While Hunter Biden enjoys the privileges of a sweeping presidential pardon, Rachel Powell, a Pennsylvania mother of eight, is spending the holidays locked away from the people she loves. While President Joe Biden’s corrupt son enjoys a get-out-of-jail-free card erasing a long list of felonies and potential offenses, Powell, marked as an “insurrectionist” for a property damage crime at the Capitol, languishes in a federal prison.
It’s the punctuation mark on the perversion of justice that has defined the Biden years, an era of lawlessness in which “no one is above the law” but this president, his grifting family and his constitution-ripping cronies.
Biden’s unconditional pardon of his ne’re-do-well progeny, issued as Americans were still drowsy from their Thanksgiving leftovers, covers more than a decade of felonies and sundry crimes that Hunter “committed or may have committed.” Legal experts are calling the act of absolution “unprecedented,” exceeding President Gerald Ford’s pardon of the man he succeeded, Richard Nixon, post-Watergate. Even that wide pardon only covered Nixon’s presidency — Jan. 20, 1969 to Aug. 9. 1974.
Joe Biden’s 11-year blanket pardon of Hunter is even more expansive than the pardon Gerald Ford gave to Richard Nixon in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. pic.twitter.com/9ThNOEGyo5
The only thing surprising about Biden’s broad act of leniency gifted to his crack-addled son is that anyone is surprised by it. But Never Trumpers like Joe Walsh sound absolutely heartbroken that Biden has once again been shown to be the unrepentant liar he is after insisting on multiple occasions that he would not pardon Hunter, who faces sentencing on gun-related and tax evasion felony convictions.
“I said I would abide by the jury’s decisions, and I will do that, and I will not pardon him,” the president told ABC News’ David Muir, press puppet for the Democratic Party and their presidential candidates, in an interview in June.
After hearing that Biden is breaking his word, a dispirited Walsh sounded like a cuckolded lover.
“They’re all like that,” the Trump-hating former Republican congressman from Illinois moaned Sunday evening on MSNBC. “So, the next time any of us complain about anything Trump does, this — this pardon is just deflating. For those of us who have been out there for a few years now yelling about what a unique threat Donald Trump is, for Joe Biden to do something like this, Trump — ‘nobody’s above the law,’ we’ve been screaming.”
Walsh and his fellow Never Trumpers have joined Democrats in their full-throated support of one of the darkest chapters in U.S. history — the politically-driven witch hunts of pro-Trump protesters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. For nearly four years, Biden’s Department of Justice, led by his Javert, Attorney General Merrick Garland, in arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning hundreds of political prisoners. Like 44-year-old Rachel Powell. The Biden administration and their pals in the Pravda press continue to paint the eventual riots over a rigged 2020 election as a coordinated “insurrection” driven by their No. 1 political enemy: Donald J. Trump, the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president of the United States.
‘You’re Going to Take Eight Years of Her Life Away?’
Nearly 1,600 people have been caught up in the Biden Justice Department investigations. More than 500 people“have been sentenced to periods of incarceration,” some on an “obstruction of an official proceeding”charge tossed out earlier this year by the U.S. Supreme Court. Interestingly, the high court’s ruling found the DOJ employed an “inappropriately broad interpretation” of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
The DOJ hit Powell, who became known as the “bullhorn lady” in the press, with the obstruction charge. She also was charged with civil disorder, disorderly conduct in a Capitol building, destruction of government property, and entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon — the “ice axe and battering ram” that law enforcement officials say she used to break through a window and “breach the Capitol” as Congress convened to count the 2020 electoral votes. Powell told Newsweek that she “used the axe and the cardboard battering ram to break a window so that some in the group near the tunnel could move to open spaces,” and a bullhorn “to flag a nearby safe haven that she saw on the other side of the glass she had shattered.”
Powell is serving a nearly five-year prison sentence after D.C. District Judge Royce Lamberth threw the book at her in October 2023. Before that, Powell spent years on strict house arrest awaiting trial and sentencing.
“She had an ankle monitor. She was not allowed to leave her home,” said Cynthia Hughes, founder and president of the Patriot Freedom Project, a nonprofit organization providing support to J6 political prisoners and their families. Hughes was interviewed on an upcoming edition of The Federalist Radio Hour podcast. Her nephew, Tim Hale, spent three years in prison on J6-related, trumped up charges, including a year in solitary confinement.
Powell “missed her daughter’s wedding. She missed the birth of her two grandchildren. She couldn’t even go to a doctor appointment if one of her children needed the assistance of her mother,” Hughes added.
Powell’s youngest child was just 7 when she was sent to prison.
While Powell did damage government property, Hughes said she didn’t assault anyone or hurt law enforcement officials during the riot and she had no previous criminal record. Yet, the mother of eight received harsher treatment than many of the Black Lives Matter protesters engaged in riots that burned down government buildings, destroyed private property and brutally assaulted police.
“Yeah, she broke a window but you’re going to take eight years of her life away?” Hughes said. She’s lost her home, she lost custody of her children for a small minute. She had a terrible public defender.”
And now Powell is serving a nearly five-year prison sentence followed by 36 months of supervised release. Hunter Biden, who faced years in prison and more than $1.3 million in fines is a free man. He owes nothing. If it’s any consolation to the J6 political prisoners learning of the pardon from behind prison bars, the younger Biden says he will never forget the kindness bestowed on him by his powerful father and that he will commit himself to “helping those who are still sick and suffering.”
He remains defiant, despite his father’s forbearance.
Jerry Broussard of WhatDidYouSay.org
“I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction – mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport,” Hunter said in a statement to the press.
‘Miscarriage of Justice’
Biden defended his son and his sweeping pardon, insisting that “Hunter was treated differently” under the law. Well, welcome to the club, Hunter. The hundreds of J6 political prisoners his father’s administration has persecuted over the past four years know what disparate treatment feels like.
President-elect Trump has met with some the families of the people he has described as hostages. He has said that he would pardon a “large portion” of the people convicted on federal charges related to the Capitol riots. On Truth Social earlier this year Trump wrote that one of his “first acts as your next president” will be to “Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned.”
Following Biden’s generous gift to his repugnant son, Trump asked on his Truth Social account, “Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!”
Joe Biden didn’t just pardon Hunter for the gun crimes for which he was convicted. He pardoned Hunter for *EVERY SINGLE FEDERAL CRIME HE COMMITTED* over the last decade—including several years during which Joe Biden was VP and the entirety of Joe Biden’s presidency. pic.twitter.com/wjvwXTL8r6
The president-elect raises a good point. Trump could and should pardon the J6 political prisoners as one of his first acts in office, or at least commute sentences. He likely will stop the prosecutions and end the witch hunt that the Biden administration has carried out. But Biden should spend the last days of his shameful presidency rectifying of the bigger injustices of his time in office. He should pardon the political enemies his DOJ has prosecuted as “insurrectionists.”
He claims his disgraced boy is a victim of politics, “singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.” Many of the protesters who showed up to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, are victims of vendetta political politics. That was wrong. It remains so.
But Biden is as political as he is corrupt. So the people locked away on political crimes will have to await deliverance from the man the Biden regime desperately tried but failed to defeat, imprison, even murder.
Trump, unlike Biden, is a man of his word, Hughes said. “He keeps his promises,” the Patriot Freedom Project founder said.
And when Trump does follow through on his promise of pardons, Democrats, Never Trumpers and their accomplice media friends will have no standing to complain.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
If any former president had access to an operational time machine, it may have been former President Gerald Ford.
But his foresight would not focus on the degradation of America’s international standing or the fiscal ramifications of stagflation and untethered federal spending. Rather, it would deal with how America would elect, or more precisely, promote the first female president.
When Ford visited the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa, on Oct. 18, 1989 — approximately a decade after leaving office — he was given the special chance to share with the nation’s youth the role that former presidents played in American society, after they departed from the presidency.
In this setting, the former president did not have to worry about ditching and dodging around the biting journalistic questions of the day. Instead, he was asked by one young girl, “What advice would you give a young lady wanting to become president of the United States?”
With a smile, the former president opened with, “Well I hope we do have a young lady at some point become president of the United States.” His following description would appear as if the 38th president was a part-time Nostradamus.
“I can tell you how I think it will happen because it won’t happen in the normal course of events.”
“Either the Republican or Democrat political party will nominate a man for president and a woman for vice president. And the woman and man will win, so you’ll end up with a president — a male — and a vice president — a female,” he said.
“In that term of office of the president, the president will die and the woman will become president under the law or Constitution,” Ford said, in an unknowingly foreboding sense.
Taking a quick look at the current administration, it may appear Ford was onto something.
At various times, President Joe Biden has slipped up — as he is known to do on occasion — and indicate that Vice President Kamala Harris is, in fact, his “president-elect” or “President Harris.”
There are a few pathways by which the vice president could become president. In the case of an assassination or resignation, the 25th Amendment gives the vice president the authority to take the role of the executive. In other cases, the mechanism of impeachment and removal gives Congress the means to check a president’s bad behavior.
Absent a popularly held election, however, it would be interesting to see how the American people would react to a Harris presidency, as conservatives, libertarians and even some progressives and liberals have voiced their concerns over her authoritarian record.
After former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii highlighted Harris’ record as attorney general and prosecutor at a Democratic presidential debate in 2019, much of the country recoiled upon hearing that she forced prisoners to stay past their sentences and purposely hid evidence of innocence for a man sitting on death row.
As a Washington grifter, Harris’ actions do not often win the hearts and minds of the American people.
Brett Kershaw is an associate staff writer for The Western Journal. A graduate of Virginia Tech with bachelor of arts degrees in political science and history, he is a published author who often studies political philosophy and political history.
Vietnamese refugees rest in a shed while awaiting transportation at the Libyan and Tunisian border crossing of Ras Jdir after fleeing unrest in Libya February 27, 2011. People in Tunisia and Egypt are driving to the border to help those arriving from Libya, with many hosting strangers in their homes, international aid groups said on Friday. More than 30,000 people have streamed across land borders in response to violence in Libya, mainly Tunisians and Egyptians who had been working in the North African country, according to the International Organisation for Migration. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra ∧
Despite today’s outrage over President Donald Trump’s refugee executive order, many liberals in 1975 were part of a chorus of big name Democrats who refused to accept any Vietnamese refugees when millions were trying to escape South Vietnam as it fell to the communists. They even opposed orphans.
The group, led by California’s Gov. Jerry Brown, included such liberal luminaries as Delaware’s Democratic Sen. Joe Biden, former presidential “peace candidate” George McGovern, and New York Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman.
The Los Angeles Times reported Brown even attempted to prevent planes carrying Vietnamese refugees from landing at Travis Air Force Base outside San Francisco. About 500 people were arriving each day and eventually 131,000 arrived in the United States between 1975 and 1977. These people arrived despite protests from liberal Democrats. In 2015, the Los Angeles Times recounted Brown’s ugly attitude, reporting, “Brown has his own checkered history of demagoguery about refugees.”
Back in 1975, millions of South Vietnamese who worked for or supported the U.S. found themselves trapped behind the lines when the communists took over the country. Vietnamese emigre Tung Vu, writing in Northwest Asian Weekly, recalled the hardships the Vietnamese faced in 1975 as they tried to escape the communists.
“After the fall of Saigon, many Vietnamese chose to leave by any means possible, often in small boats. Those who managed to escape pirates, typhoons, and starvation sought safety and a new life in refugee camps,” Tung wrote.
Ironically, Republicans led by former President Gerald Ford were the political figures who fought for the refugees to enter the United States.
Julia Taft, who in 1975 headed up Ford’s Inter-agency Task Force on Indochinese refugee resettlement, told author Larry Engelmann in his book, “Tears Before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam,” “The new governor of California, Jerry Brown, was very concerned about refugees settling in his state.”
National Public Radio host Debbie Elliott retraced Brown’s refusal to accept any refugees in a January 2007 interview with Taft. According to a transcript, which was aired on its flagship program, “All Things Considered,”Taft said, “our biggest problem came from California due to Brown.”She called his rejection of Vietnamese refugees “a moral blow.”
“I remember at the time we had thousands and thousands of requests from military families in San Diego, for instance, who had worked in Vietnam, who knew some of these people,”she told NPR.
Taft recalled another dark reason the liberals opposed the refugees: “They said they had too many Hispanics, too many people on welfare, they didn’t want these people.”
“They didn’t want any of these refugees, because they had also unemployment,”she told NPR. “They had already a large number of foreign-born people there. They had – they said they had too many Hispanics, too many people on welfare, they didn’t want these people.”
Brown echoed his isolationist theme throughout his first term. As recounted by author Larry Clinton Thompson in his book, “Refugee Workers in the Indochina Exodus,”Brown said, “We can’t be looking 5,000 miles away and at the same time neglecting people who live here.” At the same time as Brown was fighting Washington, Democrats waged an anti-refugee campaign inside the nation’s capital.
Ford appealed to Congress to quickly help the refugees, who included thousands of Cambodians fleeing a genocidal campaign perpetrated by the communist Cambodian Pol Pot regime. But in Washington, Ford found himself thwarted by many high-profile Democrats.
A review of the congressional debate at the time and recounted by CQ Almanac shows New York’s Elizabeth Holtzman – who was one of the House’s most visible liberal congresswomen — opposed helping the refugees. Like Brown, she tried to pit her constituents against the refugees. She said, according to CQ Almanac, “some of her constituents felt that the same assistance and compassion was not being shown to the elderly, unemployed and poor in this country.”
Rep. Donald Riegle, a liberal representative from Michigan who later would serve as its senator, offered an amendment that would have barred funds for the refugees unless similar assistance was given to Americans. The amendment was rejected by the House, 346 to 71, according to the Almanac.
Another House Democrat even tried to slow down the airlift of Vietnamese orphans.The Almanac reported that Rep. Joshua Eilberg, the Democratic chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship and International Law, accused the Ford administration of having acted “with unnecessary haste” in the evacuation of the orphans.
The emergency rescue mission, called “Operation Babylift,”was activated by the United States, Australia, France and Canada after urgent appeals were issued by humanitarian relief organizations in Vietnam. The evacuation faced tragedy on its maiden flight when a C-5A cargo plane carrying the orphans crashed after takeoff, killing 78 children along with 35 U.S. government workers and diplomats.
The Library of Congress also reported liberal congressmen tried to stall the refugee legislation, indicating “they would rather wait for the administration to formulate a plan for the care and evacuation of refugees before approving the humanitarian aid.”
Then-Sen. Joe Biden tried to slow down the refugee bill in the Senate, complaining that he needed more details about the quickly unfolding refugee problem before he would support it. He said the White House “had not informed Congress adequately about the number of refugees,”according to the Library of Congress history of the legislation.
Quang X. Pham, who was born in Saigon and later served as a Marine pilot in the Persian Gulf War, later criticized Biden in an op-ed published by the Washington Post on December 30, 2006. Quang wrote, Biden “charged that the [Ford] Administration had not informed Congress adequately about the number of refugees — as if anyone actually knew during the chaotic evacuation.”
Peace candidate Sen. George McGovern, who had lost in a landslide to former President Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election, appeared the most heartless senator when he introduced a bill to assist those who wished to return to South Vietnam.
McGovern said he thought 90 percent of the Vietnamese arrivals “would be better off going back to their own land,”according to the Library of Congress. His amendment died in a House-Senate conference.
In the end, most of the Democrat complaints appeared to center on the fact that the refugees were escaping communism, which many liberals did not find that objectionable.
“One of the justifications that Ford gave was related to communism. He said these people are all fleeing communism, which was the same criteria that had been used for the Cubans, the Hungarians, other refugee groups that had been processed in the past,”Taft explained
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Richard Pollock | Reporter | 9:21 PM 01/29/2017
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