President Joe Biden’s decision to grant a pardon to his son Hunter is a fitting coda to what has become a failed presidency. The president entered office on promises to restore good government, protect American democracy, and cure the republic of Trumpism. With Trump now set to return to office in two months, the pardon means instead that Biden will have contributed further to this nation’s degradation.
For the past few years, Hunter Biden’s troubled past has caught up to him. Special counsel David Weiss, a federal prosecutor in Delaware, charged the president’s son with multiple federal crimes, including various tax-related offenses and a constitutionally dubious charge for purchasing a gun while addicted to a narcotic. Hunter is also under investigation for his role in lobbying on behalf of Burisma, a Ukrainian oil company on whose board he once served.
Biden ended those legal woes with the stroke of a pen over the weekend. “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,” the president said in a statement. “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.”
No one can blame Biden for being pained by his son’s legal troubles. But the pardon is still a grave mistake. The president’s long-standing refusal to intervene on his son’s behalf was a powerful testament to his civic virtue and his commitment to the rule of law. After all, it is one thing to not abuse power against one’s foes; it is another to refuse to abuse power to protect one’s own child. Biden’s refusal to interfere had also insulated him from accusations that the Justice Department was being politicized and manipulated under his watch.
In issuing the pardon, Biden broke both his oath of office and his promise to Americans that he would accept the legal process even when it applies to his own son. “I abide by the jury decision,” he told reporters in June as Hunter’s trial on the gun charges inched closer. “I will do that and I will not pardon him.” The White House reiterated that point time and time again, most recently last month after the election results became clear.
Pardoning Hunter is a quintessentially corrupt act. Biden is the first president to pardon one of his immediate family members before they could be convicted of a crime. The closest and perhaps only precedent came in 2000 when Bill Clinton issued a last-minute pardon to his half brother Roger Clinton Jr., who had been convicted of cocaine possession and drug trafficking in the 1980s. Even then, Clinton’s pardon came long after his half brother had already served his prison sentence and returned to normal life. That use of the pardon was an abuse, to be sure, but a far narrower and less corrosive one than Biden’s move.
It is worth emphasizing here that Hunter’s pardon is no ordinary pardon. The president’s formal order said he had given a “full and unconditional pardon” to his son “for those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.” The elder Biden’s statement specifically referenced the ongoing prosecution against Hunter on federal gun charges, which were brought by special counsel David Weiss last year.
But this language is far more sweeping than just freeing Hunter from what his lawyers have dismissed as a minor technical violation of the law. The decade-long exculpation shields the president’s eldest son from legal consequences for any federal crime he committed over the last 10 years. This includes both his known alleged offenses as well as any that have yet to be charged or even come to the public’s attention. If anything, it evokes the broad language of Gerald Ford’s infamous pardon of Richard Nixon for any Watergate-related offenses in 1974.
Some of Biden’s allies have defended the pardon by claiming that the move was not an abuse of power, but merely a corrective measure, countering an abuse of power levied by Biden’s enemies. “No [federal prosecutor] would have charged this case given the underlying facts,” former Attorney General Eric Holder wrote on Twitter on Sunday. “After a 5 year investigation the facts as discovered only made that clear. Had his name been Joe Smith the resolution would have been—fundamentally and more fairly—a declination. Pardon warranted.”
This is unpersuasive for three reasons. First, the pardon covers much more than just Hunter’s gun charges. The younger Biden was set to be sentenced later this month after pleading guilty to multiple federal tax offenses, for example, in which he admitted to avoiding paying roughly $1.4 million in taxes over the last decade. Those charges were wiped away even though they appear to be fairly straightforward applications of the law by the special counsel.
Second, the implication that the special counsel pursued the federal gun charges against Hunter on baseless grounds is not borne out by the facts. Weiss’s office initially sought a plea agreement with the president’s son that would have sent him to a diversion program for the gun charges, sentenced him to probation for the tax charges, and given him immunity in other ongoing cases. Hunter’s defenders often note that Trump appointed Weiss as a U.S. attorney in the first place, but this is not the plea deal of a vengeful hack. Indeed, Weiss only moved forward with the prosecution after a federal judge rejected the plea deal last summer.
Third, even if the underlying gun-related charges are as weak as suggested, Biden’s decision to pardon Hunter for them is still inescapably corrupt. It may be true, as Holder claimed, that a federal prosecutor would have declined to bring charges against a similarly situated defendant if his name were Joe Smith. But it is impossible to deny that Hunter Biden is receiving a pardon for those charges solely because he happens to be the president’s son. A defendant named Joe Smith would have never received such special treatment.
The Biden administration’s formal defenses are even worse than the ones offered by his allies. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that the pardon was justified on prophylactic grounds in the face of Trump’s imminent abuses of power. “One of the reasons the president did the pardon is because it didn’t seem like his political opponents would let go of it, it didn’t seem like they would move on, and so, this is why this president took this action,” she told reporters during a press conference on Monday.
That is a poor reason to issue a pardon on its own terms. It is also unconvincing as a rationale. Hunter Biden is far from the only person who has been threatened with dubious investigations and prosecutions by President-elect Donald Trump. Trumpworld has suggested it will go after a wide range of political enemies in the Justice Department, the media, and the Democratic Party. That the only person to receive a defensive pardon from Biden just happens to be his son signals that Jean-Pierre’s defense is more of an after-the-fact rationalization than a guiding principle.
For that exact reason, the Hunter Biden pardon is an early Christmas gift to the president-elect, who is already planning to exercise the pardon power in even more grotesquely self-interested ways. He has long promised to pardon the January 6 rioters, for example, who attempted to overthrow the 2020 election on his behalf four years ago. “Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years?” he said on his personal social media website on Sunday. “Such an abuse and a miscarriage of justice!” (Trump was referring to the prosecutions, not the pardon, as an abuse of power.)
Other pardons will likely flow to favored subordinates and reliable allies. As I’ve noted before, Trump dangled pardons during his first term to prevent witnesses from testifying against him. Trump may even try to pardon himself for his various alleged offenses, something that he proposed doing during the Russia investigation but never attempted for fear of political backlash. That power will supplement the so-called “presidential immunity” that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority granted him earlier this year. The end result will be a presidency where Trump wields near-absolute power to exculpate his friends and punish his enemies, and the rule of law becomes a fading aspiration in American political life.
Naturally, Trump would have done this whether Biden pardoned his son or not. The president-elect may have even pardoned Hunter himself, perhaps to muddle the waters surrounding his own planned uses of the power. What Biden has done instead by pardoning his son—and only his son—is normalize further abuses of the pardon power for corrupt personal gain. If Biden had issued this pardon any sooner, the House would be justified in considering impeachment. As it stands now, it is merely a self-serving final act for a president whose administration failed on its own terms.
