Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) suggested President Joe Biden could come to regret the recent pardon he granted on Sunday, arguing the president’s son could be required to provide testimony in Congress.
The president’s pardon was granted to his son, Hunter Biden, regarding all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” over an 11-year period, marking a reversal from how he said he would not issue such a pardon. When asked what this pardon would mean for any future investigations by the Senate or the incoming Trump administration into the Biden family, Cotton contended people need to “wait and see” who else the president could pardon, be it other family members of Hunter Biden’s “corrupt businessmen.”
“I will say this, though, Joe Biden may come to regret this decision because having given his son a blanket pardon of 11 years, to include time when Joe Biden was vice president, Hunter Biden now can’t plead the fifth if he appears before Congress or appears before a grand jury,” Cotton said on Fox News’s America’s Newsroom. “He has to testify about exactly what he was up to, for instance, when he was traveling to China on Air Force Two and meeting with Chinese communist princelings, or why he was being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to sit on a Ukrainian energy company’s board for which he had no qualifications. So, that may be one unintended consequence of the pardon that Joe Biden didn’t fully think through.”
Cotton also suggested that Biden going back on his word that he would not pardon his son runs counter to how the president spent 50 years boasting about “his word as a Biden,” with the pardon now showing how “his word as a Biden is trash.” He added that the scope of this pardon, which ranges 11 years, back to when Biden was vice president, raises the question of what crimes the president thinks his son was committing during that time.
The Arkansas senator then called for Biden not to pardon his brother, James Biden, who was “up to his neck in the Biden family influence peddling operation.” However, he expressed doubt that the president would heed his call.
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Cotton was also asked about his take on President-elect Donald Trump nominating Kash Patel for director of the FBI, to which he argued that Patel has “many years of experience” as a federal prosecutor. He also rebuked how Democrats are concerned over Patel’s nomination amid Biden’s “total perversion of justice” by granting his son a massive pardon.
Many Republicans have praised Trump’s nomination of Patel, with Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) expressing enthusiasm to work with him on releasing “Epstein’s flight logs and black book.”
