President Joe Biden's White House has been adamant that he won't issue a pardon for his embattled son Hunter Biden, who faces at least a dozen federal criminal charges with the potential for additional charges in the future.
Not everybody believes that assertion, however, including former President Donald Trump, who recently predicted in an interview that his chief political rival, Biden, would indeed grant clemency to his criminally charged son, Breitbart reported.
During a lengthy interview with Breitbart at his Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida, former President Trump was asked for his thoughts on the possibility that President Biden would issue a pardon to help his son Hunter Biden avoid accountability and justice for his alleged crimes.
"I think he would do anything," Trump said of his rival. "I think he’s a guy that would do anything. He probably would do that."
As for his own legal troubles, the former president shared how lawyers had told him that he could have pardoned himself before leaving office, which would likely have helped him avoid at least some of the many criminal charges now pressed against him at the federal and state levels.
"I was given that by numerous lawyers who said, 'If you want to do that you could because you’re going to spend a lot of your time in court and these people are totally nuts, they’re bad people, they hate our country, and they hate you,'" Trump recalled of the pardon advice he'd received. "'They have Trump Derangement Syndrome, so, sir, you could pardon yourself now so you won’t have to go through it,' and I said, 'I don’t want to do that for purposes of history. I don’t want that history that I pardoned myself, because I did nothing wrong.'"
Trump may be right, except NBC News reported in December about how the Biden White House had repeatedly denied and dismissed all talk about the president potentially pardoning his son.
In fact, during a press briefing, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was unmistakable when she declared to querying reporters, "I’ve been very clear; the president is not going to pardon his son."
However, even the overtly Biden-friendly NBC News wasn't completely buying that and observed that while "the question isn’t going away, and the issue seems far from settled," the president "doesn’t need to decide just yet" on whether or not to grant clemency to Hunter.
Rather, the outlet suggested the "most opportune moment" to make that choice would be in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, given that "Win or lose, Biden won’t be on the ballot ever again, and if he did decide to pardon Hunter, he wouldn’t need to worry about a voter backlash."
The Associated Press reported in December that Special Counsel David Weiss had filed nine tax-related criminal charges against Hunter Biden, including three felonies and six misdemeanors, that could result in him being sentenced to serve up to 17 years in prison if convicted on all counts.
Those charges relate to a period between 2016 and 2019 during which Biden was alleged to have lived "an extravagant lifestyle" while simultaneously failing to pay and evading taxes owed, plus filing false returns or failing to file any returns at all.
The tax-related criminal charges followed on the heels of three federal firearms charges that stemmed from Biden's illegal purchase and possession of a handgun in 2018, in which he lied on the federal gun purchase form about his admitted drug abuse problem at that time that would have prohibited him from buying or owning any firearms.
Meanwhile, the president's son remains under investigation by both Special Counsel Weiss and House Republicans, and it remains possible that he could eventually face additional criminal charges related to his dubious foreign business dealings and alleged corrupt influence-peddling to profit from his family name and father's political power.
