Hunter Biden just did what no Republican could ever do — he stood up in public and blamed his own father for wrecking the last administration.
Appearing on the “I’ve Had It” podcast on Sunday, the former president’s son declared that putting Merrick Garland in charge of the Justice Department was “the single greatest mistake of my father’s administration.” Then he went further and pinned the tail directly on Joe.
“The buck has to stop with my dad,” Hunter said. “He was the president and he chose him.”
Sit with that for a second. This is the same Hunter Biden who was handed a sweeping, all-purpose pardon by his father on the way out the door — a pardon that wiped away a decade of potential exposure. And this is how he says thanks: by going on a friendly podcast and calling dad’s signature personnel pick the biggest blunder of the whole four years.
What’s eating at him isn’t what you might think. Hunter isn’t angry that Garland’s DOJ chased him over tax charges and a gun form. He’s angry that Garland didn’t chase Donald Trump hard enough, fast enough, or far enough.
Host Jennifer Welch teed it up for him, complaining about “the Merrick Garland DOJ and the not prosecuting of Trump. And that they prosecuted you.” Hunter took the bait and ran with it, accusing Garland of losing his nerve on January 6 out of a fear of “fanning the flames.”
“Did you not watch what I watched?” Hunter demanded. “Did you not see a president and know that it was a concerted and planned effort on their part?”
There it is, out loud and on tape. The complaint from the Biden family isn’t that the Justice Department was weaponized. It’s that it wasn’t weaponized enough. For years Americans were told that the Garland DOJ was a temple of independence, a firewall between politics and prosecution, and that anyone who suggested otherwise was peddling conspiracy theories. Now the president’s own son is on a podcast griping that the attorney general should have gone after his father’s political opponent with both barrels, and that failing to do so was the administration’s worst sin.
Hunter even tried to have it both ways, praising his father for refusing to meddle. Joe, he said, played by “a higher standard than the Marquess of Queensberry rules” and honored the tradition that a president stays out of DOJ decisions. “I guarantee you there was a division between church and state there,” he said — roughly forty-five seconds after complaining that the church didn’t burn down the state fast enough.
He and Welch then agreed on the deeper diagnosis: Garland was a “moderate,” a “milquetoast candidate” Obama had picked for the Supreme Court, and Joe made him attorney general as a consolation prize out of decency. In their telling, that decency is the crime.
Democrats spent years insisting the Biden Justice Department was scrupulously above politics. Hunter Biden just told the country that the family’s only regret is that it wasn’t political enough — and that dad owns the failure.
When the meltdown gets so bad that the pardoned son starts publicly grading his father’s presidency, you don’t need an opposition party. They’re doing it themselves.