President Joe Biden announced Sunday he signed a pardon for his son Hunter, a sharp reversal from his previous position that he would not do so after the first son was convicted of tax and gun felonies this year.
The president said in a statement that he struggled with the decision but concluded over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend that his son was “treated differently” during the Department of Justice‘s nearly six-year investigation and prosecution of his son.
Hunter Biden was set to be sentenced in less than two weeks for three gun felonies after he was convicted by a jury of unlawfully possessing a firearm while addicted to drugs. He also had a second sentencing hearing scheduled later in December in a tax case, in which he had pleaded guilty to nine charges, including failing to pay income taxes on millions of dollars worth of income.
Joe Biden revealed his surprise pardon decision, effectively erasing his son’s charges and preventing him from being sentenced, less than two months before he exits the White House and right before he was about to leave for a long-awaited trip to Africa.
“Here’s the truth: I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice — and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further,” Joe Biden said.
The president added, “I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.”
The clemency Joe Biden issued was a full pardon stretching back to the beginning of 2014 for all crimes Hunter Biden “has committed or may have committed,” meaning the first son cannot be charged for anything else related to his conduct over the last decade.
The DOJ first began investigating Hunter Biden through U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s office in Delaware in 2019. In 2020, parts of the investigation spilled out into the public and became a lightning rod during the presidential election, a result of salacious and damning data from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop leaking to the media.
After Republicans took control of the House in the 2022 elections, they launched a wide-ranging impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden that largely centered around Hunter Biden’s lucrative business endeavors abroad, including in China and Ukraine.
Republicans, led by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), accused Joe Biden of leveraging his political power to help his son conduct sham business dealings, an accusation that Joe and Hunter Biden both adamantly denied. The inquiry eventually hit a dead end, never materializing into an impeachment vote and fizzling out entirely when Joe Biden announced this summer he would not run for reelection.
Comer lambasted the president’s pardon decision in a statement Sunday night, saying Hunter Biden and his family “continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability.”
As Hunter Biden became the House GOP’s top focus last year, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Weiss as special counsel to continue investigating him. Weiss’s appointment also came shortly after a high-profile plea deal between Hunter Biden and the DOJ collapsed. Soon after Weiss became special counsel, he brought two grand jury indictments against the president’s son in 2023 in lieu of the failed plea arrangement.
Joe Biden’s pardon also comes after months of elaborate pre-trial court proceedings in both cases, and one week-long trial in the gun case. The trial put a strain on the Biden family, bringing into the spotlight Hunter Biden’s darkest moments, when he was in the throes of drug and alcohol addiction from around 2015 to 2018 and grappling with losing his brother Beau Biden to brain cancer.
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Hunter Biden has said he has been sober since 2019. He was also required to undergo drug testing as part of his court proceedings, meaning the courts have confirmed his sobriety as recently as this year.
Joe Biden repeatedly said throughout the year that he would allow the outcomes of his son’s two cases to stand and would decline to pardon him. As recently as November, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the president had not changed his mind.
“We’ve been asked that question multiple times,” Jean-Pierre said. “Our answer stands, which is no.”
