After Hunter's Pardon, Joe Biden Should Support De-Weaponizing Government Power
Maybe we can all agree that government officials shouldn’t target political enemies.
It's good to know that people who are usually political foes can agree on at least one important point: The authority of the federal government has been corruptly misused for partisan purposes. After years of arguing over the weaponization of the FBI and the biases of long-serving government officials, Republican President-elect Donald Trump's supporters and Democratic President Joe Biden concur that government power is often abused to achieve political goals outside normal processes.
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Full Government Control Through Regulation
"We had meetings this spring that were the most alarming meetings I've ever been in, where [government regulators] were taking us through their plans and it was basically just full government control," Marc Andreessen, the developer of the first web browser and now a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, told Joe Rogan last week. "There will be a small number of large companies that will be completely regulated and controlled by the government. They just said, 'Don't even start startups, like don't even bother. There's no way that they can succeed, there's no way we that we're going to permit that to happen….It's going to be two or three companies and we're just going to control them.'"
Andreessen spoke in the context of government regulators' intentions toward artificial intelligence businesses. But he also added, more broadly, "this Administration freaked us out so much…because it felt like they were trying to become way more like China" where everything is under state control.
In his complaints about abuse of government power, Andreessen sounds much like Donald Trump and his close supporters. They've voiced similar concerns about the FBI, Justice Department, and other agencies and officials. Unsurprisingly, the tech investor has arrived at similar conclusions.
"When you leave a meeting like that, what do you do?" Rogan asked Andreessen.
"You go endorse Donald Trump," Andreessen answered.
But you don't have to be a Trump supporter to see government power warped and corrupted. President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter, this week on tax and gun charges after making similar claims.
'Politics Infected the Process'
"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," Biden insisted in his pardoning statement. "There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they've tried to break me – and there's no reason to believe it will stop here."
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre doubled down, telling the media that "politics infected the process and led to a — a miscarriage of justice" in the cases against Hunter Biden.
There are good reasons to take a skeptical view of Biden's claim that his own Justice Department engaged in a politicized vendetta against his son—not least of which is the blanket nature of Hunter's pardon for "those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024."
But it's worth noting Biden's admission after all this time that government agencies can be corrupted and weaponized by the powerful against their enemies. That's quite a change after years of plausible accusations that his own administration misused politicized power against Trump and other political enemies and leaned on social media companies to muzzle critics.
Debanking Political Enemies
Targeting of critics came up in Andreessen's discussion with Rogan. Andreessen related that his business partner Ben Horowitz's father, conservative writer David Horowitz, has been debanked—denied financial services by one or more banks—as has one of his employees, "for having the wrong politics."
He related the history of Operation Choke Point, under which bank regulators leaned on financial institutions to deny services to legal but disfavored industries such as payday lenders, gun dealers, marijuana businesses, sex shops, and the like.
"Choke Point 2.0 is primarily against their political enemies and then to their disfavored tech startups," added Andreessen. "It's hit the tech world hard; we've had like 30 founders debanked in the last four years."
"Can confirm this is true," Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong commented about the claim on X.
Turning Regulatory Excess Into a Weapon
Misusing regulatory power to pressure financial institutions into denying services to disfavored people is all too possible, as the history of Operation Choke Point reveals; its ongoing nature is well-documented. While often intentional now, debanking grew out of the clumsy nature of banking regulations that make it expensive and burdensome to offer accounts to small depositors and businesses.
"Regulators are causing the opposite of the desired effect by making it so dangerous now to serve a lower-income segment," JoAnn Barefoot, a former official with the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and other agencies, told the author of a book on people stuck outside the formal financial system that I reviewed in 2017. She pointed to red tape intended to battle discrimination, terrorism, or corruption that makes serving many potential customers legally perilous. Poor people were the first victims.
It's easy to weaponize such power by pressuring banks to deny services to specific targets.
The question is whether the incoming Trump administration will reverse the practice of abusing regulatory and prosecutorial power for political purposes, or will it just turn that power to its own ends? Before becoming the vice president-elect, J.D. Vance famously wanted to "seize the administrative state for our purposes" and replace existing bureaucrats with "our people," as he commented in 2021.
But the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), under Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, is supposed to limit the government's reach. Last year, during his long-shot run for president, Ramaswamy said he wanted to "shut down the administrative state" and Musk is no fan of regulators. President-elect Trump claims DOGE "will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies."
If the new Trump administration is sincere about reducing government abuses, and if Biden is serious in fretting about politicized prosecutions, maybe we can all agree that government power should be reined in and reduced to avoid such misuses of authority. We'll see.
