When President Joe Biden and his White House aides repeatedly promised Biden wouldn't pardon his son, their allies in the media didn't push back—they ate it up.
MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann, for example, cited the pledge as proof that Biden was "living the rule of law … in the most personal way" and taking "heroic action in terms of what it means to live a principle." Weissmann's colleague, Morning Joe co-anchor Willie Geist, said Biden's pledge "should not be extraordinary … but in our times it is, and important."
On CNN, meanwhile, political commentator S.E. Cupp lauded Biden's "restraint."
"For Joe Biden to sit there and say, 'Well, I'm not going to intervene in the legal process, and I wouldn't pardon my son,' I argue that requires more restraint than if he were talking about himself," Cupp said during a June segment. "Which is what Trump does, right? He's talking about himself."
Biden went on to issue a pardon of his son Hunter for the crimes of illegally buying a gun and tax evasion—as well as any other crimes the recovering crackhead may or may not have committed between 2014 and 2024. The "full and unconditional pardon" is one of the most sweeping in U.S. history and makes Biden the first president to pardon his son. In a Sunday statement, the octogenarian said he did so because Hunter Biden was "selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted."
Weissmann is yet to react to the decision on both X, which he left last month, and Bluesky, the liberal copycat of Elon Musk's social media platform. Cupp did address the pardon in a Monday morning X post, blaming the move on Trump.
"It doesn't get sad enough, but Trump's enduring legacy will be convincing BOTH parties to lower the bar, and that possessing moral authority on anything is no longer a currency that matters," she wrote.