The Hunter Biden pardon is an outrage.

It is not just leniency for Hunter’s two criminal convictions, it’s part of a long-running coverup of the alleged influence-peddling operation perpetrated by the whole Biden family – including Joe.

If we let this go without further investigation and exposure, the Bidens will walk away from the White House with no accountability for their alleged ill-gotten gains.

The Hunter pardon was a shock, but not a surprise. Nobody seriously believed Joe when he vowed repeatedly not to pardon his son. Nobody believed hapless White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre when she was sent out many times to repeat the lie. After all, Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother Roger for cocaine trafficking.

But the sweeping scope of Hunter’s get-out-of-jail-free card is the bigger scandal.

Hunter was convicted by a jury of his peers for violating federal gun laws by lying about his drug addiction. He also pleaded guilty to avoid a politically embarrassing trial on federal tax evasion that would likely have lifted the lid on some sources of illicit income.

Old Joe didn’t want his son to go to jail for those crimes. We can understand that impulse, coming from a father who buried Hunter’s brother and sister. But it’s hypocritical nonetheless – not least because he could have waited until Hunter was sentenced in mid-December and then commuted those sentences to avoid jail time. He could also have simply pardoned Hunter for these two specific crimes.

Instead, he went so much further, issuing an open-ended ‘full and unconditional pardon’ for all ‘offenses against the United States which he [Hunter] has committed or may have committed or taken part in’ from January 1, 2014, through Decemeber 1, 2024.

Nobody has received a pardon that sweeping since Richard Nixon was pardoned by Gerald Ford fifty years ago.

There’s a reason why the Hunter pardon dates back 11 years. It was April 2014 when Hunter took a job on the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, a dodgy Ukrainian gas company, while his father was the serving US Vice President. Hunter had no qualifications for the job except for being Joe’s son. The pardon also conveniently covers most of Hunter’s other shady business dealings in China and Romania.

And to be clear: this wasn’t like long-established Trump hotels and casinos getting some extra business from foreign sources after his presidency in 2016. Trading on Joe’s influence was and always has been the whole family business. It also involves Joe’s brother Jim and a web of accounts that have allegedly funneled millions back to the family.

With the President now in the habit of quashing potential crimes as yet unknown to the public, would anybody be surprised if Uncle Jim received the next pardon?

The lies and the coverups have been going on a long, long time.

In 2019, Biden claimed that he’d ‘never spoken’ with his son about ‘his overseas business dealings’. He later claimed to have never met Hunter’s business associates.

Both a lie. Hunter’s former business partner Devon Archer testified last year about how Biden would regularly speak on the phone with his son’s foreign contacts, to let him show off his pull. Biden also met with Hunter’s Russian and Kazakh partners at Café Milano, a sceney D.C. restaurant.

When he debated Donald Trump in 2020, Biden claimed that ‘my son has not made money in terms of this thing about… China’. A lie.

He called Hunter’s laptop ‘a Russian plant’. A lie.

One of the emails on that laptop described ‘10 [percent] held by H for the big guy’ – a reference to Joe, as confirmed by another of Hunter’s old business partners, Tony Bobulinski.

In 2020, Joe’s campaign enlisted former heads of intelligence agencies to back up the false claim that the laptop was a plant. The Justice Department under Biden let the statute of limitations run out on influence-peddling charges, and IRS whistleblowers revealed how it had throttled their probes into Biden family business.

When a sympathetic Delaware prosecutor tried to close the book on this sorry saga and give Hunter a sweetheart deal last summer, it was only after a valiant judge dared to ask for more details that the attempted cover-up fell apart. It forced a humiliated DOJ to go through the motions of prosecuting the narrowest case it could make.

When Joe was leaving the vice presidency and his political heir (and only hope) Beau died, it seems the Bidens amped up their scramble to cash in because it looked like the gravy train might be ending.

Now the Bidens are facing down political irrelevancy once again, and the President is brazenly using his pardon power to cover his tracks.

Even Democrats are tiring of the Bidens. And Trump’s new Congress will have its hands full in the spring with other things.

But the whole Biden coverup and the sleaze it has no doubt concealed really ought to be exposed. A full-scale inquiry seems a good place to start.

This mess has corrupted at least two presidential administrations. It has made the public more cynical about our politics, our law enforcement agencies and prosecutors, and our foreign policy. It has poisoned a decade of American relations with Ukraine.

The history books, at least, ought to give more than 10 percent of the blame for all that to the Big Guy.