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Trump uses Hunter Biden pardon to hint potential clemency for January 6 insurrectionists
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 December 2024, 17:05
Donald Trump seized on Hunter Biden’s pardon to drop one of his strongest hints yet that he intends to grant clemency to at least some of the instigators and participants of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by a mob trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat.“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!” the US president-elect posted on his Truth Social platform.It was the latest in a series of supportive comments by Trump on behalf of those convicted for their part in the onslaught, which resulted in the deaths of five people at the time. Additionally, four police officers involved in trying to beat back the rioters killed themselves in the days and months after the attack.Now the granting of a pardon by the sitting president, Joe Biden, to his son appears to have been taken by Trump as a fresh justification.The 2021 assault spawned one of the biggest criminal investigations in US history, resulting in federal charges being filed against nearly 1,500 people. About 1,000 have either been found guilty or pleaded guilty.The investigation is ongoing. The FBI said last month it was seeking nine people in connection with violent assaults on police officers on the day.Despite the seriousness of the offences, Trump has been publicly itching for months to act on behalf of those imprisoned, whom he has labelled “hostages” and “political prisoners”.In March, he wrote that one of his first acts in office, if re-elected, would be to “Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned!”He has repeated the vow several times, including in an appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists in July, when asked if he would grant a pardon.“Oh, absolutely, I would. If they’re innocent, I would pardon them,” he said.But he has stopped short of promising a blanket pardon. “I can’t say for every single one, because a couple of them, probably they got out of control,” he told CNN.Some of those convicted and given the longest sentences did not take part in the violence inside the Capitol but were convicted of seditious conspiracy and other charges connected with organising the attack. They include Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group, and Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys, which has been described as a neo-fascist organisation that promotes political violence.Whatever distinctions Trump and his campaign team have in mind, there is little question that hopes are high among many of those in custody that a pardon could be forthcoming.Lawyers for Joe Biggs, a Proud Boys member given a 17-year prison sentence last year after being convicted of a spate of crimes including seditious conspiracy and intimidation or threats to prevent officers from discharging their duties, have said they would be requesting a pardon.Biggs claimed at his trial that he was following Trump’s orders.Lawyers for several of those convicted have unsuccessfully sought to delay sentencing hearings since Trump won last month’s presidential election, on the basis that clemency might be at hand.Among those incarcerated, at least one has little doubt about the prospects of imminent freedom.Jake Lang, who is charged with several offences, including charging police officers, posted in celebratory fashion on social media after Trump’s election win, the BBC reported.“COMING HOME!!!!,” he wrote. “THE JANUARY 6 POLITICAL PRISONERS ARE FINALLY COMING HOME!!!!” More
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Pete Hegseth forced out of non-profit leadership roles for misconduct – report
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 December 2024, 14:54
President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, was reportedly forced out of two leadership roles at veteran-focused non-profits amid allegations of financial mismanagement, drunkenness and sexist behavior.A lengthy account in the New Yorker, based on interviews with whistleblowers, described Hegseth’s behavior at two organizations where he held leadership positions: the Koch-backed group Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) and the “AstroTurf” billionaire-backed Vets for Freedom (VFF).A whistleblower report accused Hegseth, who was CEO, of appearing frequently drunk at CVA social events, fostering a hostile work environment for female staffers and spending non-profit funds on personal expenses.The news follows allegations of sexual assault in 2017, controversy over Hegseth’s criticism of women serving in combat roles in the military and an email from Hegseth’s mother in which she told him about his mistreatment of women: “get some help and take an honest look at yourself.”Hegseth’s mother, Penelope, later disavowed the email, said she had written it in anger and called it “disgusting” to publish its contents. Trump’s transition team has said the sexual assault allegations were found to be “false”, a statement contradicted by local police reports.The Department of Defense is one of the nation’s largest employers, with roughly 3 million military and civilian employees and had a budget of $820bn in 2023.“I’ve seen him drunk so many times. I’ve seen him dragged away not a few times but multiple times. To have him at the Pentagon would be scary,” a former staffer told the magazine.In one instance described in the whistleblower report, Hegseth reportedly took CVA staffers to a Louisiana strip club and then got so drunk he attempted to get on stage with the strippers.The senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut who serves on the Senate armed services committee, told the New Yorker: “Much as we might be sympathetic to people with continuing alcohol problems, they shouldn’t be at the top of our national-security structure.” Hegseth needs Senate confirmation, if he is to take up the cabinet-level position.At VFF, a former associate told the magazine that Hegseth had effectively run it into the ground, spending in a way that nearly forced the organization into bankruptcy. The findings of a forensic accountant hired by the organization’s donors were described as “appalling”, and one former staffer described parties that, “could politely be called trysts”.Eventually, VFF merged with another non-profit in a way that removed Hegseth’s leadership power. Hegseth worked at VFF from roughly 2007-2012, and at CVA from 2014-2016.The allegations come after Trump has stood by Hegseth following an investigation into sexual assault allegations by Monterey, California, police in 2017. In that incident, Hegseth was accused of assaulting a woman after a Republican women’s event.Investigators recommended the complaint be forwarded to prosecutors for review. Hegseth paid a confidential settlement to the woman involved in the alleged incident in 2023 to head off the threat of a lawsuit.At the time, a spokesperson for Trump’s transition team said: the “report corroborates what Mr Hegseth’s attorneys have said all along: the incident was fully investigated and no charges were filed because police found the allegations to be false”. More
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Rapper Rhymefest on Trump, Kanye and David Cameron: ‘There’s a political realignment happening in the US’
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 December 2024, 14:00
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View image in fullscreenChe Smith is your favorite rapper’s favorite wordsmith. As Rhymefest, the Chicago native announced himself as a formidable battle rapper, verbally sparring with Eminem and other stars in the late 90s. He co-wrote some of Kanye West’s biggest hits, not least the Grammy-winning Jesus Walks, while carving out his own exemplary career as a conscious emcee. He won a Golden Globe and an Oscar for Glory, the Selma film soundtrack theme he co-wrote with John Legend and Common, a fellow Chicagoan.Even as the successes piled up, Smith, 47, never stopped thinking about his humanitarian obligation to his home town of Chicago, cut down to a metonym for urban violence and rot.This year, when Chicago held school board elections, the first in the city’s history, Smith decided to run as an independent because he believed his experiences and relationships in the art and music community could prove beneficial.“I had my eye on this,” says Smith, an imposingly sage presence who commands attention whether on the stage or the stump. “I knew how historic an elected school board would be to Chicago, the last major municipality that did not have the democracy of an elected school board.”Pitted against a pastor, a non-profit CEO and a former district principal, Smith won with 32% of the vote. Once sworn in, he hopes to use art to expand students’ horizons. “In terms of Stem – science, technology, engineering and math – why are we not adding arts to make Steam?” says Smith, a former teaching fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. “I know it sounds cliche, but if you’re taking a trigonometry class and learning angles, and you’re in art class learning angles, it could make you better at trigonometry.”Smith’s twinning of commercial artistry with activism separates him from his rap celebrity peers who’d sooner shovel money into a foundation and occasionally turn up to hand out school supplies.View image in fullscreenHe might have become one of those check-writing celebrities if West’s mother, Donda, hadn’t intervened. “One of my biggest teachers,” Smith says of the late mentor he called Miss Maya, for Maya Angelou. “We would [come to campus] and play music for her when we’re 14 or 15. When she would hear us talk about shooting or selling dope, she would ask, ‘Is that really who you are? And if you get famous, is that who you want to be? Because if that is who people perceive you as, you’re going to have to live inside that character for the rest of your life.’”Smith and Ye (as the artist is now known) have been friends since they were teenagers, bonding over music. They came of age as Chicago was emerging as a hive of socially conscious rap and hip-hop force to rival the coasts. With Common and the producer No ID as guides and Twista and Lupe Fiasco pushing them, Smith and Ye emerged as a dynamic duo – the former putting weighty words to the latter’s chipmunk soul beats, inspiring generations of homegrown talents that run from Chance the Rapper to Earl Sweatshirt.In 2011, Smith and Ye founded Art of Culture, a youth mentoring non-profit where Smith teaches writing and leads cultural retreats around the world. It was originally named Donda’s House. But differences of opinion over how the non-profit should be run drove a years-long rift between the two. Things are better between them now. “What we do have is brotherhood,” Smith says. “And I think we as human beings in America have to learn how to have brotherhood and village without always expecting somebody to make our dream come true.”View image in fullscreenSmith’s imagination has carried him quite a distance. Unlike Ye, who was raised middle-class, Smith grew up poor and was raised by a single mother who had him at 15. He recounts some of this in a 2015 Showtime documentary called In My Father’s House. In it, Smith is driven to reunite with his father, absent from his life since age 12, after purchasing his childhood home. Despite dropping out of high school to pursue music, Smith gravitated to Donda and other individual teachers in his neighborhood – not least the Rev Jesse Jackson, who opened up the south side headquarters of his Operation Push civil rights organization for Wu-Tang concerts and rap shows featuring local artists.After seeing that combination of song and social responsibility play out so seamlessly up close, with Donda’s “sage counsel” still ringing in his ears, Smith committed himself to a more practical brand of rap realness. “When you hear lines like ‘we all self conscious / I’m just the first to admit it’ [from Ye’s All Falls Down], that didn’t come from how brilliant we are as artists,” Smith says. “That came from teachers that trained us how to be authentic. We have great teachers here that work with you in art. And the same way that was done for me, it’s my duty to serve in that way for up and coming artists.”Chicago city politics are notorious for being a vipers’ pit of sharp-elbowed, take-no-prisoners wheeler-dealing, defined by major party crony favor-trading for the better part of a century. The standard was set by Richard J Daley, the imperious mayor fabled to have fixed the 1960 presidential election for John F Kennedy. Decades later the same political machine would put Barack Obama in the White House.It’s only in the last few years that the Chicago Teachers Union has emerged as a major political player, funneling more than $23m into Illinois candidate Pacs since 2010 – investment that culminated in the 2023 election of the mayor, Brandon Johnson, a former public school social studies teacher. In 2023 CTU and its affiliate unions spent nearly $6.5m on Chicago elections, more than any interest group.Smith wasn’t the strongest candidate to represent district 10 – a craggy south side outcropping where a handful of high-performing schools are sprinkled among the failing and condemned. His given name alone, Che, taken from the Marxist revolutionary, writes its own attack ads; his Muslim faith provides the exclamation point.“I have a brother that walked across 15 countries, through the Darién Gap, who lives in my house,” Smith says when I ask him how the immigration crisis is affecting city schools. “Chicago has been having low birth rates, 10,000 less children for the last 10 years. That means there are hardly any children to enroll in public schools.” The new arrivals, he argues, keep the schools filled and funded.Then of course there’s the matter of Smith’s music career, another potential reason for voters to not take him seriously. Broadly, Smith takes offense at the way musicians are treated in the political arena, as if they’re only good for kicking off rallies. It pained him to watch Lil Jon deliver Georgia’s roll call at this year’s Democratic national convention in Chicago. “Lil Jon’s father is an aerospace engineer and his mother is a military nurse,” Smith says. “He can relate to people whether they’re low information or high information, and he’s not the only one. Kanye is the son of a Fulbright scholar. Lupe’s mom was a community activist. Chance’s parents are political operatives in the city. Why wouldn’t you let them reimagine policy? It’s a missed opportunity, but we artists have to take it upon ourselves not to wait to be handed power.”Smith might have waited longer to make his move if Mark Ronson, a close collaborator and one-time label boss, hadn’t pushed him to write an open letter to the former British prime minister David Cameron after the then Conservative party leader took exception to the hip-hop-coded content on BBC Radio 1 in 2006, saying it “encourages people to carry guns and knives”.“David Cameron – someone who I have very little, if anything, in common with – inspired me to know what my influence was as an artist and leverage my cultural currency for social and political justice,” recalls Smith. “But he said something that made sense in our meeting: ‘I turn on the radio, and all I hear is sirens, gunshots and violent rhetoric. I thought it was a national emergency. What am I supposed to do with that as a political leader?’“I thought he had a point,” Smith goes on. But what I had to tell him is that his politics created that warning shot he heard on the radio.”View image in fullscreenHe believes one reason Cameron ultimately lost power is because he “was never really in tune with the people on the street”.Keen to live up to his independent tag, Smith put $100,000 of his own nest egg into his school board bid – which was notably not endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union. He says his victory is a credit to a grassroots coalition that ran the gamut from “the streets” to former university students – whose votes he counted as a “‘very good’ professor rating”. He further appreciates that some of the same people who voted for him also voted for Donald Trump – a man who once disparaged Chicago as a “war-torn” city of Black people and Latinos “living in hell”.“Votes for Trump went up across the board in Black communities and Latino communities,” Smith says of the rightward shift in deep blue Chicago. “They voted for a deconstructor of systems. There’s a political realignment happening in America, and I don’t even think the institutions have caught up with it. There are a lot of people that long for the dismantling of the system for the opportunity to build it anew.”Smith has a lot he wants to tackle in his first term – busing, strategic partnerships, the district’s $1bn budget shortfall. That doesn’t seem like it leaves much room for making or performing music. But because school board politics is essentially pro bono work, he’ll have to find the time. “You have to ask yourself, why are these interests putting millions of dollars into running candidates for a job that doesn’t pay?” he says.There was a time in the not too distant past when Smith thought his raptivism could have lasting impact only if he were on a similar fame level to Ye, and not just a dope lyricist. But after his landmark victory, Smith feels like he’s finally meeting the political moment that was laid out for him long ago and is encouraging his industry peers to take similar authorship. “It’s not enough to make a song anymore,” he says. “You gotta make a song and then create a reality from it. It’s time to take all those raps and all those words and start to walk through them and create a better society from the imagination of the music. That’s what I’m doing.” More
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Biden pardons his son, Trump will absolve his criminal allies. America shouldn’t stand for this | Simon Jenkins
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 December 2024, 13:22
The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Yes, any father might do the same for a son. Yes, the boy is reformed, forgiven, on the mend. Only nasty people are out to jail him. Live and let live. Yet there is something monumental in the pardon granted by the outgoing US president, Joe Biden. Six months ago, he scored political points by denying he would pardon his son Hunter Biden. Now, with the election over, he has done so.The easy response is: what is new? President Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon; Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother and other figures whose families had donated to the Democrats; Donald Trump pardoned his son-in-law’s father and dodgy aides galore. No one doubts that, as president, Trump will pardon a number of outrageous figures – perhaps even the Capitol Hill rioters of 2021. We wait to see if this includes trying to pardon himself from various pending prosecutions (though he cannot extend these powers to cases brought at state level).Biden can plead a measure of justice in that Hunter Biden’s relatively minor convictions – for tax evasion and lying about his drug use when buying a gun – were frantically pursued by his political foes. But then there was a similar grain of politics in the equally frantic prosecution of Trump’s business misdeeds by the Democratic authorities in New York. The front page of the New York Times went tabloid and gleefully shrieked: “GUILTY”.Cynics – or as they might say, realists – will reassure themselves that all this will be soon forgotten, as it was in the past. Across the landscape of US crime and punishment – aspects of which still border on frontier anarchy – these are peccadilloes. More important issues beckon from a new Trump presidency.But justice is a universal liberty, one that the US purports to champion around the world. That a nation’s executive claims the right – even constitutionally – to override justice must be wrong. The US constitution is built on explicit rights and freedoms, protected by a separation of powers. The ostensive purpose of article two, section two was to strengthen the president in handling the union’s army and state militias. It was not to condone crime. It has been grossly abused. During the election, the Democrats presented themselves as the guardians of morality, with Biden praising Kamala Harris for having the “moral compass of a saint”. In reneging on his promise, Biden has undermined this.The US constitution is a thing of wonder. It has held the union together – sometimes only just – for two and a half centuries, while global nations and empires have been upheaved and disintegrated. Its survival is rooted in two underlying principles. The first is respect for the rights of often very different states to order their local laws, such as on abortion and gun control. The second is a balanced separation of federal powers between the judiciary, executive and legislature. This separation, in what is today a deeply polarised American society, clearly needs strengthening.But how? The constitution’s final task was to make its own reform near impossible. Sometimes, just sometimes, such reforms have been achieved. Presidential pardon looks like a case for change.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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‘People feel drained’: anti-Trump Americans face temptation to tune out
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 December 2024, 11:00
In late 2016, soon after Donald Trump was elected to his first White House term, many women were diligently knitting pink “pussy” hats to wear at a huge march where they protested against the election of a man who had recently boasted that he would “grab” women.There were other protests too. And across much of non-Trump-voting America, there was a sense of activism and engagement amid the shock of a Trump victory as many ordinary Americans galvanized themselves for what turned out to be one of the most chaotic presidencies in US history.Eight years later, the response of many centrist and left-leaning Americans to a Trump second term has been more muted. For many anti-Trump voters – and even some institutions – the return of Trump prompts a feeling of just wanting to ignore it all, including politics more broadly, and focus their energy elsewhere.In New York City, residents were once shocked that one of their own – Donald Trump, a man once close to Democratic power brokers in the city – had been elected, as a Republican, over Hillary Clinton. In the aftermath of November’s shock national election, they are more apt to say, “Well, we got whipped,” and move on to other topics.The left-leaning media outlet MSNBC has lost 47% of its audience since election day, according to Nielsen Media Research, while the Los Angeles Times and especially the Washington Post saw subscribers flee by the hundreds of thousands after the billionaire owners of each paper chose at the last minute not to make a presidential endorsement.After a year of intense energy, propelled by political events including two Trump assassination attempts and Joe Biden stepping down from his campaign, the mood in New York has deflated: call it the great tune-out of late 2024.It is, said Sonia Ossorio, executive director of the National Organization for Women NYC, “a coping method”.“Women’s relationship to politics is like a bad romance: you call a friend to remind you how toxic it is,” Ossorio said. “Coming to terms with the election and feeling a sense of instability about the future is personal right now, and people feel drained. It will take time and needed collective reflection to regroup.”In New York’s Washington Square Park, the site of 2016 anti-Trump protests that segued seamlessly into protests for #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, the overturning of Roe v Wade, Ukraine, Gaza and more, today there’s almost no overt sign of resistance to Trump 2.View image in fullscreen“For me it’s an exhaustion,” said Josh Marcus, a 39-year-old tech worker from El Paso, Texas, who was visiting the park with his partner, Marisha Hicks, a stay-at-home mother. The pair had come on vacation to gauge whether it might be time to move back to New York, in part to leave Texas politics behind them.“We went from disappointment that Biden was staying in,” Marcus said, which changed when “he dropped out, Kamala came in and we felt a little bit better and she had a chance. But it was the complete opposite when it came to election day.”Hicks, 45, said she was in a period of mourning. “The first time it happened I was in complete shock. This time, I almost expected it. So now I’m personally focused on strategizing for the next four years.”Both said too many losses to Trump – whether it be the Russia investigation, two impeachments, the failure of federal prosecutions and a felony conviction that appeared to do little to slow his momentum, if not the reverse – had led to a sense of inevitability.“It kept happening,” said Marcus. “We’d be thinking, ‘Surely he’s not going to get past this?’ But then you just come to expect he will – and he did.”Hicks said she had hopes that the non-politically motivated, those who did not vote at all, would now be the ones to start a revolution.“I voted, but I can totally empathize with those who didn’t. People are definitely giving Trump less attention. I certainly don’t want to read his tweets this time around.”Jaylen Alli, a street artist in the park, said he wasn’t “too big on politics in general. I don’t waste my energy, my opinions or my thoughts on these kinds of constructs. Politics is a selfish machine that doesn’t help the people.”A new study from the Cambridge Judge Business School analyzed the relationship between traditional media and social media and found that news articles were being influenced by the latter to adopt a more negative tone.“In the aftermath of the US election, people might well feel overwhelmed by the volume of negative news they’ve been exposed to,” said the study’s co-author Joe Watson.“Taking a break could be important for many reasons, including to recover.”Rosie Creamer, 54, a fashion shoot producer who was shopping for the Thanksgiving holiday on Sixth Avenue last week, said: “I can’t live my life in a future trip about what’s going to happen.” She added: “Trump said he’d build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. Did that happen? No.”Creamer said she had started to pay less attention to media reports, and to take them with a bigger grain of salt. “Every time I read an article saying ‘This could happen,’ I stop reading. It also means it could not. So we’ll see. I’ll proceed accordingly.”Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director at Women’s March, is planning another march on Washington in January for which the group, she says, has collected 100,000 signatures. At least 470,000 people were at the women’s march in 2017, and more than 2 million were estimated to have joined protests around the world.“I think we’re seeing a different reaction” this time around, Carmona said. “Folks are stunned and taking time to figure out what this means.”One change could be for protest to become more localized, moving away from the kind of tightly choreographed marches that characterized Trump’s first term. The protest group Indivisible has put out a new protest manual that notes political power resides in many places.According to Carmona, the diffusion of protest from national to local is an option, but she believes marches remain useful – perhaps even more so now – because she believes they bring new people into movements. “They help tell our story and demonstrate our agenda to people where they are at. They bring the movement to the people, not the people to the movement.“I’m sure that once folks are rested, they will be back in their lane, fighting,” she added. “But not every intervention is for every person.” More
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Anti-opioid groups are ‘optimistic’ about Trump’s tariffs. Will the move help tackle the fentanyl crisis?
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 December 2024, 11:00
Anti-opioid campaigners in the US have welcomed Donald Trump’s threat to hit Mexico, China and Canada with increased trade tariffs if they do not curb the smuggling of the powerful drug driving the US opioid epidemic.Families and doctors grappling with a crisis that has claimed about 900,000 lives say the move may signal that a second Trump administration will finally get serious about tackling the flow of fentanyl into the US. But they also warn that much more needs to be done to reduce demand for opioids and to rein in the power of the pharmaceutical industry which created the epidemic.Trump said last week that he will issue an executive order on his return to the US presidency next month imposing a 25% tariff on goods from Mexico and Canada until their governments clamp down on the smuggling of fentanyl and other drugs into the US, and on people crossing the northern and southern borders illegally.The president-elect also said he will impose a 10% additional tariff on imports from China as the leading manufacturer of the precursor chemicals used by drug cartels to manufacture fentanyl, a highly potent synthetic opioid that is now the single largest cause of drug overdose deaths in the US.Ed Bisch, who lost his 18-year-old son Eddie to a prescription opioid overdose in 2001, said that tariffs are a sign that Trump “means business”.“I’m optimistic that the threat of substantial tariffs will lead to major cooperation in reducing the fentanyl poisoning of America,” he said.Bisch and other campaigners also say that some of Trump’s cabinet choices may signal a greater engagement with the crisis by the next administration, particularly as Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is nominated as health secretary, was a heroin user and the vice-president-elect, JD Vance, wrote a bestselling book, Hillbilly Elegy, about growing up in a household and region hit by drug addiction.Trump campaigned in 2016 and again this year on commitments to tackle the opioid epidemic which has devastated regions of America in ways that are often unseen in other parts. The crisis dragged entire communities deeper into poverty, drove up crime and greater dependency on welfare, and tore families apart.Millions of children have been raised by their grandparents because the intervening generation was imprisoned, dead or in no condition to parent. In West Virginia, the state worst hit by the epidemic, nearly half of all grandparents are raising their grandchildren.The opioid crisis has also played an important part in undermining public confidence in government institutions and medical practice in parts of the US because the epidemic grew out of the pharmaceutical industry pushing the wide prescribing of narcotic pain killers from which drug makers made billions of dollars with the complicity of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The epidemic then evolved as illegal supplies of heroin and then fentanyl drove up the death toll.But critics say Trump failed to follow through on his campaign promises in 2016 and his next administration will be a test of how really committed is he is on the issue in the face of what is likely to be major pushback from the drug industry.As president in 2017, Trump declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency.“No part of our society, not young or old, rich or poor, urban or rural has been spared this plague,” he said at the time.But two years later, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) criticised the Trump administration for a lack of coordination of efforts and failing to fulfill a legal requirement to issue a national drug control strategy.Robert Kent, who served as general counsel for the White House office of national drug control policy under Joe Biden, credits Trump with declaring the epidemic an emergency and establishing an opioid commission that issued guidelines on how to combat the crisis.“In Trump’s first term, he was the one who declared an opioid public health emergency, which is still in effect. The problem was there were no concrete actions taken specifically as a result. He didn’t put significant new resources into it,” he said.Kent said that the Biden administration put a greater emphasis on “harm reduction” such as the provision of overdose antidotes and test strips allowing drug users to detect fentanyl. But he fears those may be in danger from Republicans who see such measures as enabling drug use.Andrew Kolodny, director of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing and one of the first doctors to raise the alarm about the dangers of mass prescribing prescription painkillers, said harm reduction was necessary but did not get to the root causes of the epidemic.“It’s not hard for Trump to do better than Biden did on opioids. There were some good things that came out of the Biden administration. It was nice to see the federal government move more in a direction of harm reduction. But beyond that there wasn’t really that much done so by Biden,” he said.“When Biden ran for office, he put out a platform on how he would address the opioid crisis if he was president, and it was an excellent platform. But he never really implemented the plan.”Kolodny said that if Trump wants to have a significant impact in reducing opioid addiction he needs to create cheaper and easier access to treatment.“The vast majority of people with opioid use disorder actually want help for it. The reason they keep using fentanyl is that it’s much easier to get fentanyl and cheaper to get fentanyl than it is to get yourself onto buprenorphine or methadone treatment or find a doctor or programme that will very quickly enroll you in treatment when you ask for it,” he said.Researchers are still trying to decipher a drop in overdose deaths in the US last year. They believe better treatment and prevention are playing a part. The Drug Enforcement Administration said earlier this month that the amount of fentanyl found laced into other drugs had dropped and that they were therefore less potent and dangerous. The DEA head, Anne Milgram, attributed that to the Biden administration’s targeting of Mexican cartels and their supply chains.But Kent is cautious.“There’s a lot of people running around because we’ve seen a slight reduction in overdose deaths feeling like that’s mission accomplished when we’re only losing 93,000 people versus 111,000 a year. I would never define that as success in my world. Even within those numbers, underserved communities are being higher impacted at this point. In Black and brown communities the numbers are going up while the other numbers are going down. So there’s work to be done,” he said.Kent said he agrees with the need for an increased focus on the border.“We need to increase the number of staff at the border, just for a whole bunch of reasons, including illicit drugs coming across. There needs to be an investment in screening technology. And there needs to be a continued effort with China, trying to convince China to work with its chemical companies to stop selling the chemical precursors to the Mexican cartels so they can create the fentanyl,” he said.Bisch and others whose lives have been hit by the opioid epidemic are also keen to see broader reform of a system that enabled the drug companies to push mass prescription of opioids on the public in ways not permitted in other countries.Bisch supports Trump’s nomination for attorney general, Pam Bondi, who as Florida’s attorney general cracked down on doctors and “pill mills” churning out opioid prescriptions to anyone who would pay. In 2010, Florida dispensed more opioid prescriptions than every other US state combined as people travelled from across the country to buy the painkillers in bulk. Bisch wants to see Bondi use federal laws to prosecute the drug company executives who made false claims about the safety of prescription opioids in order to get them approved.He also backs Trump’s nomination of Kennedy, who has accused the FDA of putting the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry ahead of people’s health by effectively encouraging the prescribing of too many drugs and the selection of Marty Makary to head the FDA. Makary has said doctors in the US prescribe too many medications compared with the rest of the world.“The best way to lower drug costs in the US is to stop taking drugs we don’t need,” he told the US Senate in September.In nominating Makary, Trump said the “FDA has lost the trust of Americans and lost sight of its primary goal as a regulator”. He said Makary and Kennedy would work together to “properly evaluate harmful chemicals poisoning our nation’s food supply and drugs”.Bondi is expected to have a relatively easy path to approval by the US Senate. But Kennedy and Makary may face a more difficult time. Kennedy, in particular, will face scrutiny over his rejection of vaccines. But Kolodny said they will also be up against the pharmaceutical industry.“I’ll actually be shocked if Kennedy gets confirmed and if Makary gets confirmed for FDA commissioner because big pharma doesn’t want them, and big pharma has a lot of muscle on Capitol Hill,” he said. More
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With his pardon of son Hunter, Joe Biden delivers a heartfelt hypocrisy
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 December 2024, 03:46
A loving act of mercy by a father who has already known much sorrow? Or a hypocritical political manoeuvre reminiscent of his great foe? Maybe both can be true.Joe Biden’s announcement on Sunday that he had pardoned his son Hunter, who is facing sentencing in two criminal cases, is likely to have been the product of a Shakespearean struggle between head and heart.On the one hand, Biden is one of the last great institutionalists in Washington. “From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making,” he said in an unusually direct and personal statement on Sunday. To undermine the separation of powers goes against every fibre of his political being.On the other hand, Biden is nothing without family. His speeches are peppered with references to his parents. As a senator, he once took a train from Washington to Wilmington, Delaware, so he could blow out the candles on a birthday cake for his eight-year-old daughter, Ashley, at the station, then cross the platform and take the next train back to work.Biden was profoundly shaped by the death of his first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden, and 13-month-old daughter Naomi in a car accident and, much later, the death of his son Beau from brain cancer. In that context, Hunter’s status as the first child of a sitting president to face criminal charges will have pained his father in what Ernest Hemingway called “the broken places”.Hunter was convicted this summer of lying about his drug use when he bought a gun. Joe Biden categorically ruled out a pardon or commutation for his son, telling reporters: “I abide by the jury decision. I will do that and I will not pardon him.” Hunter also pleaded guilty in a separate tax evasion trial and was due to be sentenced in both cases later this month.Biden reportedly spent months agonising over what to do. The scales were almost certainly tilted by Donald Trump’s victory in last month’s presidential election. The prospect of leaving Hunter to the tender mercies of Trump’s sure-to-be politicised, retribution-driven justice department was too much to bear. Biden typically takes advice from close family and is likely to have reached the decision after talking it over during what was an intimate Thanksgiving weekend.“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong,” the president said in a statement, calling it “a miscarriage of justice”.He added: “There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”Joe Biden’s defenders will certainly contend that, if Hunter had been an ordinary citizen, the gun case would not have come this far, and his father was simply righting that wrong. Republicans spent years hyping investigations into Hunter that failed to produce a shred of evidence linking his father to corruption.Eric Holder, a former attorney general, wrote on social media that no US attorney “would have charged this case given the underlying facts. After a five-year investigation the facts as discovered only made that clear. Had his name been Joe Smith the resolution would have been – fundamentally and more fairly – a declination. Pardon warranted.”It was also noted that this is hardly the first time pardons have smacked of nepotism. Bill Clinton as president pardoned his half-brother for old cocaine charges, and Trump pardoned the father of Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, for tax evasion and retaliating against a cooperating witness, though in both cases those men had already served their prison terms. Trump also used the dog days of his first presidency to pardon the rogues’ gallery of Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone.And yet for many Americans there will be something jarring about the double standard of a president pardoning a member of his own family ahead of numerous other worthy cases. Republicans in the House of Representatives naturally pounced with more hyperbole about the “Biden crime family”.But there were also more thoughtful objections. Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, wrote on social media: “While as a father I certainly understand President Joe Biden’s natural desire to help his son by pardoning him, I am disappointed that he put his family ahead of the country. This is a bad precedent that could be abused by later Presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation.”Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman turned Trump critic, said on the MSNBC network: “Joe Biden repeatedly said he wouldn’t do this so he repeatedly lied. This just furthers cynicism that people have about politics and that cynicism strengthens Trump because Trump can say, ‘I’m not a unique threat. Everybody does this. If I do something for my kid, my son-in-law, whatever, look, Joe Biden does the same thing.’ I get it but this was a selfish move by Biden, which politically only strengthens Trump. It’s just deflating.”The Trump context is impossible to ignore in this moral maze. Next month he will become the first convicted criminal sworn in as president, though three cases against him have all but perished. He is already moving to appoint loyalists to the FBI and justice department.Michelle Obama once advised, when they go low, we go high. On Sunday Joe Biden, 82 and heading for the exit with little to lose, decided to go low. Perhaps it was what any parent would have done. More
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Joe Biden issues ‘full and unconditional’ pardon to son Hunter
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 December 2024, 02:18
Joe Biden has issued “a full and unconditional” pardon to his son Hunter Biden covering convictions on federal gun and tax charges, the US president said in a statement released by the White House on Sunday.The decision marks a reversal for the president, who had repeatedly said he would not use his executive authority to pardon his son or commute his sentence.Hunter Biden was scheduled to be sentenced for his conviction on federal gun charges on 12 December. He was scheduled to be sentenced in the tax case four days later.In the statement, Joe Biden said that he had long maintained that he would “not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted”.But, he argued, “it is clear that Hunter was treated differently”, adding that the charges in the case “came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election”.Hunter Biden was found guilty in Delaware in June on three felony counts relating to his purchase of a handgun in 2018. He had written on his gun-purchase form, falsely, that he was not a user of illicit drugs.He pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges in Los Angeles in September, opting for an “open” plea, where a defendant pleads guilty to the charges and leaves his sentencing fate in the hands of the judge.The tax charges carried up to 17 years behind bars and the gun charges were punishable by up to 25 years, though federal sentencing guidelines were expected to call for far less time and it was possible the president’s son would have avoided prison time entirely.The pardon covers all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024, including but not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted”.Joe Biden said on Sunday evening that his son had been prosecuted when “without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form”.He noted in the statement that “those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given non-criminal resolutions”.Biden accused his political opponents of singling out his 54-year-old son.“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong,” he said.“There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”Biden departed for Angola later on Sunday evening for what may be his last foreign trip as president before leaving office.Speculation had been mounting that the president would issue a pardon since Hunter was seen with his father in Nantucket over the Thanksgiving break.Donald Trump had said in October that he would not be surprised if Hunter Biden were to receive a pardon.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I wouldn’t take it off the books,” Trump said. “See, unlike Joe Biden, despite what they’ve done to me, where they’ve gone after me so viciously … And Hunter’s a bad boy.”On Sunday, Trump reacted with outrage, writing on his social network: “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!” Just one day earlier, though, Trump had reminded Americans that he himself had previously used the pardon power to wipe away convictions of those close to him. In his final weeks in office, Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in law, Jared Kushner, as well as multiple allies convicted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. On Saturday, Trump announced plans to nominate the elder Kushner to be the US ambassador to France.Republicans have long zeroed in on Hunter Biden’s difficulties – questions around lucrative foreign consultancies, broken relationships and a crack cocaine addiction – in an effort to politically damage his father.A laptop Hunter Biden left in a Delaware repair shop that made its way into Republican hands formed a scandal in the closing days of the 2020 election. Republicans claimed that the so-called “laptop from hell”, which featured images of Hunter posing with guns, sex workers and crack cocaine, was suppressed by media favorable to Democrats.Hunter Biden later published a book, Beautiful Things: a Memoir, that detailed his struggles as a drug addict. The Biden family denied more serious accusations that Hunter’s profitable financial arrangements with businesspeople in Ukraine and China amounted to graft using the family name.James Comer, one of the Republicans leading congressional investigations into Biden’s family, denounced the pardon. “The charges Hunter faced were just the tip of the iceberg in the blatant corruption that President Biden and the Biden Crime Family have lied about to the American people,” Comer wrote on X. “It’s unfortunate that, rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability.”“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 Biden said in a statement on Sunday, adding he had remained sober for more than five years.“In the throes of addiction, I squandered many opportunities and advantages … I will never take the clemency I have been given today for granted and will devote the life I have rebuilt to helping those who are still sick and suffering.”Hunter Biden’s legal team filed Sunday night in both Los Angeles and Delaware asking the judges handling his gun and tax cases to immediately dismiss them, citing the pardon.In the statement announcing the pardon, Joe Biden said that for his “entire career” he had followed a simple principle: to tell the truth to the American people.“Here’s the truth: I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice – and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a president would come to this decision.”Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report. More

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