Tristan Leavitt
@tristanleavitt
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🚨 This opinion from the judge overseeing the tax prosecution of Hunter Biden is worth reading every word…
Jerry Dunleavy IV 🇺🇸
@JerryDunleavy
U.S. district court judge takes issue with Biden’s claim in his pardon that no reasonable person looking at the case could reach any conclusion other than that Hunter was targeted because he is the POTUS’s son, noting that federal judges & Biden’s own DOJ rejected that argument.
8:40 PM · Dec 3, 2024

The net effect of Scarsi's order is that the California case against Hunter is now also terminated. But after first noting that Hunter's team botched things by merely providing a hyperlink to the White House press release regarding the pardon rather than filing an accurate copy of the pardon, Scarsi included some delicious parting shots on the matter (emphasis added, citations omitted):

The President’s statement illustrates the reasons for the Court’s disapproval, as representations contained therein stand in tension with the case record.

For example, the President asserts that Mr. Biden “was treated differently” from others “who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions,” implying that Mr. Biden was among those individuals who untimely paid taxes due to addiction. But he is not. In his pretrial filings, Mr. Biden represented that he “was severely addicted to alcohol and drugs” “through May 2019.”...Upon pleading guilty to the charges in this case, Mr. Biden admitted that he engaged in tax evasion after this period of addiction by wrongfully deducting as business expenses items he knew were personal expenses, including luxury clothing, escort services, and his daughter’s law school tuition.

...

According to the President, “[n]o reasonable person who looks at the facts of [Mr. Biden’s] cases can reach any other conclusion than [Mr. Biden] was singled out only because he is [the President’s] son.” But two federal judges expressly rejected Mr. Biden’s arguments that the Government prosecuted Mr. Biden because of his familial relation to the President...And the President’s own Attorney General and Department of Justice personnel oversaw the investigation leading to the charges. In the President’s estimation, this legion of federal civil servants, the undersigned included, are unreasonable people.

In short, a press release is not a pardon. The Constitution provides the President with broad authority to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, U.S. Const. art. II, § 2, cl. 1, but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history.