A left-leaning MSNBC analyst was left speechless by President Joe Biden’s surprise decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden, who was convicted of federal gun and tax evasion charges earlier this year.
“Molly – fast and furious, what do you make of this new news?” MSNBC guest anchor Melissa Murray asked on Sunday night as news broke of the president’s decision.
“I…I just heard it,” MSNBC contributor Molly Jong-Fast, also a special correspondent at Vanity Fair, said with a nervous laugh. “I have to process it. I don’t have a take. I’m sorry.”
Murray was forced to pivot and try to elicit some commentary from another analyst: “Anyone?”
Michelle Goldberg, a left-leaning opinion columnist at The New York Times, jumped in to defend the president.
“Hunter Biden was prosecuted for a crime that kind of a normal person who had committed the same crime would almost certainly not be prosecuted for, and Joe Biden bent over backwards not to intervene in order to show, you know, how much of a respecter of norms he was, unlike Donald Trump,” Goldberg said.
“I certainly understand why, you know, why he would not want to forfeit the future and life of his son to upload a set of norms that are about to go up in smoke,” she added.
Biden signed a pardon for his son Hunter on Sunday night, three days after Thanksgiving, in a stark reversal after repeatedly claiming he would not use his executive powers to excuse his son. Biden said his about-face was due to Hunter’s unfair treatment.
“From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,” Biden said in a statement on Sunday. “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong.”
The president said there has been “an effort to break Hunter,” who has remained sober for five and a half years despite “unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution.”
In June, Hunter was convicted in Delaware federal court of three felonies for purchasing a gun in 2018 after prosecutors say he lied on a federal form by claiming he was not using or addicted to drugs.
Hunter had been set to take the stand in a California trial in September over claims he failed to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes, but he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor and felony charges in a surprise last-minute move as jury selection was set to begin.
The Democratic president had repeatedly claimed he would not pardon his son, in an attempt to contrast himself with President-elect Donald Trump.
In June, Biden said he would abide by the jury’s decision and would not pardon his son.
Most recently, a few days after Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in November, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded to reporters’ questions about a possible pardon: “We’ve been asked that question multiple times. Our answer stands, which is no.”