AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File
White House watch: Hunter Got the Full Nixon
“Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s,” notes Betsy Woodruff Swan at Politico. It “insulates his son from ever facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade.”
Just one other person “in generations” has “received a presidential pardon so sweeping”: Richard Nixon.
And the “starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president.”
Conservative: Prosecute the Other Bidens
“If the Bidens want to escape legal accountability for their pay-for-play operation, Joe better be ready to pardon the whole family,” fumes The Federalist’s Elle Purnell.
Hunter’s “not the only one implicated in crimes.”
His influence peddling “only worked because of Joe Biden,” and Joe “was the one who publicly used his position . . . to pressure the Ukrainian government to fire the prosecutor who appeared to be investigating” Burisma.
Other “extensive evidence” implicates “James Biden, Joe’s younger brother,” and the Biden clan got millions “in a series of payments that originated with foreign benefactors and trickled down as far as the Biden grandchildren.”
“It’s time to investigate and prosecute Joe Biden, James Biden, and anyone else who played an active role in the family business of trading influence for goodies.”
Libertarian: ’Ware the Looming ‘Taxpocalypse’
Decisions on extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act “will determine the fate of literally trillions of Americans’ dollars,” flags Reason’s Eric Boehm.
Will that money “remain in wallets, bank accounts, and retirement portfolios, or will they flow to the U.S. Treasury to fund wars and welfare?”
A full extension of the law would “add another $4.6 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office projects.”
Congress should extend the cuts and offset the cost with “spending reductions.” But that’s “borderline impossible.”
Congress could use this opportunity to “bring deficits under control,” but that “messy” problem “would be difficult to solve even in an era when Congress was less fractured and more serious about policymaking.”
From the left: Why Patel Is a Must for FBI
Racket News’ Matt Taibbi cheers Kash Patel to run the FBI, noting: “Patel was one of the only Justice Department officials willing to publicly break from enforcement consensus” when “virtually everyone considered the Mueller probe a Watergate-like supernova destined to consume the [Trump] presidency.”
Leaving the bureau to work with Rep. Duncan Nunes, Patel produced the memo exposing the Russiagate probe’s emptiness, including the deception of the FISA courts to wiretap Carter page and that the Steele Dossier was “a crucial part of the FBI probe into Trump” even though it was written on order from the Hillary Clinton campaign and the FBI had terminated Steele as a source.
And the memo’s claims were eventually confirmed by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz: All the FBI’s “ ‘sources and methods’ were revealed to be a politicized cock-and-bull scheme.”
“The FBI should get out of politics and go back to investigating crime, and it won’t do that until everyone connected to capers like” Russiagate “has been at least sent to the private sector, if not somewhere less hospitable.”
From the right: Working-Class Voters Rule
“As the 2024 presidential election clearly showed, the working class still has the clout to decide who gets put into the White House,” observes Joel Kotkin at Spiked. “Their choice of Donald Trump was a slap in the face to the ruling class.”
Trump won “non-college voters by 13 points” and “over 44 per cent of union households,” the first Republican to so since Ronald Reagan.
“The challenge for Trump” and the Republicans “will be to keep the allegiance of these voters.”
The support of working-class voters “will be critical to any party that wants to win future elections.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board