Leonard Peltier vs. Hunter Biden

American Indian Movement (AIM) activist Leonard Peltier has been in prison since the 1970s. He’s accused of killing two FBI agents during a confrontation between AIM and the FBI at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Next year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the alleged crime. During that half-century, millions of people around the world have petitioned for his release.

When the Soviet Union existed, it extended an offer of political asylum to him when he got out. In 2022, the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention came to much the same conclusion, raising concerns about anti–Native American bias, declaring his continued detention after all these decades to be arbitrary and in violation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and referring his case to the UN special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment.

Sam Levin summarized some of the reasons why Peltier’s imprisonment has alarmed so many people in the last half century in a Guardian article in 2017:

According to Peltier’s attorneys, who filed a clemency request last year, federal agents made false statements and affidavits, coerced witness statements and deliberately withheld crucial ballistics reports. A prosecutor eventually admitted in court that the US attorney’s office “can’t prove who shot [the agents]” and claimed that Peltier was guilty of “aiding and abetting” in the shooting.

The occasion for this article was that James Reynolds, a prosecutor “who supervised a key part of the case against Peltier” back in the ’70s, had come to the conclusion that Peltier had suffered enough and wrote to President Barack Obama to urge him to grant him clemency. But not even the plea of the original prosecutor was enough to get the Obama/Biden administration to extend mercy to Peltier. He remained in prison when Obama left office and remained there through the four years of Donald Trump, and it looks like he’ll stay there through all four years of Biden, too.

Meanwhile, Hunter Biden, whose guilt isn’t in dispute and who’s spent his adult life profiting from the petty corruption of people showering sinecures on him in the hopes of influencing his powerful father, will never spend a day in prison.

Edward Snowden vs. Hunter Biden

Despite the extremely high probability that Peltier was wrongfully convicted and the absolutely absurd amount of time he’s already spent behind bars, I suppose you could argue that Hunter is more deserving of a pardon because, on the off chance that Peltier really is guilty of murder, that’s far more serious than Hunter’s petty criminality. Fine. But what about Edward Snowden?

The Hunter Biden pardon was one of the most sweeping ever issued by an American president on behalf of an individual defendant. Even Gerald Ford’s notorious pardon of Richard Nixon only protected “Tricky Dick” from any crimes he “committed or may have committed” from January 20, 1969, through August 9, 1974 (the period that Nixon was in office). Biden’s pardon of his son extended not only to the tax charges and illegal firearm purchase but to any crimes at all Hunter may have committed for ten full years before the date of the pardon. That wide net was doubtless due to Biden’s concern that new crimes may be uncovered, perhaps even including some from Hunter’s financial dealings with Ukrainian oligarchs during the time when Vice President Joe Biden was in charge of Obama’s Ukraine policy.

Perhaps no charges would have emerged from that time in any case. Perhaps, as Biden’s defenders have always insisted, Hunter was merely trading on the hope that buying him off would influence his father, but such influence is inconceivable, and the only further indictments the president wants to shield his son from are small-change stuff from Hunter’s years of drug abuse and personal recklessness.

Maybe. But it’s clear that Hunter is now permanently shielded from accountability for crimes that were neither driven by honorable motives nor served the public interest in any meaningful way.

By contrast, Snowden had to flee the country for exposing official criminality. His offense manifestly served the public interest. And Biden hasn’t seen fit to grant him the slightest iota of mercy.

Snowden was an intelligence contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) who blew the whistle on the NSA’s blatantly unconstitutional secret mass surveillance of American citizens. Snowden had nothing personally to gain from this, and much to lose. He had to flee the country to stay out of prison.

Then president Obama had campaigned on a promise to reverse the Bush administration’s policy of going after whistleblowers, but he broke that promise and pursued Snowden around the world for telling the American public that their government was illegally spying on them. Snowden ended up seeking refuge in Russia, not because that was his intended destination, but because that was the airport he was in when his passport was revoked and he was stranded. Even after being granted asylum there, he’s repeatedly risked his status by criticizing the Russian government, calling it “corrupt” and even explicitly accusing Russian president Vladimir Putin of lying about his own mass surveillance activities.

Snowden is, by any sane definition of the term, a hero. A federal court ruled a few months before Biden assumed office that the surveillance program Snowden had exposed “was unlawful” and that “the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.” Biden had his entire term to act on that ruling and pardon Snowden. But Snowden embarrassed the national security state, and he wasn’t born into the Biden family, so he’ll go away for a long time if he ever steps foot on American soil.

The Forty Prisoners Donald Trump Plans to Kill vs. Hunter Biden

It’s outrageous that Snowden isn’t allowed to return to his country. And his life in Moscow depends on the continued generosity of a government he’s gone out of his way to offend. But, at least for the moment, he’s a free man. The same can’t be said for many thousands of federal prisoners who went away for nonviolent drug offenses (or, in some cases, for illegally purchasing firearms). And even those thousands are in a better position than forty federal prisoners sitting on death row.

Biden is the first president in American history to come out against the death penalty. That was, at any rate, his official position when he ran for president in 2020. And president-elect Trump not only supports the death penalty but, as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) notes, during the last six months of his administration, went on a “killing spree,” executing more federal prisoners than any other president in the last 120 years. There’s no doubt that he plans on a repeat performance. In fact, per the ACLU, he’s made unconstitutional proposals to extend capital punishment to “non-homicide crimes like drug trafficking and to use methods like hanging or the guillotine.” (So much for the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment.”)

If Trump manages to push those insane plans through and the courts let him, there’s nothing Biden can do to save future victims. But he could at least save the forty prisoners who are currently on death row, who will be Trump’s to kill at the end of January.

Given his stated strong opposition to the death penalty, why doesn’t Biden do this? Has he just forgotten?

It’s hard to know. What’s certain is that there’s no possible defensible moral calculus that would save Hunter Biden from spending a day in prison but not any of the current inmates serving time for similar crimes, nor a likely victim of a severe miscarriage of justice like Peltier, nor a heroic whistleblower like Snowden, nor even the forty people whose lives Biden could literally save with the stroke of a pen if he commuted their sentences to life in prison.

To the best of my knowledge, no one anywhere has had the chutzpah to argue that Hunter deserves mercy more than any of the others. They’ve only argued, as the president himself did in his pardon statement, that Hunter is a victim of political prosecution because prosecutors paid special attention to his crimes due to political pressure from conservatives eager to embarrass the president.

Whatever truth there is in this defense, it only reinforces the point that the rules are very different for the Hunter Bidens of the world than they are for the rest of us. Drug addicts who illegally purchase firearms and people who cheat on their taxes frequently get busted. But under normal circumstances, wealthy and well-connected people like the president’s son often get a slap on the wrist if their crimes aren’t ignored entirely. The effect of political prosecution was that, for a moment, the president’s cartoonishly corrupt son was treated like an ordinary criminal. That’s the alleged “unfairness.”

The point is not that Hunter should be thrown in a dungeon for eternity. It’s that many people born in far less fortunate circumstances have shown the same kind of recklessness and poor judgment as Hunter and suffered severely for it. As I wrote when Hunter was first indicted last year, I’d “certainly rather live in a society that was more compassionate toward Hunter’s less fortunate equivalents than one that was more consistently cruel.” But mercy for Hunter Biden and only Hunter Biden is a deep obscenity.