President Joe Biden , after a career of dishonesty, self-dealing, and corruption, left office with one final grand act: a brazen abuse of power.

The only thing surprising about Biden’s pardon of his tax-dodging, influence-peddling son Hunter , who hasn’t served a day in prison, and which pardons him for crimes for which he has not yet been caught, was that it surprised some people.

In June, when Hunter Biden was convicted on gun charges, and when his tax-dodging charges were pending, President Biden repeatedly swore he would not pardon his son or commute his sentence. Biden was lying, we should assume. In all likelihood, the president always intended to pardon his son after the election, but he knew the pardon was corrupt, and so he lied about it.

Biden behaved this way because he is a dishonest politician who regularly does corrupt things.

Clear-eyed commentators suspected this was not a credible promise, but many in the legacy media treated Biden’s statements as reliable. “People who insist Biden will pardon Hunter after specifically ruling it out are telling on themselves,” reporter John Harwood stated. “They can’t imagine someone acting on principle and keeping his word.”

More accurately, people who have followed politics in recent decades cannot imagine Joe Biden keeping his word.

A plagiarist and a fabulist

We could start the story of Biden’s crooked career in many places, and his famous habit of plagiarism is as good as any.

In 1987, as Biden was running for president — spending more than 30 years running for president automatically makes one ethically suspect — he stole a big portion of his stump speech from British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. Biden tried to defend this plagiarism as accidental, but it soon came out that Biden had plagiarized Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey. In fact, Biden’s plagiarism was traced back to college .

This was awkward because Biden had campaigned in part on his brilliance and academic achievements, claiming to have gotten a full academic scholarship and graduating in the top half of his class. Neither of those claims was true. He also falsely claimed to have finished college with three undergraduate degrees. “My recollection on this was inaccurate,” Biden explained.

But the claims had no grounding in truth, and so the real explanation was likely that Biden simply doesn’t care if he’s telling the truth at all. The rest of Biden’s career corroborates that suspicion.

In his pardon message for his son, it was perfectly fitting when the president padded it with the dishonest claim, “For my entire career, I have followed a simple principle: just tell the American people the truth.”

If you can rely on a liar to lie about anything, it’s his own lying.

Insider enrichment

Questionable ethics and abuse of power have also been themes of Biden’s decades in politics. In his 1996 reelection, Biden’s top source of campaign cash was the credit card company MBNA. Around that same time, Biden sold his home to an MBNA executive for the asking price, but the bank reimbursed the buyer for more than $300,000 of “moving expenses.” That is, it looks like the bank itself helped buy Biden’s house.

Meanwhile, Biden was pushing through the Senate bankruptcy reform supported by MBNA.

After the election, MBNA hired Hunter, who had just finished law school, and quickly promoted him to senior vice president. It wasn’t for nothing that Sen. Joe Biden was known as the “Senator from MBNA.”

When Hunter launched a lobbying firm with his father’s top fundraiser and made sure to put “Biden” in the firm’s name, the University of Delaware hired the firm for $1.5 million. As ABC News reported, “The payoff: As of 2006, $24.8 million in earmarks for defense research, a student-exchange program, and a drug-and-alcohol-studies program.”

So, the Biden family got Delaware taxpayers’ dollars, and the client got federal taxpayer dollars. This sort of insider-dealing has been Biden’s mode of operation for five decades.

One of Biden’s many chiefs of staff to become a lobbyist was Alan Hoffman. In between two of his stints with Biden, Hoffman was a lobbyist for oil company Unocal, which later merged with Chevron. Hoffman was hired to lobby on issues related to Burma sanctions.

The House of Representatives in 2007 voted to tighten sanctions on Burma’s military dictatorship, passing a bill that explicitly prohibited U.S. companies from paying Burma royalties for natural gas fields and pipelines. But Unocal was doing exactly that. Hoffman moved back to Biden’s office, and then Biden “spearhead[ed]” the Senate bill, which stripped the natural gas provision and exempted Unocal/Chevron from the sanctions.

‘My son did nothing wrong’

With this background on Biden’s ethics, we can better understand why Biden repeatedly insisted, “My son did nothing wrong.”

Biden, if we take his words at face value, believed that tax evasion was not wrong and that violating federal gun laws was just fine.

Biden also supports Hunter’s business model of making millions as a revolving-door influence peddler trading on his proximity to government power.

Recall that Hunter became a lobbyist while his father was a senator and peddled the Biden name to bring in corporate clients in the United States. During the Obama-Biden administration and right afterward, Hunter became a global consultant, bringing in clients from China and Ukraine.

Joe Biden knew that and said, “My son did nothing wrong.”

This is the sort of corrupt mindset one expects in Third World countries. Joe Biden was given power by the voters, and so he believes the Biden family has every right to get rich by selling access to that power.

The Democrats’ defense on the influence-peddling charge was that Hunter and Joe never actually delivered government favors to Hunter’s clients. So, the most charitable interpretation is that Joe Biden is fine with his son defrauding foreign businessmen and falsely convincing them that they should expect favors from Biden’s government.

If you’re beginning to question the ethics of Joe Biden, you’re catching on.

Biden spent five decades wielding public power. Consistently, he wielded it to the benefit of himself and his family and with disregard for honesty or basic ethics.

It’s perfectly fitting that his parting act would be an indefensible pardon of his criminal son. After all, Hunter was just doing things the Biden way.