What do these guys know that we’ll probably never know?

AP Photo/Susan Walsh – File

The only presidential pardon that bears even a passing resemblance to Joe Biden’s sweeping pardon of his son, Hunter, is President Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon in September 1974, a month after Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace.

Ford pardoned Nixon for “all offenses against the United States” that he “committed or may have committed” from January 20, 1969, through August 9, 1974 – the precise term of Nixon’s presidency.

That pardon was considered by many at the time to be excessive. In the annals of presidential pardons, it was without precedent.

But there was logic to it.

The stated goal was to bring an end to the contentiousness that had come to define the Nixon presidency. Gerald Ford was correct in his belief that prosecuting Nixon would have distracted from the business of reestablishing a functioning administration following the chaos that had hobbled the administration of a Watergate-plagued Nixon. Ford was correct in believing that the country would have suffered all the pain and angst attendant to prosecuting a former president without gaining the benefit of a timely and conclusive disposition of the controversies that drove Nixon from office.

Better then to move on with the nation’s pressing business. It was a sweeping pardon. But objections at the time notwithstanding, there was good reason behind it.

But by comparison, Hunter Biden’s pardon redefines sweeping. A better word is breathtaking. The pardon covers eleven years and any federal crime all the way up to mass murder.

Perhaps we should give Joe Biden some credit. As diminished as he obviously is, there’s logic to this pardon, too. Hunter stands convicted of only two crimes, but he stands pardoned for anything and everything.

One result is that it lets loose one’s imagination.

We know about $20 million worth of payments from mostly malfeasant foreign governments that wound up in various bank accounts controlled by the Biden family. We know that little, if any, federal income tax was ever paid on that money. We don’t know what that money bought but we can easily believe that those paying it believed they were getting value received for value given.

But what do we not know? Just how deep is the corruption? One can only imagine.

And thus, the logic. The logic is that unlike Nixon, whose pardon period coincided with the time when he was in the White House being president, Hunter Biden’s pardon period coincides with him galivanting around the world. One can imagine so much corruption and so much malfeasance and so much legal exposure that the only prudent thing to do is to take it off the table preemptively, multiple promises to the contrary be damned.

That leaves one seething in the realization that Biden and son, safe in their media-protected leftist Washington cocoon, correctly believed that they’d get away with it.

I remember the outrage surrounding Richard Nixon’s pardon by President Ford. But Nixon should rest in peace. His legacy just got a fresh coat of polish, thanks to Joe and Hunter Biden.