Day: December 6, 2024

IT WAS ON A SATURDAY NIGHT—when most journalists were off the clock—that President-elect Trump dropped a political bombshell. He announced on Truth Social that he planned to nominate a fierce and uncompromising MAGA loyalist, Kash Patel, to be the next director of the FBI.

Then the very next night, President Biden dropped his own bombshell, revealing that he planned a sweeping pardon for his son Hunter that freed him from being sentenced for gun charges in Delaware and felony tax evasion in Los Angeles.  

Both disclosures kicked off enormous controversy. In Trump’s case, it was for tapping a conspiracy-obsessed political brawler to head what is arguably the most sensitive and powerful agency in the United States. In Biden’s case, it was for breaking his word that he would respect the judicial process and not pardon his son. 

But what if those two seemingly disparate events were actually connected? That’s the provocative theory of Garrett Graff, a historian and journalist who has meticulously chronicled the FBI’s successes and failures over the years.

“I really see the Hunter Biden pardon as basically a knee-jerk reaction to Kash Patel’s nomination literally the day before as FBI director,” Graff told me on the SpyTalk podcast. “And sort of this idea that Hunter Biden got such an oddly sweeping pardon— I think it is best seen as Joe Biden reading Kash Patel’s nomination on Saturday night and saying, you know, the Trump Justice Department is never going to leave my son alone. And the one thing I can do for him is give him this pardon.”

In his 2003 book, Government Gangsters, Patel unveiled an “enemies list” of 60 “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State” designated for some kind of retribution. Not being a government official, Hunter Biden wasn’t on the list, but his father apparently concluded that his son would be targeted by the incoming Trump administration. 

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As Graff notes, the Biden pardon for Hunter was not simply to erase his criminal convictions in Delaware and California. It also preemptively covered the last ten years, dating back to Jan. 1, 2014, for anything and everything he might have done over that period.  

Why 10 years? January 2014 was just a few months before Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma, a corrupt Ukrainian energy company which apparently thought hiring the then vice president’s son would protect it from investigations into its questionable affairs.  

“I think people sort of wrongly have been looking at it as Biden pardoning Hunter for the things that he had already done, for the cases that had already been adjudicated,” said Graff. “Whereas I think it’s much more of a preemptive pardon to prevent Kash Patel and [Trump’s nominee for attorney general] Pam Bondi from persecuting Hunter for years to come.”

Cleaned Slate

Few noticed that the pardon covered the 14-month period, in 2017 and 2018, that Hunter Biden’s company collected $4.8 million from a Chinese energy company with close ties to that country’s Communist government—for purposes that were never clear, much less documented. Former FBI officials said the large sums of Chinese cash funneled to Hunter Biden, who shared some of it with his uncle, James Biden, should have triggered a counterintelligence investigation.. 

These were the subjects that consumed House Republicans, who opened an impeachment investigation in an ultimately fruitless effort to prove the president financially benefited from his son’s shameless efforts to profit off his name.

To be sure, as the New York Times has noted, there were multiple factors that caused Biden to abandon his public no-pardon commitment. There was lobbying from his family to do so quickly, including from Hunter himself and his defense lawyers, before he was sentenced for both of his convictions. And to state the obvious: Biden acted out of love and determination to protect his only surviving son. 

But there seems little doubt that the looming threat of continued prosecutions was a major factor, if not the crucial one, in influencing President Biden’s decision. While Trump frequently threatened criminal prosecutions of his enemies, including the Bidens, during the campaign, the selection of Patel—who vowed to “come after” journalists and potentially those 60 “Deep State” targets—suddenly made those threats seem very real. 

And the timing certainly suggests Patel’s prospective nomination would have concentrated the minds of the president and his family.  Trump’s Truth Social posting revealing his intention to nominate Patel was dated 6:47 pm on Saturday evening.  According to the Times account, it was not until “late Saturday evening,” after the president flew back to Washington from Nantucket, that he notified his senior aides that he was reversing course and granting a full pardon for Hunter. “Time to end all this,” he reportedly said. 

Equally significant, the after effects of a prospective Patel nomination are still reverberating. As CNN and others have reported, White House aides and legal advisors are now discussing whether Biden should issue prospective pardons for multiple potential targets such as Liz Cheney, Rep. Adam Schiff (just elected to the Senate from California), and Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith and his staff. 

All this begs the question of what Patel might actually do as FBI director, if he’s confirmed. Graff argued in the New York Times that he is the “most concretely dangerous and worrisome” of most of Trump’s nominees, contending that his background as an uncompromising political loyalist would inevitably impact the bureau’s efforts at combating public corruption. Will MAGA loyalists read the Patel nomination as a free pass to commit graft and other misdeeds? Graff wondered. 

Graff noted that he conducted one of the very few interviews that the current FBI director Christoper Wray has ever given.  In the April 2020 story marking the the 25th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing by a white supremacist, Wray warned about the growing links between domestic white supremacist groups and overseas actors.

“The FBI has been vocal, I wouldn’t say very vocal, but vocal that they see the rise of white nationalism and white supremacist organizations as the greatest domestic terror threat,” Graff said during our conversation on the SpyTalk podcast. “And, to me, one of the real fears of a next Trump administration is, those are Donald Trump’s voters …[and] a major part of the push around January 6th.”

These are the same rioters who Trump has vowed to pardon and, at least some, of the very voters who Kash Patel has vowed to avenge. 

You can listen to the entire podcast here on Apple, or whatever your preferred platform. 

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