Washington, D.C. Hunter Biden was given a pardon by President Joe Biden on Sunday night. This saved the younger Biden from a possible prison sentence for federal felony gun and tax convictions and broke a promise he made in the past not to use the extraordinary powers of the president to help his family.
The Democratic president had said before that he would not commute his son’s term or pardon him after he was found guilty in Delaware and California. This was done just a few weeks before Hunter Biden was supposed to get his sentence for being found guilty in the gun case and on tax charges, and it will happen less than two months before President-elect Trump takes office.
It’s the end of a long court battle for the younger Biden, who told the public he was being investigated by the federal government in December 2020, a month after his father won the 2020 election. It also brings shame to the elder Biden’s legacy.
Many times, Biden told Americans that he would bring back normalcy and respect for the law after Trump’s first term. However, he ended up using his power to help his son, which was against what he told Americans he would do.
I believe in the justice system, but as I have thought about this, I also think that raw politics have gotten into this process and caused a miscarriage of justice. Biden said this in a speech released Sunday evening.
It’s not just the gun and tax crimes that the younger Biden is forgiven for by the president. It also includes any other “offences against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, to December 1, 2024.”
In June, when his son was on trial in the Delaware gun case, Biden told reporters, “I abide by the jury’s decision.” He made it clear that he would not pardon or commute his son’s sentence. I’m going to do that, and I’m not going to forgive him.
The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said on November 8, just days after Trump’s win, that the younger Biden would not get a pardon or clemency. She said, “We’ve been asked that question multiple times.” The answer we gave is still no.
The older Biden stood by his only living son Hunter as he became seriously addicted to drugs and messed up his family life. In recent years, Hunter has gotten back on track. Hunter Biden’s many mistakes have been used as a political weapon against the president’s father for a long time. At one meeting, lawmakers showed pictures of the president’s son half-naked and high on drugs in a seedy hotel.
House Republicans also tried to impeach his father by using the younger Biden’s years of shady business dealings abroad. They have since given up on this plan, as his father has long denied having any role in or benefiting from his son’s dealings.
Biden said in his speech, “The charges in his cases came about only after some of my political opponents in Congress pushed them to attack me and stop my election.” “Hunger was targeted just because he is my son. This is the only conclusion that makes sense when you look at the facts of Hunter’s cases.”
Biden said, “I hope Americans will understand why a father and a president would make this choice.” He said he made the choice this past weekend.
Before he leaves office on January 20, 2025, the president may take his last trip abroad as president. He spent Thanksgiving with Hunter and his family in Nantucket, Mass., and was set to leave for Angola later Sunday.
In June, a federal court in Delaware found Hunter Biden guilty of three felonies for buying a gun in 2018 while lying on a federal form that said he wasn’t using drugs illegally or being hooked to them.
In September, he was supposed to go to court in California on charges that he didn’t pay at least $1.4 million in taxes. However, he decided to plead guilty to both misdemeanour and felony charges, which came as a surprise just hours before the jury had to be picked.
The plea deal was worked out by David Weiss, who was chosen by Trump as U.S. attorney in Delaware. He was later made a special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland so that he could have more control over the prosecution of the president’s son.
Hunter Biden said he was pleading guilty in that case to keep his family from having to go through more pain and shame after the gun trial showed sexy details about his crack cocaine abuse.
Tax charges can get you up to 17 years in prison, and gun charges can get you up to 25 years. However, federal sentencing guidelines called for much less time, and it’s possible that he would not have gone to jail at all.
Last month, Hunter Biden was meant to be sentenced in the two federal cases brought by the special counsel. This was after a judge looked over a plea deal with prosecutors that would have probably kept him out of jail. Hunter was meant to plead guilty to misdemeanour tax offences as part of the original deal. He would not have been charged in the gun case as long as he stayed out of trouble for two years.
But last year’s plea hearing fell apart quickly when the judge raised questions about strange parts of the deal. After that, the younger Biden was charged in both cases.
This weekend, Hunter Biden’s lawyers put out a 52-page white paper called “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden.” It called the president’s son a “surrogate to attack and injure his father, both as a candidate in 2020 and later as president.”
Lawyers for the younger Biden have long said that prosecutors gave in to political pressure to charge the president’s son, even though Trump and other Republicans were very critical of what they called the “sweetheart” plea deal.
Rep. James Comer, one of the Republican chairmen in charge of investigations into Biden’s family in Congress, spoke out against the president’s pardon, saying that the proof against Hunter was “just the tip of the iceberg.”
“It’s sad that President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability instead of telling the truth about the decades of wrongdoing they’ve been involved in,” Comer said on X, the site that used to be Twitter.
Biden isn’t the first president to use his power to pardon to help people close to him.
During his last few weeks in office, Trump released from prison several people connected to the Russia probe by special counsel Robert Mueller. Charles Kushner is the father of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Over the weekend, Trump said that he would put forward the older Kushner to be the next U.S. ambassador to France.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump, said in a statement, “That system of justice must be fixed and due process must be restored for all Americans. That is exactly what President Trump will do as he returns to the White House with an overwhelming mandate from the American people.” Cheung was charged with trying to rig the 2020 presidential election and has promised to completely change the Justice Department and fill it with Trump supporters.
In an email, Hunter Biden said he would never take the help he received for granted and promised to use the new life he has built to “help those who are still sick and suffering.”
The younger Biden said, “I have admitted and taken responsibility for the mistakes I made during the worst days of my addiction—mistakes that were used to shame and humiliate me and my family in public for political gain.”
Hunter Biden’s lawyers asked the judges in his gun and tax cases to drop them right away, citing the pardon, in filings made Sunday night in both Los Angeles and Delaware.
A spokesperson for Weiss did not answer calls left Sunday night asking for comment.
NBC News was the first to report that Biden would likely forgive his son on Sunday.
