Donald Trump megadonor and incoming administration official Elon Musk has used his social media platform to chastise Joe Biden for a six-month-old X post after the president issued a pardon for his son Hunter.
X users deployed the “community notes” function to correct the president’s May 31 post reading “no one is above the law.”
The post was revived with a note added for “additional context” that read: “Joe Biden granted a full and unconditional pardon to his son, Hunter, on December 1, 2024. Hunter was convicted of multiple felonies but will now go unpunished.”
Musk shared the post with a screenshot of a note that said Biden “has made clear that some people are, in fact, not above the law.”
“Community Notes slays,” Musk wrote.
Biden wrote the initial post one day after a New York jury convicted Trump on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records as part of a so-called hush money scheme to silence an adult film star ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Though not the first time that a president pardoned a family member, Biden’s pardon reversed his previous pledge that he would not do so within his final months in office.
Hunter Biden was convicted on charges stemming from lying on a federal form about drug use when he bought a handgun in 2018. He also pleaded guilty to tax evasion and related charges in a separate case.
“The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” the president said in a statement on Sunday.
“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong,” he added. “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”
The world’s richest man, who spent Thanksgiving with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago and has remained a close adviser shaping his incoming administration, is set to lead a newly created advisory group that will recommend mass firings of workers and drastic cuts to federal agencies.
His crowd-sourced “community note” feature, meanwhile, has largely failed to meaningfully check misinformation on the platform, with a majority of fact checks proposed by users on political posts never shown to the public.
