During an NBC News interview, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis found himself puzzled when questioned about potentially pardoning Hunter Biden as president. Pressed by Dasha Burns on his openness to pardoning former President Trump, DeSantis justified it as a means to “move the country forward,” drawing parallels to President Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon for national healing.
When asked to discourage GOP lawmakers from investigating President Biden in the interest of preventing division, DeSantis declined, citing Biden’s lack of accountability.
“There’ve been different standards of justice that have been applied on these investigations because the amount of money that’s come into their family — how does that happen where you have millions of dollars that’s coming into the family… we weren’t even scratching the surface on that,” DeSantis said.
“So heal the country when it comes to Trump, but not when it comes to Biden,” Burns responded. “What about Hunter Biden, would you pardon him?”
“Why?” a puzzled DeSantis reacted before exclaiming, “No!”
“Same question — I mean, in the spirit of healing the country and moving forward,” Burns said.
“Those are not the same things,” DeSantis said. “You have a current administration that is prosecuting the former president. That is not the same thing as a Hunter Biden prosecution. Hunter Biden was not one of the leaders of the opposition political party. So when you have that, that is not healthy for this country to be doing that.”
He later continued, “If [Hunter Biden] had been not connected to the D.C. ruling class, he would have been prosecuted a long time ago. But those are not equivalent things in terms of, like, a Ford and Nixon and then, versus some of the things that we’re seeing with Donald Trump.”
