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No one should be surprised that President Joe Biden lied when he said he would not pardon his corrupt son Hunter before wandering out of office. As much as journalists want to pretend this is just a Dear Old Dad rescue scenario, Hunter Biden enriched most of the Biden clan in his foreign influence-peddling projects, including Joe and Jill.

No one's surprised that Joe Biden would commit this outrage and then fly to Africa to get out of the earshot of reporters. His entire presidency seemed designed to avoid reporters, and never mind that about 95% of them are Biden voters.

The surprising occurrence was people on the Left complaining now that Donald Trump has been reelected that the Hunter pardon ruins all their talking points about nobody being above the law. It "muddies the water" of their anti-Trump crusades. How did these supposedly smart people figure this scandal was going to end?

New York Times White House reporter Peter Baker wrote the pardon would "make it harder for Democrats to defend the integrity of the Justice Department and stand against Mr. Trump's unapologetic plans to use it for political purposes."

At this late and ridiculous juncture, Baker and other journalists are still engaged in the fiction that the Biden Justice Department wasn't used for political purposes, and certainly not like Trump, who wants "retribution."

Just start with the Biden Justice Department's oppressively overwrought prosecution of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. More than 1,000 Americans have been convicted (a large chunk of them in plea deals), and about 350 trials are still pending. Almost four years later, the FBI is still hunting down suspects. It's easy to categorize this aggression as "retribution" for challenging Joe Biden's election certification.

Take 72-year-old "Praying Grandma" Rebecca Lavrenz, who's now serving six months of home confinement in Colorado after being found guilty in August of this year. Her "crime"? Lavrenz watched other rioters breach barricades and overrun a police line on the Capitol's Rotunda steps, prosecutors said. She then spent approximately 10 minutes inside the Capitol.

Prosecutors sought 10 months behind bars. Ten months for 10 minutes. Anyone who doesn't think this sounds ridiculously overwrought probably watches MSNBC 12 hours a day. This is the kind of "Jan. 6 criminal" that the leftists are already protesting might be pardoned by Trump next year. How does Grandma compare to Hunter Biden's tax evasion and gun crimes?

The Justice Department started investigating Hunter Biden in 2018 (but nobody reported it). The FBI kept Hunter Biden's laptop under wraps to protect the Bidens. Under Joe Biden, they kept slow-walking the case. CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig called the delay "preposterous" in 2023. He said, "Five years? That's a five-week investigation."

Joe Biden's Justice Department tried to toss the whole case in the trash can (like Hunter Biden's gun) with a plea deal in 2023. Only a federal judge stopped that outrage, which led inescapably to the pardon outrage. But Joe Biden screamed in his pardon memo that all this delay and attempted deconstruction was a Hunter persecution. Give us all a break.

All the reporters who lecture us about the perils of disinformation and misinformation ruining democracy are the same ones who still pretend that the Biden Justice Department is the pristine antonym of a partisan agency. To use their own formulation, "there is no evidence" that either the Justice Department or their pompom squad in the press have acted in a nonpartisan manner during the Biden presidency.

The Hunter pardon doesn't muddy the waters. The leftist press have been churning mud into the waters this whole time.

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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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