The unprecedented pardon of Hunter Biden by his father, President Joe Biden, has ignited a firestorm of criticism from legal and political experts, with some viewing it as a pointed rebuke of the Justice Department and others downplaying it as political theater.
In conjunction with the sweeping 11-year pardon, the president announced Sunday that he believed his son, who was convicted on three federal gun charges for lying on a firearms application and pleaded guilty to federal tax evasion charges earlier this year, was being unfairly targeted by his political rivals. Since then, the president’s decision has incited public skepticism about both the impartiality of the justice system and the motivations behind the president’s decision.
The pardon was an “acknowledgment that this Justice Department has engaged in lawfare and the weaponization of criminal justice,” Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz told the Washington Examiner.
Dershowitz said he viewed the pardon as a denunciation of Attorney General Merrick Garland and special counsel David Weiss, whom Garland appointed in 2023 amid pressure from Republicans to investigate Hunter Biden over his foreign business dealings that GOP critics said were tailored to benefit the elder Biden.
“It’s a rebuke to Garland, it’s a rebuke to the special prosecutor Weiss, it’s a rebuke to the entire system,” said Dershowitz, who represented Trump during his first impeachment trial.
The conservative Article III Project’s senior counsel, Will Chamberlain, said Biden’s pardon and the accompanying criticism of the cases amounts to a “criticism of Garland.”
“Garland appointed Weiss and would have had to sign off on major investigative steps,” Chamberlain said. “Biden can’t criticize the prosecution as political without implicitly criticizing Garland.”
In a recent Washington Post op-ed, the editorial board described Biden’s decision as an “unquestionable legal right” but one that “maligned” the DOJ under Garland. The article asserted that the pardon “invited” President-elect Donald Trump to “draw equivalence between the Hunter Biden pardon and any future moves Mr. Trump might take against the impartial administration of justice.”
Garland has not issued any public comment since the pardoning of the first son on Sunday. His most recent comments about pardons date back to August, when he was asked about Trump’s floated plans to pardon defendants from the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.
“The convictions indicate that both juries and judges have agreed with our charges,” Garland told reporters in August when asked about Trump’s plans to pardon defendants from the riot. “Pardons are another matter, and I really don’t have anything to say about that.”
Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy was more skeptical of the substance of Biden’s criticisms of the Garland DOJ and likened the president’s statement to “play-acting.”
“Biden knows the things he said about his son’s case are not true and that, in fact, Hunter was given special treatment, not selective prosecution,” McCarthy said. “This is all being said politically (for public consumption), and none of it is real.”
McCarthy also said that “Weiss did not conduct a real investigation” and added that “Garland tried to disappear Hunter’s case,” but instead endured humiliation once a prenegotiated plea deal blew up before a federal judge in Delaware in July 2023.
In Biden’s statement, he blamed Republicans in Congress for “instigating” an investigation into his son, claiming “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.”
But Weiss’s lead prosecutor, Leo Wise, vehemently objected to the president’s assertion in court filings on Tuesday, citing that no court has agreed when the “defendant falsely claimed that the charges were the result of some improper motive.”
McCarthy also noted that the pardon was always a failsafe that Biden had under his tool belt if all else failed and that Weiss’s role as special counsel was merely a way to “pretend” that the prosecution of Hunter Biden was being handled by an “independent” lawyer.
“But Weiss not only is not independent, he is the U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware,” McCarthy said, adding, “This means that if Biden really thought Weiss abused his power, he could fire Weiss immediately — U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president. So the whole thing is nonsense.”
Georgetown law professor Jonathan Turley said Hunter Biden managed to escape from any consequences in part because he “flaunted his status as a protected person among the Washington elite. He is one of Washington’s untouchables.”
“In order to rationalize this abusive use of the pardon power, the president is now attacking his own Justice Department as politically motivated and engaged in lawfare,” Turley added.
Although the indictments against the first son never included any allegations of influence-peddling investigated by the House Oversight Committee, Republicans charged that the president’s family, through dealings handled by his son, had used their influence and status to make more than $20 million beginning at the end of Biden’s vice presidency in 2015.
Now, questions linger over what Republicans can or will do in the 119th Congress that could move forward an investigation into whether the sitting president benefited from his son’s alleged influence operation. Even though Hunter Biden can no longer be prosecuted for any alleged actions since around 2014, his pardon means that he can be brought in to testify under oath during future congressional inquiries or court hearings.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) has not said much about the future of investigations into the Biden family but suggested in a statement to reporters Tuesday that he is not done with the first son yet.
“We still don’t have the pseudonym emails, which we believe will show Joe Biden was communicating secretly with the shady associates that were a part of the money laundering scheme with the money from our adversaries around the world,” Comer told the Daily Beast.
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“I look forward to talking to Attorney General [Pam] Bondi about this,” Comer added, referring to Trump’s nominee for attorney general.
The Washington Examiner contacted the DOJ for comment.
