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Ana Navarro-Cardenas tried to defend President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter, but ended up raising eyebrows instead.
Biden pardoned his son, who has been convicted of tax and gun charges, in the last stretch of his presidency after repeatedly vowing he wouldn’t. The move prompted critics to groan that Biden put his family over his political legacy and that he was potentially establishing a controversial precedent.
The View co-host took to X to point out a pattern of presidents pardoning family members.
“Woodrow Wilson pardoned his brother-in-law, Hunter deButts. Bill Clinton pardoned his brother, Roger. Donald Trump pardoned his daughter’s father-in-law, Charlie Kushner. And just appointed him ambassador to France. But tell me again how Joe Biden ‘is setting precedent’?” Navarro-Cardenas wrote Monday.
But her point was buried in a furious discussion about one particular name: “Hunter deButts.”
A community note tacked on to her tweet debunked her claim: “There is no evidence that Woodrow Wilson had a brother-in-law named ‘Hunter DeButts.’ While at least one person by that name was living during Wilson’s presidency, there is nothing to suggest any relation, or that they were pardoned — the only result is this tweet.”
GOP operative Zach Parkinson looked into the matter, determining that the man cited in Navarro-Cardenas’ claim doesn’t appear to have existed. He wrote on X: “There’s (unsurprisingly) no record of Woodrow Wilson having a brother-in-law named ‘Hunter de Butts.’”
He pointed to biographies of the former president, which state that Wilson was married twice: to Ellen Axson Wilson and then to Edith Bolling Galt Wilson.
“Neither had a brother named ‘Hunter deButts.’ And even if you go one degree further, out of Wilson’s wives’ five combined sisters, none appears to have been married to anyone named ‘de Butts,’” Parkinson wrote.
Wilson also had two sisters — Marion and Annie Josephine — but neither married someone with the last name deButts, he noted.
Several media outlets declared the DeButts character pure “fiction.”
On Tuesday, Navarro-Cardenas admitted where the unusual name came from: ChatGPT.
She posted a screenshot of the AI bot’s answer to her question of whether any US presidents had pardoned any relatives or in-laws and wrote: “Hey Twitter sleuths, thanks for taking the time to provide context. Take it up with Chat GPT …”
