Both the gun and tax felonies are ones that are rarely prosecuted. Civil penalties and sometimes misdemeanor prosecutions are far more common. So there is certainly an element of overzealous prosecution.

This just....isn't true, AFAIK, for the tax charges. The gun charges, maybe. But if you commit willful tax fraud for well over a million dollars, over multiple years, with deliberate fraudulent filings, and they have you dead to rights because you wrote a biography admitting to some of this stuff, you're going to get charged. And you're probably going to jail. And you probably deserve to go to jail.

Hunter would be an ideal candidate for a pardon from any President.

A moderately wealthy white-collar tax cheat who was caught dead to rights, who had no reason whatsoever for his decision not to pay his taxes (other than perhaps to pay for his drug habit), with access to expensive private defense counsel? No way a guy with that bio ever gets a pardon from any other President, absent his political (in this case familial) connections.

President Biden has hidden nothing. Hunter did do some bad things, but the punishment (felony jail time) is considerably more harsh that the vast majority of similarly situated people face. So a pardon is appropriate.

Again, I don't think any of this is true. Hunter didn't endure a miscarriage of justice, and he hadn't been sentenced yet. People do get charged with felony tax fraud, and sometimes go to jail for a few years. If the average person were to deliberately cheat the government out of a million or more dollars, and they have you dead to rights, they'd probably go to jail. This is exactly the sort of defendant that progressives generally think should have the book thrown at them - the elite wealthy guy who thinks that taxes are for "little people" (sorry Leona). The only reason Hunter's getting this pardon is because he's the President's son. Neither Hunter personally nor the circumstances of the crime or prosecution warrant the beneficence of a pardon.

The worst part is that Biden could have mitigated the damage caused by this pardon if he hadn't thrown DoJ under the bus in an effort to make this look more principled than it was. Hunter Biden wasn't prosecuted because "raw politics" "infected" the process. He was prosecuted because he committed a fairly serious white collar crime and decided to write a memoir about it. He got caught dead to rights with sufficient evidence that the prosecutors couldn't play the "we might not win in court" with a straight face. Had Biden just made this a personal decision - using his pardon power selfishly but understandably - he would have taken the heat in his own legacy but spared DoJ as an institution. But by claiming that DoJ did something wrong, Biden is throwing them under the bus at a time when they are literally at their most vulnerable in history.