Hunter Biden’s pardon has given Donald Trump all the ammunition he needs to take on the ‘deep state’

Donald Trump has big plans to shake up what he calls “the deep state”. Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter may just have given him a gift that will help him do that.

Trump has spent years clashing with the federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies, as well as the foreign policy establishment. In Trump’s telling, American politics is a cynical racket, and the permanent denizens of “the swamp” – the civil service in DC and the bureaucracies they populate – serve as a kind of Praetorian Guard to protect that racket rather than keep it honest.

There’s a two-tiered system of justice, where the favoured insiders get kid-glove treatment, while disruptive outsiders such as Trump don’t just get the book thrown at them – they also face draining “lawfare”. That includes secret spying, seemingly never-ending investigations, and anonymously-sourced leaks. This prevents anyone from deviating too far from the civil service’s consensus centre-Left views on foreign affairs or the law, even if the voters elect them to do precisely that.

It’s an exaggerated portrait, and one that’s unfair to a lot of diligent public servants doing necessary work to keep Americans safe. But there is more than enough truth to it to cry out for reform. Trump first won the presidency in part due to accumulated public revulsion at a quarter-century of Bill and Hillary Clinton getting away with all manner of sins personal, political, and financial.

The capper was Mrs Clinton skating on mishandling of national security information with an off-the-books home email server while she was secretary of state. When it came out later that both Trump and Biden had stored national secret documents at their homes, Trump was charged with dozens of felonies – and Biden walked.

The pattern continued as Trump spent two years under investigation for the non-existent crime of “collusion” in 2017-18 and faced a blizzard of criminal and civil charges in 2023-24. His first choice for national security advisor got charged in a sting operation that started before Trump even took office.

When Hunter got a shady gig on the board of a Ukrainian gas company in 2014 and Biden bragged publicly about getting the Ukrainians to fire a prosecutor looking into the company, the only charge that got brought was the House impeaching Trump. When Biden needed to claim during the 2020 campaign that a laptop belonging to his son and full of incriminating information was “a Russian plant”, luminaries from across the intelligence agencies lined up to sign a public letter giving credibility to the lie.

The Biden family got rich over Joe’s half a century in public service, and congressional investigators could get only part way to the bottom of all the foreign money lining their coffers. When IRS agents tried to dig further, they got shut down by their superiors. When prosecutors tried to bury the whole story in a sweetheart plea deal that would prevent anyone from prosecuting Hunter in the future, a judge called it out and humiliated them into bringing him to trial. He had to plead guilty to more limited tax charges after a jury found him guilty on federal gun charges.

Now, Joe has handed down a presidential pardon of staggering breadth, releasing Hunter not only from being sentenced for the gun and tax charges but for any crimes committed since January 1 2014 – conveniently, far enough back to cover his whole time on the Ukrainian gas company board.

For Trump, this may make it harder to bring a revenge prosecution against the Biden family. But after chasing Joe out of the presidential race and defeating his vice-president at the polls, Trump’s real targets are the deep state agencies and the people who brought the charges against him. The furore over this blatantly self-serving pardon will help fortify his case for root and branch reforms to “drain the swamp” and end the two-tiered system of justice.

Trump has already shown some of his cards in this direction with personnel choices. Matt Gaetz, the bomb-throwing Congressman harshly critical of the Justice Department, was Trump’s first pick to run the place. Kash Patel, his choice to run the FBI, has said that he wants to expel the bureau’s entire Washington staff from DC and turn its headquarters into a museum of government abuses. Tulsi Gabbard, a critic of the national security establishment, is his pick for director of national intelligence.

Trump will probably also enrage the establishment with many pardons of his own, including a great many participants in the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021. Judging by his first-term pardons, he’ll probably also give clemency to personal cronies, ideological allies, and crooked politicians of both parties. But there, too, the Hunter pardon will hamper Democrats in convincing the voters that this is anything but fair payback.

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review

Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 3 months with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.