The same day The View co-host Ana Navarro was forced to admit ChatGPT gave her bad information about a fake pardon involving Woodrow Wilson and an alleged brother-in-law named “Hunter deButts,” Esquire magazine retracted an article about another presidential pardon that never happened.
The outlet published an editorial on Tuesday about how Republicans should “shut the f-ck up” about Joe Biden’s controversial pardon of Hunter Biden because President George H.W. Bush did the same thing for his son Neil Bush. The retraction followed because of one tiny detail: There is no record of the forty-first president granting his son, who was never convicted of a crime, a pardon.
On Thursday’s show, Megyn was joined by Michael Knowles, host of The Michael Knowles Show, to discuss the error and how untrustworthy the press has gotten.
The Article
Equire.com ran a piece by pundit Charles P. Pierce on Tuesday titled, “A President Shouldn’t Pardon His Son? Hello, Anybody Remember Neil Bush?” The sub-headline on the column, which has now been taken down, read: “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 moral: Shut the fck [sic] up about Hunter Biden, please.”
Archived versions of the article show Pierce referred to Neil, the fourth of the six Bush children, as “Lucky American Businessman” throughout the piece and claimed his father, President George H.W. Bush, “exercised his unlimited constitutional power of clemency to pardon” him.
Pierce suggested Neil needed his father’s mercy for his involvement in the messy collapse of Silverado Saving and Loan, where he was a board member. In reality, Neil was never criminally convicted (though he did settle a civil lawsuit filed by federal regulators) and did not need a pardon.
A simple Google search of “Was Neil Bush ever pardoned?” yields little to no historical results, but that was not caught by Pierce or his editors at Esquire. Instead, as Andy Kaczynski of CNN and the KFILE flagged on X, the mag had to issue a correction.
It read: “An earlier version stated incorrectly that George H.W. Bush gave a presidential pardon to his son, Neil Bush. Esquire regrets the error.” Not long after, the entire column was removed, and the page now looks like this:
‘Good Grief’
Megyn said the scope of the error that led to the correction and subsequent retraction is nothing short of remarkable. “Did they get, like, a supporting fact wrong? Did they take a left turn someplace,” she asked. “No, president George H.W. Bush did not give a pardon to his son, Neil Bush… They wrote a whole thing about how he pardoned a son, and the whole thing was wrong. It was all made up.”
While Knowles gave Esquire some credit for not just scrubbing the piece without acknowledgement, he said the premise of the column was flawed from the get-go. “It says, ‘Anybody remember Neil Bush?’ First of all, the answer to that question is, obviously, no,” he said. “But even if one did have some awareness of Neil Bush, do you remember Neil Bush recording himself with tons of crack and hookers and, even more importantly, selling American state influence – potentially with the permission of his father, the president or vice president – to foreign actors to get bribes?”
Regardless, Knowles said there is no excuse for getting it so wrong. “It is so sad. Esquire at least claims to have some kind of credibility,” he concluded. “Before I even sent a tweet like that, I would at least make a Google search to make sure my central thesis was correct. Good grief.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Knowles by tuning in to episode 958 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.