already done, as well. However, there is no allegation, except possibly in the fever swamps of #Resistance Twitter, that members of Donald Trump’s family deliberately sold access to their father to foreign oligarchs in exchange for money and titles which they then used to feed an apparently insatiable appetite for drugs and prostitutes. Whereas with Hunter Biden, all of that is there – on the laptop – in black and white. The only thing that isn’t established from the laptop is whether Joe Biden was an unwitting element of this pay-to-play scheme, or its architect.

And now, we will never know, at least not for sure. However, given the suspiciously broad scope of this pardon, both in terms of time and in terms of the acts it covers, we think there is certainly room to argue that more than simply the tears of Jill Biden were on the mind of our corrupt corpse commander-in-chief. But more than that, knowing that the Democrats are willing to allow a corruption scheme of this magnitude go unexposed, never mind punished, simply for the sake of sour grapes over their loss, is a terrible indictment of America’s failing, flailing Left-wing party. And what’s more, it shows just how unserious their crocodile tears over Donald Trump’s supposed “crimes” were from the beginning. And they may come to regret this “for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law” approach sooner rather than later. However, thanks to Joe Biden’s shamelessness and deceit, they have relieved us of any obligation to care.