ADDED: "Let’s Talk About RFK Jr.’s Workout Pants/Our health secretary is a jeans guy, and he knows it" (The Atlantic)(gift link).BawitMAHA https://t.co/npFlS2NxTo
— HHS (@HHSGov) February 17, 2026
This is an embarrassing headline: "How Biden Changed His Mind on Pardoning Hunter: ‘Time to End All of This’/The threat of a retribution-focused Trump administration and his son’s looming sentencings prompted the president to abandon a promise not to get involved in Hunter Biden’s legal problems."
They — the authors are Katie Rogers and Glenn Thrush — cannot know the interior of the President's mind. He may have changed what he was saying about his thoughts, but I presume that he was lying all along, for political purposes, when he said he wouldn't pardon Hunter, and I presume that he always intended to pardon him.
The phrase "How Biden Changed His Mind" is misdirection — sleight of hand. If we fall for it, we unwittingly form a belief that Biden did change his mind. He and his supporters weren't lying to us throughout the campaign season. He was weighing all the factors and the factors changed after the election. He painfully reweighed and his consistent and honorable decision-making process yielded a new result. Let Rogers and Rush detail the factors and burnish our respect for the venerable statesman.
No, no, absolutely not. Now, and only now, am I reading past the headline. So let's see:
A dark sky had fallen over Nantucket, Mass., on Saturday evening when President Biden left church alongside his family after his final Thanksgiving as president.
It was a dark and stormy night. We begin with a weather report.
Inside a borrowed vacation compound earlier in the week, with its views of the Nantucket Harbor, Mr. Biden had met with his wife, Jill Biden, and his son Hunter Biden to discuss a decision that had tormented him for months....
Who, if anyone, is the source of this knowledge of Biden's months-long mental torment?
Support for pardoning Hunter Biden had been building for months within the family...
Who? Jill? Hunter? Who's talking to the NYT? How is building support observed? Was this support in the mind of Jill? Was it voiced to the President?
... but external forces had more recently weighed on Mr. Biden, who watched warily as President-elect Donald J. Trump picked loyalists for his administration who promised to bring political and legal retribution to Mr. Trump’s enemies.
Biden also "watched" as Trump got elected, but that's not mentioned. It's not politically convenient to characterize Biden as waiting to see if his party might win, lying about the pardon in an effort to produce that win, and needing a new plan when the party lost. It needs to be about Trump's bad behavior, and son of a bitch, it was!... in this dark-and-stormy-night tale the NYT is telling.
Mr. Biden had even invited Mr. Trump to the White House, listening without responding as the president-elect aired familiar grievances about the Justice Department — then surprised his host by sympathizing with the Biden family’s own troubles with the department, according to three people briefed on the conversation.
So Trump was sympathetic, and it's here, for the first time in the article, that we see a reference to sources. It's harder to portray Trump as a vengeful narcissist when 3 sources say he sympathized with Biden. It was sympathy, we're told, in the context of Trump's complaining that Biden's administration was using criminal prosecution against Trump. Maybe that inspired Biden to see how a pardon of Hunter could be portrayed not as a political favor to Hunter but as an end to political disfavor. It sounds crazy, but we're looking for "How Biden Changed His Mind."
But the article doesn't pursue that, perhaps because it had no evidence that the meeting with Trump jogged Biden's thoughts on the subject. Or do you think the fact that Biden was smiling widely is circumstantial evidence that a wonderful new idea had arisen?
The next thing in the article is this:
But it was Hunter Biden’s looming sentencings on federal gun and tax charges, scheduled for later this month, that gave Mr. Biden the final push....
The final push. So we were supposed to see the Trump meeting as a push? This is a long article, and it purports to tell us "How Biden Changed His Mind," but there was no elaboration of "how" in that bit about the meeting with Trump. Now, I'm wondering if Trump cleverly played Biden somehow? The Times had 3 sources about the conversation and we got one unenlightening sentence.
But there is much more to the article after that introduction. We're told the NYT spoke with "a half dozen people close to the president and his family," but not told who they are or anything about how they could have access to Biden's mind and why they should be trusted to tell the truth.
When the president returned to Washington late Saturday evening, he convened a call with several senior aides to tell them about his decision. “Time to end all of this,” Mr. Biden said, according to a person briefed on the call....
That's says nothing about how or when Biden decided to pardon Hunter, only about the timing of the action.
Mr. Biden’s decision has tarnished a storied public legacy that began more than 50 years ago....
Here's a good place for elision.
Hunter Biden’s decision to plead guilty on the tax charges — after a weeklong gun trial in Delaware in June that rehashed the family’s darkest days — had further embittered Mr. Biden.... [who] began to realize there might not be any way out beyond issuing a pardon. It appears that there was never serious consideration of anything short of a full pardon, such as a commutation of his sentence, they said.
Was there any serious consideration of restricting the full pardon to the gun and tax charges? The article doesn't mention the sweep of the pardon Biden gave, covering every possible federal crime in a 10-year period, such as the oft-alleged corrupt dealings with Ukraine and China!
For his part, Hunter Biden was hardly shy about telling the people around him that he wanted — needed — a pardon, although it is unclear how often he had discussed the matter directly with his father before this past week....
You've got sources. What did he say? Did he threaten to do drugs again and yell about how it would all be dad's fault? Did he say he's writing a memoir that will destroy Joe's reputation forever? Did he threaten to offer his testimony to Trump officials about Joe's involvement in corrupt dealings with Ukraine and China? You're inviting your readers to visualize this scene. That's what I'm seeing.
And here's a hint that the corrupt dealings were part of the discussion:
While both father and son expressed anger over the yearslong effort by Republicans to link Hunter Biden’s questionable foreign business consulting to the president — the unproven “Biden crime family” narrative — they were almost equally contemptuous of the prosecutors who aggressively pursued both cases....
The door was cracked open for half a sentence, then quickly shut.
The statement that followed from Mr. Biden on Sunday offered a window into the mind-set of an aggrieved president who, in the end, could not separate his duty as a father from his half century of principled promises as a politician....
The most comforting possible narrative is chosen! That's the answer to how — how Biden "changed" his mind. He's just too devoted a father — to his duty as a father. Surely, you won't subtract very much from the value of his half century of principled promises as a politician!
I've read the whole thing now, and the NYT hasn't rebutted my presumption that Biden was lying all along, for political purposes, when he said he wouldn't pardon Hunter. And I need to know much more about the 10-year sweep of the pardon, covering all federal crimes, and how that connects to Joe Biden's own possible corruption. Don't just label that "unproven." Investigate it!
ADDED: I just listened to this morning's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, and it is much better. The guest is the NYT reporter Peter Baker. Excerpts:
I think obviously the only thing that's changed between June... and December when he gives this pardon, is the election. And you can look at it a couple of different ways. You could look at it in the way of him not being honest in the summer. That he really was in fact considering this, but didn't want to say before an election because it would be politically damaging. And only after the election does he admit that in fact he is going to use his extraordinary power for his son. Or — and this may be an and/or — you can also look at it as waking up to the reality of a Trump-run Justice Department in which this new president is promising retribution and specifically to go after Hunter Biden and a president who's on the way out thinking, I'm not going to let that happen. I'm not only going to pardon him for this tax and gun charges. I'm going to protect him from the next guy who's making very clear he's going to use the FBI for retribution....
[In his statement announcing the pardon, Biden] talks about the current prosecutions that his son has faced being unfair and selective. He doesn't say the other part... which is that he is guarding against politicization of the Justice Department by his successor. Right? He could have framed it that way, but he didn't. But the net effect of what he did by making it a 10-year sweeping pardon for any and everything that his son might have done does have that effect. And it does tell you what was probably going through his mind when he decided to issue the pardon.
What Peter Baker says was "probably going through his mind" is what I was saying Rogers and Thrush left out of their "How Biden Changed His Mind" article.
Mr. Biden has never claimed that his son died in combat, but he has often spoken of his son’s overseas deployment and the toll it took on his family. Mr. Biden’s supporters say that military families are entitled to their grief, but that the president is also entitled to his....
The general thinking among Mr. Biden’s supporters is that he is a welcome change from President Donald J. Trump, who was almost always publicly unable to express empathy. They believe Mr. Biden is the right president for this moment in history, one so far marked by the unthinkable loss....
Biden needs to show people that he's focused on the problems that beset us now and that he can do something to help us. To stand there offering up himself as an example of a person who has suffered doesn't send a message of focus and competence. It's a message that can be read as Hey, I've got problems of my own. Faced with parents of marines who'd just been killed, he said, essentially, my son died too.
His son died 6 years ago. You might be tolerant of an old man who came up to you at your child's funeral and wanted you to know how much he still hurts from the death of his child 6 years ago. It might be difficult, but you'd probably think something like, that poor old guy. But this poor old guy is President of the United States. He asked to be President of the United States, and by some strange twists of fate, he got what he said he wanted. And now everyone's problems are his. He needs to act like someone who can handle all that. If he's swallowed up in grief over his lost son — if he's "haunted," as the NYT headline has it — perhaps he should resign.
It is possible — though it's awkward to say this — that he's not as absorbed in grief as he acts. He may be doing the theater of empathy. It's worked for him to a certain extent. Some people like to see a big display of empathy in politics. Others — a dead marine's father, McGurn, etc. — are telling Biden he's going too far. If it's theater, he can rein it it. Touch up those speeches. Get back to Obama-level empathy, but stress competence and mental clarity.
But it's no wonder he's lapsed into the misconception that "Beau" is a magic word. The press has propped him up so much — including with this "Invoking Beau" article. You know, to "invoke" means "To call on (God, a deity, etc.) in prayer or as a witness" or "To summon (a spirit) by charms or incantation; to conjure; also figurative" or "To call upon, or call to (a person) to come or to do something."
How is Biden "invoking" Beau?
I'm reading "Beneath Joe Biden’s Folksy Demeanor, a Short Fuse and an Obsession With Details/As Mr. Biden settles into the office he has chased for more than three decades, aides say he demands hours of debate from scores of policy experts" by Michael D. Shear, Katie Rogers and Annie Karni.
Before making up his mind, the president demands hours of detail-laden debate from scores of policy experts, taking everyone around him on what some in the West Wing refer to as his Socratic “journey” before arriving at a conclusion. Those trips are often difficult for his advisers, who are peppered with sometimes obscure questions. Avoiding Mr. Biden’s ire during one of his decision-making seminars means not only going beyond the vague talking points that he will reject, but also steering clear of responses laced with acronyms or too much policy minutiae, which will prompt an outburst of frustration, often laced with profanity.
Let’s talk plain English here, he will often snap....
On policy issues, Mr. Biden, 78, takes days or weeks to make up his mind as he examines and second-guesses himself and others. It is a method of governing that can feel at odds with the urgency of a country still reeling from a pandemic and an economy struggling to recover..... Those closest to him say Mr. Biden is unwilling, or unable, to skip the routine....
Mr. Biden is gripped by a sense of urgency that leaves him prone to flares of impatience, according to numerous people who regularly interact with him...
So... urgent and not urgent, simultaneously?
[S]everal people familiar with the president’s decision-making style said Mr. Biden was quick to cut off conversations.
So... long conversational journeys but also cutting off conversation? I'm not really seeing a big problem here. The President should control when things go long or need to be cut short. It's only a problem if he's reacting based on his temper rather than his degree of understanding.
Three people who work closely with him said he even occasionally hangs up the phone on someone who he thinks is wasting his time.
Who cares?!
Most described Mr. Biden as having little patience for advisers who cannot field his many questions.
Fine!
“You become so hyperprepared,” said Dylan Loewe, a former speechwriter for Mr. Biden. “‘I’ve got to answer every conceivable question he can come up with.’”...
So? Well, maybe now I'm suspecting the NYT of making a bullshit show of critiquing him when they're really praising him.
“He hates blandishing fast-talk that sounds like double speak,” said Chris Jennings, a former health policy aide who engaged frequently with Mr. Biden when he was vice president. “Doesn’t trust it, and he’s certain voters loathe it.”...
Hmm. My hypothesis gathers steam.
If you keep going in this article, you'll get to stuff about what he and Dr. Jill eat: "vanilla chocolate chip Haagen-Dazs ice cream, Special K cereal, one bunch of red grapes, sliced cheese, six eggs, sliced bread, one tomato from the garden, and at least two apples on hand at all times." Biden drinks Orange Gatorade, and Jill is “an oenophile of the first degree.”
That's like something W.C. Fields would say for a laugh: "an oenophile of the first degree."
President Trump began the weekend believing that something good had just happened to him... But ... watching TV... [t]he president’s mood began to darken as it became clearer to him that some commentators were portraying the indictment as nothing for him to celebrate, according to three people with knowledge of his reaction.....I see that there are sources, but even assuming these were good sources, all they seem to have known is that Trump became aware — I can't believe this could have been a surprise — that his antagonists had a way to spin the indictments against him and they were getting a lot of TV time.
What followed was a two-day Twitter tirade that was unusually angry and defiant even by Mr. Trump’s standards.We can all read Trump's Twitter feed. I read it over the weekend, and it never crossed my mind that Trump had become "unusually angry" or beset with "fury." He put out some great tweets that pushed back his antagonists and restated his interpretation of the indictments. One tweet struck me as his best ever:
If it was the GOAL of Russia to create discord, disruption and chaos within the U.S. then, with all of the Committee Hearings, Investigations and Party hatred, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They are laughing their asses off in Moscow. Get smart America!That's totally on point and completely intelligent. In very few words, he's saying the damage done to America has been mainly the work of Americans doing the chaos the Russians could only have hoped to see. They're laughing at us, and we need to stop doing what must be so damned funny to them.**
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