Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson claimed Friday on his podcast that Hunter Biden was “blackmailing” President Joe Biden with his past crimes and using it as leverage for a potential pardon.
Despite Biden and his staff repeatedly insisting that Hunter would not be pardoned for his tax fraud and felony gun charges, the president announced Sunday his decision to clear Hunter’s record. On “The Victor Davis Hanson Show,” the senior fellow suggested that Hunter, angry at being seen as the “bad seed” of his family, allegedly blackmailed Biden by threatening to testify against the family.
“There is a sickness in Hunter Biden vis-a-vis his father. I mentioned that if one reads carefully the laptop communications, there’s an anger. He is not Beau Biden. He’s the bad seed, the prodigal son,” Hanson said. “He feels that he cooked up the entire shakedown operation. He is the dirty bag man. He is Hunter. Remember he says to his cousin, ‘They always have me do stuff. Nobody ever, I’m the one making this family. If I was like dad, I’d charge everybody.’ So he had to do the dirty work.”
“When he was up with the IRS and they were squeezing him because of this phony sweetheart deal they cooked up and the judge was mad. His lawyer said, ‘We might have to call in Joe Biden, now president.’ Think of that,” Hanson added. “They’re going to call the president of the United States to testify on behalf of Hunter Biden. He would say something that would probably be preposterously false.”
Hanson went on to support his claim of Hunter’s alleged leverage by highlighting how, in 2020, Hunter began selling his ink-blown art, claiming the technique was a reference to his past cocaine addiction.
“So he was basically blackmailing his own father and saying, ‘If you don’t pardon me at some point, I am going to have you come and testify.’ If you don’t believe this, [and] you think Victor’s crazy, right during the height of this controversy and this exposure, Hunter Biden started to paint and he put a paintbrush in his nose and mouth?” Hanson recalled. “I mean, that was almost a deliberate reference to his Coke.”
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“Think about that, everybody. So you’re the presidential son. You’re under enormous scrutiny. You’ve embarrassed your dad and you just, and you are known and you have videos of you snorting Coke and you come up with the idea that you’re going to put straws in your nose and blow on a canvas, blow — blows a keyword — paint all over the canvas,” Hanson said.
During his new artist phase, Hunter was praised by art critics for his work. Some, like Mark Tribe, chairman of the MFA Fine Arts Department at New York City’s School of Visual Arts, described the president’s son’s work to The New York Post as an “organic abstraction that I find easy on the eyes and provokes your curiosity.” However, reports in 2021 found that Hunter’s work wasn’t sold until after Biden won the presidency, raising questions about the connection between Democratic donors and those who had purchased a substantial amount of Hunter’s art.
“Then they go to the Biden administration and say, ‘Hey, I gave Hunter three or 400,000 for those paintings. I want an ambassadorship. I want a law change. I want a regulation modified.’ Why did he do that?” Hanson asked. “Well, I can tell you it’s the same thing as the references in the laptop. It is the same thing of threatening to bring his father in to court and embarrass him. He’s sending a cannonball shot across the administration,” Hanson said.
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