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--:-- John Bickley: Welcome to Morning Wire. I'm John Bickley, editor-in-chief of the Daily Wire. It's December 7th, and this is a special edition of our show. Today, we're discussing President Biden's sweeping pardon of his son, Hunter. Joining me now is Eric Eggers, vice president at the Government Accountability Institute and co-host of the Drilled Down podcast with Peter Schweitzer. Eric, thanks for coming on.
--:-- Eric Eggers: Thanks, John. It's an important story.
--:-- John Bickley: Look, we witnessed this week something we were told repeatedly would not happen by the White House, by President Biden himself again and again. He issued a full and unconditional pardon to his son, Hunter. I want to ask you first about the nature of that pardon. What exactly has the president given his son immunity from?
--:-- Eric Eggers: I think the president has given his son immunity from any and all federal charges spanning for a decade, which is in a much larger context than the actual charges Hunter Biden was facing. He was facing a sentencing over three different charges related to a purchase of a gun and tax evasion allegations.
--:-- John Bickley: But what Joe Biden has effectively done is given his son a full pardon for any allegations, of which there are many, that he has been an unwitting or witting foreign agent. All the international business dealings that Hunter Biden has done over the last decade, And it's very specific. It starts in January of 2014. That's three months before Hunter Biden's business relationships with the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma began. And that's when a lot of the legal issues may have emerged.
--:-- Eric Eggers: So what Joe Biden has done is not just said Hunter Biden will not face any charges from what he's actually been accused of, but what many people suspect he's actually guilty of.
--:-- John Bickley: What's the context for this? There are some investigations ongoing about Hunter and Biden family corruption. Can you give us a breakdown of what taking place right now on Capitol Hill that may be impacted by this?
--:-- Eric Eggers: There's been an ongoing House oversight investigation led by the committee of Representative Comer. And thanks to whistleblower testimony, thanks to tax records, thanks to bank records they've been able to get, they were starting to put together, I think, a very comprehensive puzzle that showed not just what Hunter Biden was doing, but how Joe Biden and other Biden family members may have personally profited from it.
--:-- John Bickley: That, I think, actually is the biggest takeaway from this. By giving Hunter Biden a full pardon, what Joe Biden effectively sets up is the removal of any pressure or leverage they might have used, they being federal authorities, to try to implicate Joe Biden. Because as you noted, this is something that we were told would never happen. We were told that Hunter Biden would never be pardoned.
--:-- Eric Eggers: But what else have we been told consistently? We've been told that Joe Biden was nowhere near any of Hunter Biden's business dealings. It began with he didn't even know anything about Hunter Biden's business dealings. Then it was, well, we had no actual conversation about it. Then it was, no, I never actually spoke to any of his business people. And then it was, no, Joe Biden never personally profited off of Hunter Biden's business dealings.
--:-- John Bickley: That's what the committee was investigating. That's what the bank records may have revealed. And that, in some sense, is what this pardon may have eliminated any actual eventual prosecution for Hunter Biden and then eventually Joe Biden.
--:-- Eric Eggers: And I would say many people are predicting that this will not be the last Biden to see a pardon.
--:-- John Bickley: Limiting how much action can be taken against Hunter doesn't mean an investigation into alleged Biden family corruption has to end. What are we seeing in terms of Biden's brother, Jim Biden, and the allegations swirling around him?
--:-- Eric Eggers: So legal scholars have pointed out a couple of interesting things. Number one, the elimination of the federal tax charges doesn't necessarily preclude state tax charges from being filed because oftentimes they are joined because you submit your state taxes at the same time as submitting federal taxes.
--:-- John Bickley: The second piece of this is that Jim Biden has been adjacent to or a part of many of the business dealings that Hunter Biden did with Joe Biden. And so if what's actually being concerned is these FARA violations, these Foreign Agent Registration Act violations, of which, by the way, Hunter Biden admitted in an email that, hey, we should probably register for this.
--:-- Eric Eggers: Jim Biden is right there with them. And so when you have phone calls with business people from China when you have business dealings in Ukraine and you have business dealings in some of the darkest corners of the developed world in terms of the lack of transparency and very questionable business practices.
--:-- John Bickley: You know many of Hunter Biden business associates have been accused of bribery in other contexts. So I think that's very much what the committee was looking into. And I think if Hunter Biden was potentially guilty of that, there's no reason to think Jim Biden wasn't guilty of it as well.
--:-- Eric Eggers: What kind of response have we seen from the committee Comer and others? Have they given us any signals about their next actions?
--:-- John Bickley: They have expressed some disappointment in the fact that Joe Biden has gone against what he and many people of his administration have repeatedly signaled they would do, which is not give Hunter Biden a pardon.
--:-- Eric Eggers: But there's also some suggestion that now that Hunter Biden doesn't face any actual charges, he can't plead the fifth. So he may now actually be forced and compelled to testify if he does get called into the committee hearing and taken ask harder questions because Hunter Biden no longer faces the threat of incriminating himself.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, President Biden said that his son has been politically targeted. That's why he's pardoning him. But he's also glossing over a major piece of this, which was the extremely problematic plea deal that Hunter originally got. Can you walk us through what happened with that, which really opened this can of worms for Hunter on these felony charges?
--:-- Eric Eggers: I think you raise an excellent point. And that is to say, if not only Hunter Biden's personal attorney, but the attorneys for the Biden administration's Department of Justice had gotten their way, this would have gone away if not for the questioning and ultimate refusal of a judge who said, wait a minute, you're telling me I don't have jurisdiction over this?
--:-- John Bickley: What would the appropriate remedy be? And the lawyers, again, a Department of Justice attorney and Hunter Biden's personal attorney said, well, that would be the political process. So that would have been, I think, an insane miscarriage of justice, maybe greater, I think definitely greater than the one we're currently seeing.
--:-- Eric Eggers: At least this is a legal move. The president can pardon anyone he wants, although people are saying this is by far the most sweeping and biggest pardon in American history per some legal analysis.
--:-- John Bickley: Exactly. So this would be the latest... remember this... Some would argue that the 2020 election Joe Biden even been in position to be president to then pardon Hunter had it not been for the work of Department of Justice officials and FBI officials telling big tech to censor any story about Hunter Biden laptop and the business dealings details that that laptop contained. That may have in some analysis swung the election.
--:-- Eric Eggers: So you go from the Department of Justice officials working with big tech to censor the story four years ago that kept it from being politically influential to then you had the desire to move and get rid of these charges based on an effort to kind of strong arm this judge.
--:-- John Bickley: And then you had, when it looked like Joe Biden was politically vulnerable, the unprecedented move of telling the most powerful person in the world, that is President Joe Biden, that he's not allowed to run for reelection anymore, despite every indication that he wanted to, because they were trying to find somebody that would be more politically viable. That didn't work either.
--:-- Eric Eggers: And so the only tool Joe Biden had left in his arsenal was to do the thing he said for years he would not do, which is pardon Hunter. A remarkable sequence of events, to say the least.
--:-- John Bickley: Final question. There are some Democrats that are really expressing disappointment, even shock at President Biden's actions here. And part of that reason is they say, look, this gives Trump license to issue his own pardons. January 6th defendants are often cited. What does this do in terms of Democrats' arguments about Trump's power as the president?
--:-- Eric Eggers: I think what it undermines more than anything, John, is Joe Biden's argument that he was the sole protector of democracy and American ideals. And that is now gone between Democrats saying that you couldn't vote for Trump because democracy was on the ballot and yet they ran a candidate who received zero primary votes.
--:-- John Bickley: And now them saying that Donald Trump was the one that would weaponize the Department of Justice and go after political opponents. In fact, now you see that justice is being upended by Joe Biden's own actions because Hunter Biden pled guilty himself.
--:-- Eric Eggers: And at every turn, the Justice Department said, no, this is something that's a serious charge. So I think what Joe Biden has done, unfortunately, is erode any semblance of credibility he might have had that he was, quote unquote, adult in the room, and the one that would protect American democratic norms, because he clearly did not do that.
--:-- John Bickley: Eric, thanks so much for joining us.
--:-- Eric Eggers: Thanks, John.
--:-- John Bickley: Mr. Bickley, always a pleasure.
--:-- Eric Eggers: That was Eric Eggers, vice president at the Government Accountability Institute and co-host of the Drilled Down podcast with Peter Schweitzer. And this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire.
