Good to see they are back on form with their headlines…
Hunter Biden got pardoned, and Judge Mark Scarsi is big mad about it.
In the Delaware gun indictment, Judge Maryellen Norieka terminated the case via minute order, while maintaining relative judicial modesty. In contrast, Judge Scarsi, the Trump appointee overseeing the tax case in California, engaged in what can only be described as an act of judicial onanism on the public docket.
“Rather than providing a true and correct copy of the pardon with the notice, Mr. Biden provided a hyperlink to a White House press release presenting a statement by the President regarding the pardon and the purported text of the pardon,” he breathed heavily, adding that “The President’s statement illustrates the reasons for the Court’s disapproval, as representations contained therein stand in tension with the case record.”
If Abbe Lowell had just docketed the pardon itself, certified and in triplicate, Judge Scarsi wouldn’t have been forced to yell at the sitting president. So if you think about it, the defendant was really asking for it!
Judge Scarsi takes great umbrage at the suggestion that this prosecution was politically motivated — something he and Judge Norieka both insisted was impossible with President Biden in charge of the Justice Department. As independent journalist Marcy Wheeler notes, this required wholesale contortion of the record by Scarsi. It also confuses the almost insuperable standard to prove vindictive prosecution with the colloquial and obviously true statement that politics affected this process, which began when Bill Barr tapped David Weiss to investigate Joe Biden and his son and was the subject of sustained pressure by Trump himself and his congressional allies.
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