Written 12/2/2024 by Lynn McMorris

Hunter Biden’s story is not a political story. It is a human one.

He is a man who spent years drowning in addiction, a disease that does not discriminate by last name or zip code or political affiliation. It takes who it takes. Hunter Biden had resources most addicts never see and still nearly lost everything. That is not a character indictment. That is the nature of the disease.

So when his father pardoned him, I was not surprised. I was not outraged. I was reminded that Joe Biden is, before anything else, a father who has already buried one child and was not willing to watch the justice system finish what addiction started on another.

Then came the outrage machine.

Critics called it favoritism. An abuse of power. A dangerous precedent. A president protecting his family from accountability.

Let us pause here and consider Charles Kushner.

Charles Kushner is the father of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law. In 2005, Charles Kushner was convicted of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. The witness tampering charge is worth dwelling on. To silence a cooperating witness, his own brother-in-law, Kushner hired a prostitute to seduce him, recorded the encounter, and mailed the tape to his sister. He did all of this cold sober, in full possession of his faculties, with deliberate premeditation.

Donald Trump pardoned him. Charles Kushner is now the United States Ambassador to France.

Hunter Biden struggled with crack cocaine addiction for years, made a series of catastrophic personal decisions in the wreckage of that disease, and faced a level of public scrutiny most people could not survive. His every relapse was televised. His every mistake was entered into the congressional record.

These are the two cases. You decide which one represents the dangerous precedent.

The deeper argument, the one worth having, is about what we believe addiction is. If it is a disease, and the science is unambiguous that it is, then our justice system’s approach to it is a moral failure on a massive scale. We spend billions incarcerating people whose primary crime is being sick and undertreated. Hunter Biden had money, family, access to the best treatment available, and still spent years losing. Most people in this country have none of that and lose faster and harder and with no one watching.

Biden’s pardon will not change the justice system. But it did something smaller and more honest. It said out loud that a father’s love and a broken man’s recovery matter more than the appetite of a machine that was never interested in justice to begin with.

Charles Kushner is having dinner in Paris tonight.

Think about that.