The White House is defending President Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, after the President had repeatedly insisted that he had no plans to grant such executive clemency. Biden issued the sweeping pardon on Sunday evening before heading off on an official trip to Africa, and it covers any potential federal crimes that 54-year-old Hunter may have committed over the course of a decade.
Hunter Biden became the first child of a sitting US president to be criminally convicted in June, after a jury in Delaware found him guilty of three charges for lying about his drug use on a form when buying a handgun. He also pleaded guilty to federal tax charges that included failure to file and pay his taxes, tax evasion and filing a false return just this past September. The pardon covers any potential federal crimes that Hunter Biden may have committed between January 2014 and December 2024, spanning a period beyond the tax and gun offenses.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Monday that Biden had “wrestled” over the decision during the family’s Thanksgiving break on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, at the weekend. Jean-Pierre said that Biden had pardoned his son, who was facing sentencing later this month in two federal cases, to shield him from potential persecution by the outgoing president’s political foes.
As recently as last month, Jean-Pierre was still telling reporters that Biden would not pardon his son; however, she told reporters on Air Force One en route to Angola: “He said he came to this decision this weekend, and he said he wrestled with this and, because he believes in the justice system, but he also believes that the raw politics infected the process and led to a miscarriage of justice .. Hunter was singled out, and because his last name was Biden, because he was the president’s son. That’s what we saw. And so the president believed enough is enough, and the president took action, and he also believes that they tried to break his son in order to break him.”
President-elect Donald Trump and other Republicans have lambasted the move, with Trump calling it “an abuse and miscarriage of justice”, and House Speaker Mike Johnson saying that “trust in our justice system has almost been irreparably damaged by the Bidens and abuse of it”.
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