AP Photo/Ron Edmonds
Esquire had to issue a correction to a column that incorrectly claimed President George H.W. Bush pardoned his son, Neil Bush, eventually taking down the column altogether.
The column, penned by Charles Pierce, was headlined “Hunter Biden Isn’t the First Presidential Son Caught Up in Controversy. Anybody Remember Neil Bush?” and published Tuesday afternoon. It was written in response to President Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden.
Googling the article reveals what may have been the original headline, “Neil Bush Was Also Pardoned by Dad, George H.W. Bush,” something that did not happen, given that there is no record that Neil Bush was ever charged with any crimes for his various business misadventures and failures.
Screenshot via Google.
“Nobody defines Poppy Bush’s presidency by his son’s struggles or the pardons he issued on his way out of the White House,” the declared the subhead of Pierce’s column. “The moral: Shut the fck [sic] up about Hunter Biden, please.”
CNN senior reporter Andrew Kaczynski highlighted the correction and then retraction of the article with several screenshots and tweets. As he noted, the article received an editor’s note at the beginning that stated, “This story has been updated,” because “[a]n earlier version stated incorrectly that George H. W. Bush gave a presidential pardon to his son, Neil Bush. Esquire regrets the error.”
Eugene Volokh at Reason quoted an earlier version of the article that claimed George H.W. Bush had “exercised his unlimited constitutional power of clemency to pardon [his son, Neil Bush] for all that S&L business way back when.”
The article, as Kaczynski noted, has now been completely taken down. Going to the column’s link on the Esquire site takes the reader to a page that has an updated subhead, “Please see the editor’s note below,” and an editor’s note that says, “This column has been removed due to an error. The original article stated incorrectly that President George H. W. Bush gave a presidential pardon to his
The previous text of the article can be read at this archived link.
In that archived column, Pierce tells “the fable of the Lucky American Businessman,” who “came from a wealthy and prominent family” who was “not very good” at business or “being honest,” recounting Neil Bush’s travails through an oil-exploration company, a savings-and-loan company that wiped out $1.3 billion in loans when it failed, and “a methane exploration company that found no methane,” among other failed ventures and a scandalously nasty divorce.
Even after the story was apparently “updated,” the text still seemed to insinuate the first President Bush had pardoned the fourth of his six children:
The Moral: Shut the fck up about Hunter Biden, please. The pardon power is—theoretically, anyway—the only untrammeled royal authority granted to the office by the Constitution. The power was defended by Alexander Hamilton, especially in Federalist 74. His principal opponent at the nation’s founding was George Mason of Virginia, who seemed to anticipate the arrival in our politics of Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, and other Trumpist miscreants. According to James Madison’s notes from the Philadelphia convention, Mason argued:
Now, I conceive that the President ought not to have the power of pardoning, because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself. It may happen, at some future day, that he
will establish a monarchy and destroy the republic. If he has the power of granting pardons before indictment, or conviction, may he not stop inquiry and prevent detection?So if you want to argue that the president’s pardon power should be reined in somehow, you’ll get no argument from George Mason or me. But at the moment, it is virtually unlimited, so presidents will pardon their sons and daughters and siblings as easily as they pardon their ratfckers, propagandists, and bagmen. Nobody defines GHWB’s presidency—or his political character—by the fact that his son was caught up in controversy or that Poppy pardoned everyone except Shoeless Joe Jackson on his way out the door so as to obscure forever his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Pierce has long been a sharp critic of the 41st president. In 2018, he was one of the loudest voices on an episode of All In with Chris Hayes trashing George H.W. Bush just days after he had passed away.
This article has been updated with additional information.