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I'm not 100% that this is pissing all over his legacy, per se.
An interesting "culture war" piece of this is why it was a blanket pardon stretching back to when Hunter first joined Burisma. The "innocent" argument is that even if Biden simply pardoned Hunter for the gun/IRS charges, there would be continued lawfare trying to tie the Bidens to shady backroom dealings in Ukraine.
The less innocent argument - the one that will spawn a thousand conspiracy theories - is that there's a lot of "there" there and Biden is protecting himself, not just his son. And seeing how much rationality gets expensed towards the "innocent" theory will be interesting to watch unfold.
The discussion along party lines have also been eye raising. The three things I've seen from Dems have been "Trump pardoned/will pardon worse!!!", "guess I won't vote for Biden again, hurr hurr" and "wow cons are melting down!!" The three things I've seen from cons are "I'm a father, I get it," "well, Biden lied," and the aforementioned "so... Why ten years?"
There's a reason why exit polls had voters listing Democracy as their #1 issue had those voters breaking 50/50. "Democracy" is not a winning issue for Dems when their messaging on this stuff sucks. The cons are acting more conciliatory about this than they are.
I mean, I'm mostly curious as to how Hunter will behave going forward.
If they really want him, seems like Trump could direct an ongoing investigation into him and keep him under tight surveillance and ding him for any new crimes he commits.
It's a tad hard for me to believe that Hunter will just go completely straight after this.
He'll still be into hookers and blow, but he won't be making any corrupt deals, because he no longer has the quo that others would provide the quid for.
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Uh, this doesn’t seem like something trump or Bondi would do. Hunter has always been much more useful as a tool of political grandstanding(for which he’s most useful when free) or a means to get at Joe Biden(who’s now irrelevant, free to live out his life in the memory care facility he so clearly needs to be in). Republican grandstanding about Hunter was not based on genuine horror of his crack habit, otherwise it wouldn’t have been a matter for congress.
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