Zorn: Joe Biden's pardonable sin

& results for the first mayoral poll in the 2027 cycle

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Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise.

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Biden came to his senses and pardoned his son. Spare me the outrage and the umbrage!

So President Joe Biden went back on his word and he issued a full pardon to his son Hunter, who was convicted for lying on an application to buy a firearm and cheating on his taxes.

The right seems united in condemning the president for breaking a long-standing promise not to intervene in the proceedings against his son, which is totally to be expected — Republicans are all about norms, the rule of law and civility until it comes to the wild, offensive dishonesty and self-dealing of the narcissistic, criminally convicted ogre who dominates their party. I can’t yawn loudly enough.

But the left is divided on the decision. Some are saying that Biden has gone low, that he’s proven himself to be a rank liar and that thwarting the administration of justice for his family’s own interest by abusing the pardon power is a lasting stain on his reputation.

In the Atlantic, Tom Nichols writes:

Joe Biden has now provided every Republican—and especially those running for Congress in 2026—with a ready-made heat shield against any criticism about Trump’s pardons, past or present. … This pardon has more than a whiff of panic around it, and if President Biden is unnerved about the outcome of a process controlled by his own Justice Department, how can any of us object to a future President Trump letting people out of jail based on the same fears? The reality, of course, is that Trump’s malevolent and trollish pardoning of various cranks and cronies is not in the same universe as an anguished father pardoning his son, but President Biden has now ensured that no one will really care much about the difference.

And in New York Magazine, Elie Honig writes:

The problem is in how Joe Biden has handled the situation. For months, the president denied he would do precisely what he’s just done. His position was categorical, forceful, indignant even. In June 2024, David Muir of ABC News asked Biden if he would “accept the jury’s outcome, their verdict, no matter what it is” (on the then-pending gun case) and if he had “ruled out a pardon” for his son. Both times, the president answered sternly and simply, “Yes.” For good measure, Biden denied that he would commute his son’s sentence, adding, “I abide by the jury’s decision.”

I understand that disappointment and anger. It’s hard to boast about the Democratic Party’s comparative integrity when the sitting president lied repeatedly during the election season that he would not pardon his son.

I’d probably share those feelings in normal times — if, say, we were not less than two months from the inauguration of a Republican president hell bent on revenge, long obsessed with the failed effort to link the sins of the son to his father and openly determined to use the pardon power to exonerate those who rioted violently in support of his bogus claim to having won the 2020 election.

Or if Donald Trump had a record for objective, disinterested use of pardon power. Instead, in 2020, he pardoned Charles Kushner, his daughter’s father-in-law, for what Republican Chris Christie called “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted when I was U.S. attorney.”

From the Associated Press:

The elder Kushner was pardoned by Trump in December 2020 after pleading guilty years earlier to tax evasion and making illegal campaign donations.

Prosecutors alleged that after Charles Kushner discovered his brother-in-law was cooperating with federal authorities in an investigation, he hatched a scheme for revenge and intimidation. Kushner hired a prostitute to lure his brother-in-law, then arranged to have the encounter in a New Jersey motel room recorded with a hidden camera and the recording sent to his own sister, the man’s wife, prosecutors said.

Kushner eventually pleaded guilty to 18 counts including tax evasion and witness tampering. He was sentenced in 2005 to two years in prison.

Just this week, Trump said he will nominate Kushner to be ambassador to France. So MAGA can wad up those pearls they are clutching and shove them where the moon don’t shine.

“I can’t bring myself to be even a little mad about Biden pardoning Hunter,” wrote New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg on social media. “The values and norms he’d been trying to uphold were obliterated by American voters last month. Why sacrifice your son to a dead god?”

Hunter Biden was facing up to three years in prison for crimes that for which an average person named, say, Hunter Smith would have paid fines and received probation. MSNBC’s Katie Phang has the best rundown:

Hunter Biden was investigated for five years by the Justice Department. After those five years of investigations, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Delaware, David Weiss, agreed with Biden’s lawyers to a nonprosecution agreement. Weiss then backpedaled and ended up insisting that Biden instead plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors (for failure to file) and that he enter into pretrial diversion for one gun charge. Biden agreed in June 2023 to these new terms and the two sides submitted his written diversion agreement to the court. … On the date of Biden’s plea hearing, the federal judge in Delaware questioned the scope of the immunity provision in the agreement. But she never killed the deal; she asked the parties for clarification of the immunity.

At this time, Trump and his team went after Weiss full bore. Weiss was publicly attacked and criticized. At one point, Trump posted on social media: “Weiss is a COWARD, a smaller version of Bill Barr, who never had the courage to do what everyone knows should have been done.” Instead of clarifying the deal that he himself had negotiated and already approved and despite there not being any new evidence to merit any changes, Weiss reneged on the agreement and insisted that Hunter accept new terms. …

Weiss, in a surprising about-face, then indicted Hunter Biden on three felony gun counts in Delaware and nine tax counts in California. It’s worth exposing the legal hypocrisy in these charges to underscore just how unprecedented these prosecutions were:

Once Weiss caved to the political pressure by Trump and his Republican supporters including members of Congress, Weiss failed to honor the original plea agreement and instead filed nine counts.

Hunter Biden possessed a firearm for a total of 11 days. At no point during those 11 days was the firearm loaded or used. … Prior to Weiss' indicting Biden, prosecutors did not believe the evidence even supported a prosecution. And his substance abuse problem at the time merited, at the most, a diversion program. In fact, Biden’s lawyers have argued that in the history of this district in Delaware, no individual has ever been charged under the same facts as Hunter Biden has.

There were zero aggravating circumstances that would have justified the DOJ pursuing any gun charge against Hunter Biden. As Hunter’s lawyers noted: “Since 2023, the only defendant charged with these [gun] offenses in the District of Delaware has been Hunter Biden. In that time, no other case has been charged in Delaware under these statutes.”

Biden was also charged with nine tax counts in California, despite having fully paid his past-due taxes, including interest and penalties in 2021, more than two years before any criminal charges were filed.

I’ve never been a fan of the unbridled pardon power of a president or many governors and believe they should be subject to some forms of legislative review to prevent abuses, even though, here, the case is strong that keeping Hunter Biden out of prison was in the interests of justice.

Now it’s incumbent on Biden to use the power he still has for the next month and a half to insulate as many people as he can from the drooling jaws of Trump’s vindictiveness. These will not be normal decisions, but we are not in normal times.

Your take?

Notes and comments from readers — lightly edited — along with my responses

Customer help desk

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On the Jussie Smollett decision

Donald Nemerov — Regarding “More lies in the epilogue to the Jussie Smollett story,” I say that releasing Smollett from legal peril is another political decision by the fake Illinois Supreme Court.

Zorn — I don’t think it was a political decision. I didn’t like the ruling but I’m not a lawyer and I know that far finer legal minds than mine disagree on whether his trial amounted to violation of the agreement prosecutors had struck with Smollett. I was surprised that the court’s decision was unanimous given that the Illinois Appellate Court was split 2-1 the other direction, but, as I wrote, Smollett has been punished enough for his folly.

Tom Schneider — Your obsession with the Smollett case has always perplexed me. It’s always been a total nothing burger. Kim Foxx might not have handled it as adroitly as possible, but you consistently ignored the political nature of the feigned outrage of her opponents. They were from the police department, which disingenuously blamed her reforms for spikes in gun violence, and from judges, like the late Michael Toomin, who appointed Dan Webb, who were part of the Daley, Devine, Alvarez administrations and despised Foxx. Webb of course found time in his busy schedule to write a letter in support of Ed Burke, so much for his credibility. Like I said, I have never understood your obsession with this. I hope it is over.

Zorn — Did my wife put you up to writing this letter? In my defense, the nation was obsessed with the Smollett story and my commentaries on it drove near record traffic to the Sentinel. It was a big face-plant by Foxx and the public’s outrage wasn’t feigned.

Bruce Livingston— Kim Foxx said she would recuse from the case after the revelation that she’d taken a private call from a friend of Hillary Clinton’s on Smollett’s behalf. Illinois law states that when the elected State's Attorney recuses from a case, it means the entire office is recused because it is that official’s office and totally under his or her direction and control. The law requires the attorney general of another state’s attorney’s office to take over the case. Foxx, however, either intentionally or negligently, stayed on the case and her office the deal with Smollett that was at issue. Accordingly, there was no legal contract that had to be upheld, as Foxx was without the power or authority to make that deal once she recused her office. How could there be a contract between two parties when one party doesn't have the power or the right to contract? The Illinois Supreme Court upheld a non-existent contract.

Dan R. — Smollett should have checked himself into rehab for something, then upon discharge"he could have apologized for the false report, noted that he was in a "bad place" at the time and made a donation to a police charity for the trouble he caused. He'd have been done with the matter in a short time and then cast again in some show or film. America is a forgiving country.

Zorn — So true.

David Leitschuh— I direct your attention to an article at the Illinois Policy Institute by Chris Coffey with the subhead, “A new Cook County state’s attorney inherits crime problems aggravated by her predecessor, Kim Foxx. Eileen O’Neill Burke seems ready to fight crime without abandoning efforts to be fair to minority defendants. Here’s what she should do.”

The commentary includes a graphic detailing that shoplifting in just the past 5 years has increased over 300%. Foxx and her fellow far left ideologues who were largely funded by Soros have been a serious detriment to public safety, and a good number of them have now been recalled or voted out of office as even the very liberal-minded people in large cities are fed up with a tolerance for crime under the guise of social justice.

Zorn — I’d consult the city’s violence reduction dashboard and look for big city-to-big city comparison trends before swallowing whole what Coffey argues here. Correlation is not necessarily causation.

Kids and phones

Jake H. — You passed along this quotable: "Parents: Kids are more depressed these days, I wonder why? Kids: You destroyed the economy for us, the Earth is literally dying, we are going to work until we die, and, on top of that, the Nazis are back. Parents: It's those pesky iPhones. — James Parker"

But it actually is the phones. There's research on it. Jonathan Haidt, in his book “The Anxious Generation,” points to a remarkable consistency of bad mental health indicators (suicide, hospital visits, depression, etc.) all turning dramatically upward in many countries around the world at just the time of the proliferation of the smartphone and social media, from around 2010 to 2015. This was especially true among girls, who are the most avid users of social media and the most apt to be affected by it. In addition, there is other experimental research that links depression with greater social media use.

Meanwhile, if you've ever spent time around a bunch of average adolescents on a daily basis, as I do at school, I think you'd find the idea that they are generally super exercised about and personally affected by climate change and the economy and whatnot to be utterly ridiculous. That quote was projecting the viewpoint of an adult, educated progressive onto kids.

Wendy C. —I've worked in the high school environment long enough to witness changes in social norms and behavior since the advent of smart phones. Students are so tuned into their phones and social contacts that they've tuned out almost everything else. This is an addiction. Test scores and graduation rates have dropped in many districts as a result. I think banning phones in classrooms is the inevitable solution.

Jay G. — I note that over the past 30 years, the flipping of the achievement arc of boys and girls in academics/test scores have a very strong correlation with the introduction/popularity of video games —which have much higher male than female participation rate.

I sometimes ask my classes if they think Haidt is on to something with an eyes-closed hands-up poll, after scrupulously presenting both sides fairly, and I routinely see that the vast majority of kids themselves buy it. Haidt reports likewise. This is much different from past generations' attraction to the new thing that scared or irritated their parents — their music, TV, talking on the phone, whatever — when kids would roll their eyes at the squares who don't get it. With socials in particular, many of them see a problem. But they can't just opt out, because that would mean opting out of what social interaction there is. You'd miss out. It's a massive collective action problem.

We should have an open mind, but it would be surprising if these things that have come to dominate children's lives — this giant transformation happening under our noses — didn't have significant effects. Most of the evidence I have seen suggests that negatives outweigh positives overall.

Zorn — It’s an interesting theory. I tend to be skeptical of moral panic alarms. Comic books, rock ‘n’ roll and so forth. But technology does change us and classroom bans on phones and other internet connected devices seems like the way to go.

More about the shopping cart theory

Tom T. — Regarding your item advancing the idea that to be a good person you must return your shopping cart to the parking lot corral: There is a great YouTube channel called "Cart Narcs". The agent approaches people who did not properly return their cart and attempts to shame them into doing so. The offenders often respond in a very negative fashion and that leads to some entertaining situations.

Michael M. —Remember this story about a woman who refuses to return her shopping cart? “Leslie Dobson revealed that she didn't expect people to react to her video the way they have. She said she's even received death threats.”

Head for bluer skies

Mark K - Many X/Twitter users have migrated to Bluesky and sometimes post the same content on both platforms. It’s time to deny X-owner Elon Musk clicks, especially in the light of the recent throttling of posts linking to news sites, not to mention his general awfulness.

Zorn — I am trying to cut back on Twitter usage, but I don’t love the Bluesky interface on the iPad and I have some other minor gripes about its weaker functionality. I keep hoping Musk will tire of his new toy and sell it off to a responsible adult.

Careful when calculating inflation!

Jim Strickler — Your use of the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index Inflation Calculator to show how the adjusted price of an annual subscription to the Picayune Sentinel has fallen is justifiable. But comparing prices between years is tricky. Some PS readers might appreciate seeing seven ways to do it. Go to Measuring Worth. Depending on which method one chooses, Babe Ruth's $80,000 salary in 1930 was equivalent to a salary of between $1.4 million and $23.8 million today.

Rick Weiland -- And, of course, some things get cheaper. I am a recovering computer systems consultant. A few days ago, I bought a 256 GB microSD card for $22, so more than 10 GB for a buck. In my youth, it cost about a dime to buy one (1) byte of storage, so 256 GB of memory (more than existed in the whole world then) would have cost 256 giga-dimes, significantly more than $22.

Rascals on video?

Rick Weiland — I miss the videos of the pre-show run-up to the Mincing Rascals podcast. Any hope they will return?

Zorn — I’m working on the station to have us put the whole podcast on YouTube, because “According to Edison Podcast Metrics, 31% of weekly podcast listeners age 13 and up choose YouTube as the service they use most to listen to podcasts, surpassing Spotify (27%) and Apple Podcasts (15%).” Watching people talk isn’t my idea of a great experience, but ….

As video and audio content continue to overlap, creators and listeners are benefiting from more dynamic and engaging experiences. One of the key factors driving the popularity of YouTube is the considerable number of younger listeners tuning in each week, especially Gen Z. … For this younger audience, the ability to watch their favorite podcasters, not just listen, adds a layer of engagement that traditional audio platforms lack. Forty-nine percent of Gen Z monthly podcast listeners say video provides a better understanding of context/tone through facial expressions and gestures, while 45% feel more connected to the podcaster(s) through video podcasts.

Cheerful readers

Joan Pederson— I finally got my first-ever ticket for "Songs of Good Cheer" and found a perfect spot on the seating chart. Thanks to you and Mary Schmich, for keeping the tradition going this long.

Zorn — Glad you got tix! Our run of shows starts a week from Thursday and it’s really a good time. Doug George at the Tribune has a nice story on “Songs…” this week Tickets are now on sale online and at the Old Town School of Folk Music.

Here’s a rehearsal video of one of the songs we’re working on. I’m not a fan of “Jingle Bells,” as the Tribune story notes, but when it swings like this I’m OK with it:

Here are the top five choices of PS readers for 2027 challengers to Mayor Brandon Johnson

I posted a click survey last week asking readers to select names from a long list of potential challengers to Mayor Brandon Johnson assuming — which right now I don’t — that Johnson decides he wants to keep the job that he’s proving so bad at. Voters were allowed to select as many names as struck their fancy, and here’s what the top of the poll looked like:

• Former U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan — 16%

• Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza — 15%

• U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Chicago — 13%

• Former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas — 12%

• Former Chicago inspector general Joe Ferguson — 10%

Duncan and Quigley pointedly sat out the 2023 race and I have no reason to suspect they’re any more interested in the thankless job of running Chicago than they were then. And I predict Vallas is tired of being told no by voters and I doubt he has the appetite for another bid for office.

Ferguson is an intriguing figure but I doubt he would find financial backing for a serious run. That leaves Mendoza, who was my favorite last cycle but was too closely associated with scandal-infected insiders former Ald. Ed Burke, 14th, and former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan. Those associations are likely to be old news in two years when the next mayoral campaign will begin in earnest.

I did not include 2019 mayoral finalist and current Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle because she will be 80 in 2027 and as well all know that’s way too old to hold an important political office. Ahem.

Meanwhile, I would not count out these three:

• Ald. Brendan Reilly, 42nd — 7%

• State Rep. Kam Buckner, D-Chicago — 7%

• Ald. Bill Conway, 34th— 5%

News you can use

Passing this life hack along

And remember folks, this type of message is always a scam

The week’s best visual jokes

Here are some funny visual images I've come across recently on social media. Enjoy, then evaluate:

Yes, this last one is a spoof that’s been going around online for eight years or so. I checked with the office of the Monroe County, New York sheriff and they agreed it was funny but informed me that, sadly, it’s a fake that used their letterhead.

There’s still time to vote in the conventional Quip of the Week poll!

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