We actually covered the post at the heart of this a bit back, but besides getting schooled by Richard Grenell, there was something else funny about Navarro-Cárdenas’ post. Let’s look at it again:
Woodrow Wilson pardoned his brother-in-law, Hunter deButts.
— Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@ananavarro) December 2, 2024
Bill Clinton pardoned his brother, Roger.
Donald Trump pardoned his daughter’s father-in-law, Charlie Kushner. And just appointed him Ambassador to France.
But tell me again how Joe Biden “is setting precedent”? 🤣🤣
Yep, the first time this author saw that comment, our BS detector started going off right at that first line: ‘Woodrow Wilson pardoned his brother-in-law, Hunter deButts’ (emphasis added). We did a little Googling and there is no record of Woodrow Wilson pardoning a man by that name. Indeed, the only person by that name who shows up in Google is a modern Lacrosse player who we won’t highlight because he’s just a random guy who might not appreciate the attention.
Indeed, sometimes a Community Note shows up with that post and sometimes it doesn’t. If it isn’t showing up right now, this is what it says:
Woodrow Wilson had two brothers-in-law from two different wives - Richard Bolling and Stockton Axson. There is no evidence that any person named Hunter DeButts was ever pardoned by Wilson.
Look, sometimes names are funny. This author remembers listening to a biography of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes, Jr., and having an immature reaction when we started hearing about his eventual wife, Fanny Dixwell. That was really her maiden name and it is extra hilarious when you say it out loud. But apparently Hunter DeButts was not a person pardoned by Wilson and eventually Navarro-Cárdenas acknowledged her mistake.
And her excuse is kind of jaw-dropping:
Hey Twitter sleuths, thanks for taking the time to provide context. Take it up with Chat GPT…😂😂😂 https://t.co/4OfMtb09xL pic.twitter.com/TiM2CNkPDw
— Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@ananavarro) December 3, 2024
Look, this person is one of the co-hosts of the View and a frequent commentator on various news programs. How has she made it this far in life without knowing that you can’t trust ChatGPT? We’d let it slide if this happened to a person whose didn’t pay attention to the news for a living, but this is inexcusable. We have had enough famous examples of people getting publicly humiliated after they trusted AI to do their research, that she should know better.
Seriously, if anyone out there in Internetland hasn’t figured this out yet, don’t trust AI to do your research. Maybe someday we can trust so-called AI, but that day isn’t here just yet. At most you can safely start research using AI, but you also have to fact check every part of what it says. Every allegation, every statistic, every citation needs to be checked.
Recommended
(And for the record, we don’t even think the term AI is appropriate for the technology we are discussing. We have always understood the term ‘AI’ as describing when computers theoretically become self-aware and as far as we know, that doesn’t exist just yet. Being nerds, we look to science fiction and specifically the Mass Effect game series where they draw the distinction between Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Intelligence. In those games, they explain that Artificial Intelligence is when a computer becomes self-aware, while by comparison, Virtual Intelligence is a sophisticated program designed to seem like it is a self-aware being, but lacking true self-awareness. What we are currently calling AI seems more like Virtual Intelligence.)
YOU JUST CITED CHATGPT LOL
— jimtreacher.substack.com (@jtLOL) December 3, 2024
Woodrow Wilson actually pardoned Deez Nutz
— FilmLadd (@FilmLadd) December 3, 2024
When ABC tires of your idiocy, and soon they will, what's your dumb ass going to do?
— JWF (@JammieWF) December 3, 2024
This raises an interesting point. Should ABC be willing to risk defamation suits on a person who doesn’t realize you can’t trust AI to do your research? Especially given how they got spanked recently by Trump?
But we will borrow a line from Dennis Miller and say we don’t want to get off on a rant, here … but we really want to get off on a rant. We wanted to take a few minutes and talk about Hunter Biden’s pardon and what if anything can be done to limit or undo the damage caused by it.
First, as to Navarro-Cárdenas’ substantive point, the pardon is close to, but not quite fitting the precedents. Of course, we don’t think there’s much difference between pardoning your half-brother, as Bill Clinton did with Roger Clinton, and pardoning your son as Joe Biden did. And we would never pretend for a moment that Trump treated the father of his son-in-law just like anyone else. Even if Trump considered the case neutrally, we are pretty sure Charlie Kushner had access to Trump in a way most of us don’t.
But the potentially unprecedented element here is that there is good reason to suspect that Joe Biden was looking at Hunter’s situation as more than just a father. He might have also seen Hunter as his co-conspirator. As we wrote a couple of years ago:
We are at the point where any person who is at least moderately informed, moderately intelligent, moderately worldly knows what is almost certainly happening here, even if we can’t prove it. This was bribery. Hunter Biden would get the money and give it to his father, skimming a great deal off the top. And specific requests for Joe Biden to do a specific thing didn’t go to Joe, at least not directly. They would go to Hunter. And then Hunter goes to Joe and tells him what he needs to do. Maybe the conversation is something like ‘hey, Dad, the executives at Burisma need you to get this prosecutor fired or else I will lose my job, there.’ Or maybe it is ‘hey, Dad, I need you to get that prosecutor fired.’ In other words, maybe he doesn’t say explicitly that this is part of his deal with Burisma. Maybe Joe doesn’t even know who specifically is making the request, but Joe knows that he has to do it, to keep the gravy train going.
So, we might not ever be able to prove it, but we feel like everyone who didn’t just fall off the turnip truck knows that Hunter Biden was almost certainly a conduit for bribes to his father. In that context, for all we know, Hunter Biden was threatening to testify against his father in a Trump administration if he didn’t get his pardon. We’re not saying that Hunter definitely did that, but we are saying it is a possibility that should be investigated. In other words, for all we know, Hunter got a pardon by extortion and then that pardon technically covered that act of extortion. And even if there was no explicit threat, there might have been a reasonable fear that Hunter would start talking to avoid prison. If you were in a criminal conspiracy with Hunter Biden, would you trust him to accept a prison sentence instead of rolling over on the rest of the conspirators?
So, the presence of a strong suspicion that this pardon is being done as part of an effort to obstruct justice might be an unprecedented element in this instance.
Or it might not. This author won’t pretend to know the history behind every pardon, so maybe this isn’t the first time a pardon was potentially used to obstruct an investigation into the President's potential crimes.
But we are not sure how much the question of whether or not there is a precedent matters very much, anyway. First, just because someone did something before doesn’t mean it’s right to do it again. The holocaust arguably set a precedent, and we don’t think many rational people want to apply that precedent to other situations. Second, what the law says is that Joe Biden can pardon any person he wants for a good reason, a bad reason or no reason at all. The only limits are that he can only pardon 1) federal 2) crimes 3) in the past. So as far as the law is concerned, who cares whether or not it has been done before? He can still do it…
…if you agree with the Supreme Court’s decision in the immunity case. And this author does.
We talked about the immunity decision before, but the TL:DR on that post is that Jack Smith tried to argue that if you used a presidential power for the wrong reasons, that could be a crime. So, a pardon issued because you think the guy is innocent, or some normal concern like that is legal. But a pardon to keep a witness against you silent can be charged as obstruction of justice. Or at least that would be the rule, if Smith got his way. But the Supreme Court rejected that argument, recognizing that Smith’s approach could lead to endless investigations of presidents and even unjust convictions, because you could accuse any president of doing anything for the wrong reason and Congress doesn’t get to regulate how the president exercises his or her powers.
So that’s it, right? Despite being close to something like a Grand Theft Auto protagonist come to life, Hunter Biden gets his pardon and that’s the end of it all, right?
Well, not necessarily and it will depend on how the next administration wants to approach it. If Donald Trump the once and future president wanted to, he could have the issuance of this pardon investigated, for two reasons.
First, what if Joe Biden was no longer competent, mentally, to issue such a pardon, either in general or just at the specific moment he signed it? The 25th Amendment sets up one method of dealing with incompetent presidents but the law might organically develop another.
For instance, imagine this outlandish scenario. Imagine someone slipped an unusually potent dose of LSD into the president’s drink and while under the influence, the president issued all kinds of crazy new regulations. When the president was him or herself again, surely the President can say that the regulations were not properly issued because he was not competent to do so, right? So why can’t someone say that at some point in the presidency, Biden became unable to issue pardons? Thus the Trump administration could investigate the pardon on that basis: To see if Biden was competent to issue it. And if he wasn’t, perhaps it could be rescinded.
Second, we said that Biden had a right to issue a pardon for a good reason, a bad reason or no reason at all because of what the Supreme Court said on the topic of immunity. But Joe Biden is only protected by immunity if he raises it as a defense, and he has claimed that the Supreme Court was wrong to rule as it did in the immunity. So, investigate him according to his rules. Investigate Joe Biden for obstruction of justice in issuing the pardon, indict him if the evidence supports it, and let Joe Biden decide if he meant it when he said that presidents had no such immunity. Either Joe Biden will let himself risk going to prison… or he will show us what a scummy hypocrite he really is. And there might be value in ripping that mask off.
But that’s not the end of the ways we can blunt the effect of this pardon.
For one thing, Joe Biden can only pardon his son for federal crimes and very often people commit state and federal crimes at the same time. So enterprising state prosecutors and police can investigate the pardon to see whether or not Joe or Hunter committed any state offenses during the pardon process—for instance, it’s perfectly reasonable to investigate whether Hunter Biden did commit extortion to get his pardon. For instance, if a person is hypothetically standing in Florida when they extort the President of the United States by phone, that person very likely committed extortion under Florida law. Furthermore, one would wonder if Hunter Biden committed any state crimes for that 11-year-period covered by that pardon. The most obvious example of this would be the gun crimes—many federal gun crimes are also state gun crimes.
And, for now at least, there is room to investigate Joe Biden’s potential criminality. A minute ago, we said above there was a good chance that Hunter Biden was essentially a conduit for bribery but we also said that there might not be any paper trail. Certainly if Joe and Hunter are smart, there is no paper trail leading directly to any bribe but … can you see the flaw in our logic? After all, if Hunter Biden was smart, he wouldn’t have left his laptop at the repair shop in the first place. In that circumstance, its hard to imagine that we would know even as much as we do about the Bidens’ corruption.
But Joe Biden might still have a solution to that problem: He might attempt to pardon himself. It’s an open question whether or not the President can self-pardon. But even if he can’t, there is one obvious way around that problem: Temporarily make Kamala Harris the acting president—as they did during a colonoscopy
Harris first woman to hold presidential power, briefly, while Biden undergoes routine colonoscopy https://t.co/Bi1y50gVMy
— Jasperflx (@kamuhandafelix) November 20, 2021
—and while she is the acting president, she gives Joe Biden a pardon. It’s a dirty trick, but we don’t see why it can’t work in theory. The only question is whether or not Harris would be willing to go along with that. Who knows what kind of relationship she has with Joe Biden these days.
But even then, one thing that Biden can’t do is pardon into the future. This was mentioned briefly in Judge Scarsi’s opinion excoriating Hunter’s team for failing to provide a copy of the pardon itself. We covered that opinion here and you can read the whole thing yourself here:
Judge in the Hunter Biden case is not pleased with Joe Biden's attempt to rewrite history. https://t.co/bUDetkavNb pic.twitter.com/zz1HetMhz9
— Casey Mattox (@CaseyMattox_) December 4, 2024
There’s a lot of good stuff to read here but we want to highlight this part:
Subject to the following discussion, the Court assumes the pardon is effective and will dispose of the case. The Supreme Court long has recognized that, notwithstanding its nearly unlimited nature, the pardon power extends only to past offenses. See Ex parte Garland, 71 U.S. 333, 380 (1867) (‘[The pardon power] extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken, or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment.’ (emphasis added)).
The clemency warrant pardons Mr. Biden ‘[f]or 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,’ including the charges prosecuted in this case. (Reply Ex. A (emphasis added).) The President signed the pardon on December 1, 2024. (Id.) Because the period of pardoned conduct extends ‘through’ the date of execution, the warrant may be read to apply prospectively to conduct that had not yet occurred at the time of its execution, exceeding the scope of the pardon power.
The court goes on to say that it was going to pretend the President didn’t say that and to declare that even if the pardon purported to invalidly apply to future crimes, the court was only going to apply it retrospectively from the moment the pardon was issued. We aren’t entirely sure when the pardon was issued that Sunday, but we first saw it just before 8 p.m. So, if Hunter happened to be in Washington, D.C., that day—a federal territory—in theory he could have walked down Pennsylvania Avenue machine gunning every person in sight and the pardon would have purported to excuse his conduct until the clock struck twelve. Of course, the courts would have rejected the claim that Hunter could be immunized for future conduct, but it is ironic that they attempted to make Hunter Biden literally above federal law for several hours after how many times Democrats claimed to believe no one was above the law.
Finally, if the Trump administration was interested in seeking justice, there is one other way to go after the Bidens: Make them talk about what they did. This can be done in Congressional hearings or in civil suits, or even in criminal investigations. In each setting, it is a crime to lie. Further, Hunter Biden can’t even ‘plead the Fifth’ because of the pardon. So, let’s see if Hunter is willing to tell the truth about all the terrible things he did during that eleven-year period and, if he doesn’t tell the truth, charge him with the new offense of lying when it is a crime to do so.
Of course, all of this depends on how interested the Trump administration—and others—are in pursuing the Bidens. Previously in 2016 Trump talked about locking Hillary up but was convinced to go easy on her when he actually took office in 2017. We have no idea if Trump will repeat that behavior. We think it is safe to say no one quite knows what Trump’s second term is going to be like, maybe not even Trump.
Finally, to make fun of Navarro-Cárdenas one last time.
Did ChapGPT tell you about his cousins, Hugh G. Rection and Heywood Jablomi?
— Physics Geek (@physicsgeek) December 4, 2024
I used to think you were an average moron, but using ChatGPT results as your "source" and LOLing because you think those results are dispositive? You are weapons grade stupid. You're so dumb that the…
The cut off text says:
You're so dumb that the mass of your stupidity threatens to form a singularity and swallow the View whole.
Harsh, but no lies told.
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