Michael Goodwin: Joe Bidens corrupt last act as president proved his family hustle always superseded the truth, the law and the country

Imagine you are one of those gullible people who believed mentions of a Biden crime family was a Republican fever dream and a sinister plot to smear an honest, devoted father, his surviving son and other relatives. You refused to watch the congressional hearings showing vast sums of foreign money were deposited in Biden family checking accounts because The New York Times and CNN said there was nothing to see there. You also believed Joe’s claim that son Hunter’s abandoned laptop full of incriminating evidence was Russian disinformation because most of the media echoed him, but you were later surprised to learn the FBI had authenticated the contents a year earlier. Still, you were stunned when Hunter was convicted of gun charges and pleaded guilty to federal tax charges under cases brought by Joe’s own Department of Justice. That gave you some doubts about the family, but you hung on to the slender thread of innocence because Hunter had been a junkie and you believed Joe was an honest public servant and family man. Besides, Donald Trump was evil and ..

.then came Monday. That’s when the roof fell in. It was bad enough that Trump was being inaugurated, but then you learned that Biden had taken the extraordinary step of issuing sweeping preemptive pardons to five members of his family, on top of the one he had granted Hunter last year. The beneficiaries were his two brothers, his sister, a brother-in-law and a sister-in-law — the same people GOP probers said got big money from the family’s scheme to sell the Biden name to foreign nations and companies. Even though the Times and others predictably defended Biden’s pardons by saying he did it to protect his family against “retaliation” by Trump, it began to dawn on you that you’ve been played for a sucker. By Tuesday, you could no longer escape the conclusion that Biden and the media had been lying to you all along. This, of course, was the same White House and media that lied to you to h...