ANDREW NEIL: The REAL and sickeningly self-serving motive Biden pardoned Hunter. And why it now greenlights Trump to unleash a judicial jihad in revenge

Despite repeated denials that he would ever do it — the most recent only last week — in the end the Big Guy (Hunter Biden‘s handle for his father) came good for his sleaze-bag son with a pardon for the ages.

Far from bringing closure to a sordid affair, it is mere prelude — pretext even — to Donald Trump going on a rampage of revenge against his enemies.

He will now be able to use as justification the very same reason President Biden has given for his extraordinary grant of clemency to his son: that America’s justice system is hopelessly politicized.

Something Trump has always claimed — and which Biden, for his own self-serving reasons, now confirms.

The presidential pardon doesn’t just wipe out the gun and tax crimes, for which Hunter was likely about to serve lengthy jail sentences, it covers ‘all offences against the United States which he [Hunter] has committed or may have committed or taken part in’ from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.

So whatever federal crimes Hunter might have committed in the last decade, including ones we know nothing about, the president’s son can never be held to held to account for them in a court of law. It is a remarkably comprehensive ‘get-out-of-jail’ card.

Indeed it is hard to think of any previous presidential pardon quite like it. Bar one: President Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon after he’d been forced to resign over the Watergate scandal and cover up in August 1974. The Biden pardon even copies its wording.

The Ford pardon didn’t just cover any and all crimes associated with Watergate but extended to ‘all offences against the United States’ that Nixon ‘has committed or may have committed’ between January 20, 1969 and August 9, 1974 — in other words anything criminal Nixon might have done during the exact span of his presidency.

Just as there was no mystery about the dates in the Nixon pardon, there is none in the Biden pardon.

Why the January 1, 2014 starting date? Simple. Hunter joined the board of Burisma, a dodgy Ukrainian energy company, in April 2014. He was paid millions for his role in the company, despite having no background or expertise in the oil or gas business.

But he traded off his father’s name — the ‘Big Guy’, who was then President Obama’s vice president — in a notorious bout of influence-peddling. Hunter’s shady Burisma years have spawned an avalanche of accusations, some false, more as yet unproven.

The pardon has been carefully concocted to protect him from any new evidence of criminal behavior that might emerge. In doing so it also protects his father from being swept up in any of Hunter’s wrongdoing. I doubt there has ever been a greater misuse of the presidential pardon since it was devised by the Founding Fathers almost 250 years ago.

It certainly marks the end of Saint Joe, the supposedly selfless leader who made way for Kamala Harris for the good of party and nation. Instead, he will see out his final days in the Oval Office as Sleazy Joe, prepared to pervert the pardon process to protect not just his son but himself.

Not quite the ‘Biden Crime Family’ of Republican mythology. But a step in that direction. It makes a mockery of all those Democratic cheerleaders who’ve tried to depict Joe as a cross between George Washington and FDR.

The Biden pardon is all the more unpardonable because of the President’s repeated statements (reinforced by his aides) that he would not pardon his son. Even after Hunter was convicted at trial this summer, the president was unequivocal: ‘I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process.’

In the event, he neither accepted the outcome nor respected the process.

Indeed, it’s now emerging that the President started game-planning a pardon with some of his closest aides the moment Hunter was convicted in June (according to sources close to the discussions). The hapless White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was briefed to keep parroting the ‘no pardon’ line. But behind closed doors, it was under active consideration.

Thus did the Biden White House become synonymous with lies and deceit.

No wonder, then, that even Democrats are dismayed.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis attacked Biden for ‘putting his family ahead of the country’ and setting ‘a bad precedent that could be abused by later Presidents.’ Clearly, he had Trump in mind.

Greg Stanton, a Democratic congressman from Arizona, said: ‘I respect President Biden but I think he got this one wrong. This wasn’t a politically-motivated prosecution. Hunter committed felonies and was convicted by a jury of his peers’

Stanton was referring to the reason the President gave for his pardon, a reason which will probably do the greatest damage of all to the American judicial process.

‘No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion,’ claims the President, ‘than that Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.’

‘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.’

Put aside the fact this is self-serving nonsense — as Rep. Stanton says, Hunter was ‘convicted by a jury of his peers’ — and consider that this is what Trump and his supporters have been saying for some time.

When Biden says, ‘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,’ he sounds exactly like Trump when he claims the judicial system has been politicized on multiple fronts to bring him and his allies down. Hunter’s lawyers even prepared the case for a pardon with the title ‘The political persecutions of Hunter Biden.’

There had been hopes that Trump might drop thoughts of a judicial jihad against his enemies when he returned to the White House, just as his regular promise to ‘lock up’ Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign came to nothing when he took power.

Trump will not be able to undo Hunter’s pardon when he takes office. Its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department, no matter who runs it, will be unable to reopen the criminal probe into Hunter. But that will merely whet Trump’s appetite to go after others.

Trump will surely now weaponize Biden’s reason for pardoning Hunter as justification for draining the judicial swamp, taking down those who had tried to take him down.

You can see now why Trump wants an outsider like Kash Patel to run the FBI. But this all risks becoming a massive diversion from everything Trump needs to concentrate on to get America back on track.

It is Biden’s toxic parting gift to the American people, undermining whatever good he has done these past four years in a departure which will forever taint his legacy.

As the finishing touches were being made to the pardon over the weekend, the President and his son dined at a Nantucket restaurant called ‘The Brotherhood of Thieves’ — a fitting venue as the Biden family heads into the history books discredited, disgraced and disparaged even by its own side.