Why Did Biden Pardon Hunter?

Happy Tuesday! Oxford University Press’ word of the year is “brain rot.” 

Checks out.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Romania’s top constitutional court on Monday ruled that the first round results of the country’s presidential election—which had far-right outsider Călin Georgescu in the lead and advancing to the second round with center-right Elena Lasconi—could go ahead. The ruling followed a recount prompted by accusations that Georgescu had benefited from favoritism on TikTok. The second round of voting will proceed on December 8. Meanwhile, the Romanian center-left party on Sunday came first in parliamentary elections but fell well short of a majority as three far-right parties surged—which will likely make it difficult for the Social Democrats to form a government. 
• President Joe Biden on Monday arrived in Angola—after a refueling stop on the island nation of Cape Verde—on the first and only trip to sub-Saharan Africa of his presidency. He’s the first sitting president to visit the southern African country. On Tuesday, Biden is set to visit a slavery museum in the country before traveling to the south to highlight a railroad project partly funded by the United States to provide a route to facilitate the export of critical minerals to the West, instead of to China. 
• Lawyers for Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son, moved late on Sunday to have his gun and tax cases dismissed. Special counsel David Weiss, who brought the cases in Delaware and California, pushed back in court filings on the efforts to dismiss the cases, asking they instead be closed, meaning they’d remain on the record. Prosecutors also defended their investigations against accusations of political motivations. “In total, eleven different [federal] judges appointed by six different presidents, including his father, considered and rejected the defendant’s claims, including his claims for selective and vindictive prosecution,” prosecutors wrote in a Monday filing.
• President-elect Donald Trump on Monday warned that if all the Hamas-held hostages in Gaza were not released before his inauguration, “there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East, and for those in charge.” The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced earlier on Monday that Omer Neutra, an Israeli-American soldier who was thought to have been taken hostage on October 7, was actually killed that day and his body taken to Gaza. 
• The Defense Department on Tuesday announced a $725 million aid package to Ukraine through the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which allows the president to transfer weapons from U.S. military stockpiles. The package included munitions for surface-to-air missiles, High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, and counter-drone systems, as well as 155mm and 105mm artillery ammunition. 
• Hezbollah on Monday fired on Mount Dov in the Golan Heights—the group’s first cross-border attack on Israel since the ceasefire went into effect on Wednesday. In response Israeli jets struck targets in Lebanon, including, the IDF said, the launchers used to fire mortars at Mount Dov. The truce agreed to last week requires Hezbollah and the IDF to withdraw from southern Lebanon over a 60-day period, and prevents either party from conducting offensive military operations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that Hezbollah’s attack constituted a grave violation of the truce. Meanwhile, Lebanese officials claimed Israeli strikes over the weekend breached the terms of the ceasefire, though the IDF said they followed efforts by Hezbollah to access military sites.
• The House Oversight and Accountability Committee on Monday released its final report following its investigation of the COVID-19 pandemic, determining that the pandemic was the result of a leak from a lab conducting gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China. The report added that the government contributed to “misinformation” when it dismissed the lab leak theory. “Unfortunately, kneejerk reactions by the federal government did little to fix the problem and instead may have sowed deeper distrust of government institutions while trampling on the First Amendment of the Constitution,” the report states. The report also panned former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s COVID-19 response, saying he “participated in medical malpractice and publicly covered up the total number of nursing home fatalities in New York.”

Pardon Me, Dad 

Your Morning Dispatchers have done several tours of duty in the trenches of the years-long Hunter Biden saga: From the early details of the federal criminal investigation, to last summer’s charges and accompanying plea deal to resolve them … to that plea deal’s land-speed record implosion in open court, and Biden’s much-publicized gun charges trial, his subsequent conviction on those charges, and his last-minute guilty plea in a separate tax charges case.

That’s not to mention the whistleblower allegations of political interference favoring Biden in the Justice Department’s probe; the House Republican investigation into Hunter’s foreign business dealings featuring the president’s son and one of his close associates who testified in closed-door sessions on Capitol Hill; or the Justice Department indicting a key source underpinning the “Biden Crime Family” narrative and House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden, alleging the source fabricated his statements to federal law enforcement and apparently met with Russian officials.

So when the president issued a sweeping pardon for his son late on Sunday night, we might have hoped the Hunter Biden story was finally over. But we know better by now. 

The pardon fully clears Hunter Biden of …

As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. Our 1,410-word item on the Hunter Biden pardon is available in the members-only version of TMD.

Worth Your Time

• BBC reporter Lyse Doucet made a rare visit to West Darfur in Sudan, an area devastated by a civil war nearing its two-year mark. “No-one lives in the ghostly outskirts of el-Geneina any more,” Doucet wrote. “But its empty buildings still stand to tell their shocking stories, loudly and clearly. Charred homes and shops are peppered with bullet holes. Doors are wrecked. Metal shutters are smashed. Rusting Sudanese army tanks dot the streets. In this rare trip for international journalists into Darfur, we could still smell the fires which blazed here last year. … It was RSF fighters, along with allied Arab militias, who ran amok in el-Geneina last year, mainly targeting residents from the non-Arab Masalit community in what human rights groups, including UN experts, have described as ethnic cleansing and possible war crimes and crimes against humanity. Human Rights Watch concluded it was a possible genocide.”
• Something happened to journalists when Donald Trump was elected, Yascha Mounk wrote for Persuasion. “The new self-conception adopted by a large share of American journalists was at once less demanding and more self-aggrandizing than the one it replaced. It was less demanding because it provided them with the perfect excuse for indulging in their own biases: giving favor to your own side was recast from being a failure of professional ethics to being a brave act of resistance. Simultaneously, it was more self-aggrandizing because it seemingly transformed journalists from humdrum stenographers of the first draft of history to key actors in a grand historical battle for the preservation of democracy. … The aspiration of many journalists to save democracy has not just proven counterproductive because it drove a big part of their readership away from mainstream outlets. It has also deprived Democrats of key facts they would have needed to make good strategic decisions—which, ironically, has helped to strengthen the very political forces that the journalists who were self-consciously striving to preserve democracy were trying to contain.” 

Presented Without Comment

Reuters: Putin Drops Plan for ‘Friendship Games’ to Rival Olympics 

In the Zeitgeist

Now that Thanksgiving Day has passed and we can listen to Christmas music without judgment from seasonal purists, we thought we’d share this reimagined Christmas standard (and that is not Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You”). Enjoy the Punch Brothers’ version of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: Nick examined (🔒) Biden’s decision to pardon his son. 
• On the podcasts: Sarah and David discuss Kash Patel’s nomination and Hunter Biden’s pardon on Advisory Opinions and Jamie was joined by Michael Mazza to respond to last week’s Dispatch Podcast episode about Taiwan.
• On the site: Chris shares his thoughts on the Hunter Biden pardon, Paul Miller considers claims that Trump is a “fascist,” and Justin Perry looks into Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s pick to head the National Institutes of Health.