PARDON HIM: President Biden went back on his word yesterday and pardoned his son Hunter, issuing a blanket pardon for all the federal crimes his son did or may have committed going back to 2014.

  Hunter Biden faced possible prison time for a gun crime conviction and his plea of guilty to failure to file tax returns.

  President Biden in a statement claimed his 54-year-old son had been targeted for political reasons. “The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” the President said. “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.”

  Former President Donald Trump and other Republicans have been claiming for years that Hunter Biden committed financial crimes linked to his father. The younger Biden had reached a plea deal on the gun charge that was thrown out by a judge, leading to trial and conviction.

  In pardoning his son, President Biden echoed Trump’s complaint that the Justice department has become political. “There has been an effort to break Hunter,” Biden said and “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.”

IN TRANSITION: In yet another challenge to what the Senate will approve or tolerate, Donald Trump announced over the weekend that he plans to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray and appoint Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist and 2020 election denier to run the agency that Patel has denounced. He once told an interviewer that, “I’d shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state.”

  Patel has also threatened the press, telling podcaster Steve Bannon; “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.” 

  Patel has worked as a junior federal prosecutor and public defender but has virtually no law enforcement or management experience.  Trump called Patel “a brilliant lawyer, investigator and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American people.”

  Trump appointed Wray to a 10-year term during his first presidency but soured on him after the 2022 FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in a successful search for classified documents the former president was illegally holding. 

  A true believer, Patel said, “We’re blessed by God to have Donald Trump be our juggernaut of justice, to be our leader, to be our continued warrior in the arena.”

FAMILY TIES: Donald Trump also announced that he’s naming the fathers-in-law of two of his children to important government posts. He nominated Charles Kushner, the rich real estate executive and father of his daughter’s husband, Jared Kushner, to serve as ambassador to France.

  At the end of his first term, Trump pardoned the older Kushner for his convictions on 16 counts of tax evasion, as well as retaliating against a federal witness and lying to the Federal Election Commission.

  Yesterday Trump named Massad Boulos, a Lebanese-born billionaire and father-in-law to Tiffany Trump, to be his senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs.

THE WAR ROOM:  Former Israeli defense minister Moshe Yaalon accused Israel of committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip, making a rare break from the government establishment in the midst of war.

  At an event on Saturday, Yaalon publicly denounced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for the ferocity of its tactics saying, “The path they’re dragging us down is to occupy, annex, and ethnically cleanse — look at the northern strip.” Roughly 70 to 80 percent of the housing has been destroyed and more than 44,000 people killed in Gaza. “They’re basically cleaning the territory of Arabs,” Yaalon said.

  And he concluded,  “At the end of the day, they’re perpetrating war crimes.” 

THE SPORTING NEWS: Ending a season marked by controversy over a transgender member of the team, the San Jose State women’s volleyball team lost the Mountain West tournament championship to Colorado State. The player in question has not publicly identified herself as transgender and the University has not confirmed it either.

  US skier Mikaela Shiffrin was leading the pack after the first run in the giant slalom gunning for her 100^th World Cup win when she crashed out on the second run Saturday at Killington in Vermont. Shiffrin was attended for quite a while before being taken off the hill on a sled, but she suffered only a hip abrasion.

  Also on Saturday, Michigan’s three-point upset win over Ohio State ended in a brawl when the winners tried to plant a large Michigan flag on the logo in the center of Ohio’s home field. Coaches, police, and security officers had to separate the two teams that were pushing and throwing punches at each other.

THE SPIN RACK: A conference of 200 countries adjourned without reaching a treaty on how to curb plastic waste. — A federal judge is threatening to take control of New York’s notorious Riker’s Island prison for failing to stem violence and excessive force at the facility. Among the current celebrity inmates are the rapist former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, and music mogul Sean “Puffy Combs” who’s accused of sex trafficking. Weinstein is suing the city for $5 million citing “negligent deprivation of medical treatment, deprivation of civil and constitutional rights” and other complaints.

BELOW THE FOLD: Belgium yesterday became the first country in the world to allow sex workers to sign formal employment contracts that would give them sick days, maternity leave, and a pension. We do wonder whether they would have to work until age 65 for that pension.

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