On Friday, former Rep. George Santos was sentenced to 87 months in federal prison for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, a fitting punishment for a man whose deceitful campaign defrauded donors and mocked the electoral process. I’m not defending Santos. His fabricated persona — lying about his education, Wall Street career, etc. — was despicable.
He will serve a mandatory two-year minimum for identity theft, and that's all fine and good. Santos must also pay nearly $375,000 in restitution and forfeit over $200,000 in ill-gotten gains. His actions were a betrayal of public trust, and he deserves the consequences.
But the severity of Santos’s punishment throws the outrageous blanket pardon of Hunter Biden into a whole new perspective. President Joe Biden’s pardon, covering potential offenses from January 2014 to December 2024, shields his criminal son from prosecution for any possible crimes he committed during that period, including influence peddling and questionable foreign transactions.
These allegations, potentially compromising national interests, arguably carry far graver implications than Santos’s fraud. Yet Hunter will never face any legal reckoning for his crimes, while Santos, a small-time grifter by comparison, will languish in prison for at least two years.
This disparity is infuriating.
Consider the context: Santos’s crimes involved deceiving donors and stealing identities to fund his 2022 congressional campaign — a serious but localized scheme. Prosecutors called it a “brazen web of deceit,” and they’re not wrong. But Hunter Biden’s crimes, which include leveraging his father’s influence for personal gain, suggest a systemic abuse of power.
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In an interview on Thursday on One America News Network, former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) sat down with Santos to discuss his sentencing hearing. Gaetz, noting President Trump’s recent pardon of a former Las Vegas City Council member convicted of wire fraud, asked Santos whether the move gave him “any specific hope” that Trump might offer him similar relief.
Santos, a staunch Trump ally, admitted that he hasn’t formally requested a pardon. “I haven’t petitioned the president for a pardon,” he said. “A lot of people keep asking me this, but obviously, if the president were to extend one, I’d be humbly grateful, because he’d be taking a major weight off my back.”
Still, Santos acknowledged he hasn’t given up hope. “Hope’s the last to die,” he said. “I can hope for many things, and I do hope that hopefully he takes a look at me, too.”
I have no idea if Trump will ultimately grant Santos a pardon. Maybe he will after a couple of years served — who knows? There’s little point in speculating right now. What’s crystal clear, though, is that Hunter Biden’s pardon makes a mockery of equal justice under the law.
I find myself more outraged that Hunter Biden will never face real accountability than anything happening with Santos. Yes, Santos’s case appears to be justly resolved, but it only throws the corruption of Hunter Biden’s escape from justice into even sharper relief. One man faces over seven years behind bars for fraud; the other walks away untouched after committing crimes far worse. That kind of blatant double standard breeds distrust in our institutions and leaves Americans realizing that the well-connected truly are above the law.
