Joe Biden has drawn criticism from Democrats over his decision to pardon son Hunter, following his gun and tax convictions, reversing past promises not to use the extraordinary powers of the presidency for the benefit of his family.
The Democratic president had previously said he would not pardon his son or commute his sentence after convictions in the two federal cases in Delaware and California. The move comes weeks before Hunter Biden was set to receive his punishment after his trial conviction in the gun case and guilty plea on tax charges, and less than two months before President-elect Donald Trump is set to return to the White House.
It caps a long-running legal saga for the younger Biden, who publicly disclosed he was under federal investigation in December 2020 - a month after his father’s 2020 victory - and casts a pall over the elder Biden’s legacy.
Mr Biden, who time and again pledged to Americans that he would restore norms and respect for the rule of law after Trump’s first term in office, ultimately used his position to help his son, breaking his public pledge to Americans that he would do no such thing.
Representative Greg Landsman, an Ohio Democrat, said on X: “As a father, I get it. But as someone who wants people to believe in public service again, it’s a setback.”
Fellow Democrat Michael Bennet, Colorado Senator, said Mr Biden’s decision placed “personal interest ahead of duty and further erodes Americans’ faith that the justice system is fair and equal for all”.
In a statement released Sunday evening, President Biden said: “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.”
White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday defended the president's action and said Mr Biden believed Hunter faced further persecution from his adversaries, who she did not name.
"One of the reasons the president did the pardon is because they didn't seem like - his political ... opponents - would let go of it. It didn't seem like they would move on," she told reporters on Air Force One during a trip to Angola. "They would continue to go after his son. That's what he believed."
The president’s sweeping pardon covers not just the gun and tax offences against the younger Biden, but also 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 through December 1, 2024.”
In June, Mr Biden categorically ruled out a pardon or commutation for his son, telling reporters as his son faced trial in the Delaware gun case: “I abide by the jury decision. I will do that and I will not pardon him.”
As recently as November 8, days after Trump’s victory, Ms Jean-Pierre ruled out a pardon or clemency for the younger Biden, saying: “We’ve been asked that question multiple times. Our answer stands, which is no.”
President-elect Donald Trump, who has pledged to dramatically overhaul and install loyalists across the Justice Department after he was prosecuted for his role in trying to subvert the 2020 presidential election, said in a social media post on Sunday that Hunter Biden’s pardon was “such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice.”
“Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years?” Trump asked, referring to those convicted in the violent Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.
Hunter Biden said in an emailed statement that he will never take for granted the relief granted to him and vowed to devote the life he has rebuilt “to helping those who are still sick and suffering.”
“I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction - mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport,” the younger Biden said.
Hunter Biden’s legal team filed Sunday night in both Los Angeles and Delaware asking the judges handling his gun and tax cases to immediately dismiss them, citing the pardon.
The elder Biden has publicly stood by his only living son as Hunter descended into serious drug addiction and threw his family life into turmoil before getting back on track in recent years. The president’s political rivals have long used Hunter Biden’s myriad mistakes as a political cudgel against his father: In one hearing, lawmakers displayed photos of the drug-addled president’s son half-naked in a seedy hotel.
House Republicans also sought to use the younger Biden’s years of questionable overseas business ventures in a since-abandoned attempt to impeach his father, who has long denied involvement in his son’s dealings or benefiting from them in any way.
“The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” Mr Biden said in his statement. “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.”
“I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision,” Mr Biden added, claiming he made the decision this weekend.
The president had spent the Thanksgiving holiday in Nantucket, Massachusetts, with Hunter and his family, and departed for Angola later Sunday on what may be his last foreign trip as president before leaving office on January 20, 2025.
The US President is making his long-promised visit to Africa to showcase a US-backed railway project in Zambia, Congo and Angola that he has pushed as a new approach in countering some of China's global influence. He was pictured on Monday stopping off in the Atlantic Ocean island of Cape Verde.
Hunter Biden was convicted in June in Delaware federal court of three felonies for purchasing a gun in 2018 when, prosecutors said, he lied on a federal form by claiming he was not illegally using or addicted to drugs.
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He had been set to stand trial in September in the California case accusing him of failing to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes. But he agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor and felony charges in a surprise move hours after jury selection was set to begin.
David Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Delaware who negotiated the plea deal, was subsequently named a special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland to have more autonomy over the prosecution of the president’s son.
Hunter Biden said he was pleading guilty in that case to spare his family more pain and embarrassment after the gun trial aired salacious details about his struggles with a crack cocaine addiction.
The tax charges carry up to 17 years behind bars and the gun charges are punishable by up to 25 years in prison, though federal sentencing guidelines were expected to call for far less time and it was possible he would have avoided prison time entirely.
Hunter Biden was supposed to be sentenced this month in the two federal cases, which the special counsel brought after a plea deal with prosecutors that likely would have spared him prison time fell apart under scrutiny by a judge. Under the original deal, Hunter was supposed to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax offenses and and would have avoided prosecution in the gun case as long as he stayed out of trouble for two years.
But the plea hearing quickly unraveled last year when the judge raised concerns about unusual aspects of the deal. The younger Biden was subsequently indicted in the two cases.
Hunter Biden’s legal team this weekend released a 52-page white paper titled “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden,” describing the president’s son as a “surrogate to attack and injure his father, both as a candidate in 2020 and later as president.”
The younger Biden’s lawyers have long argued that prosecutors bowed to political pressure to indict the president’s son amid heavy criticism by Trump and other Republicans of what they called the “sweetheart” plea deal.
Mr Biden is hardly the first president to deploy his pardon powers to benefit those close to him.
In his final weeks in office, Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in law, Jared Kushner, as well as multiple allies convicted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Trump over the weekend announced plans to nominate the elder Kushner to be the US envoy to France in his next administration.
Mr Biden arrived in Angola on Monday for his long-awaited first presidential visit to sub-Saharan Africa and will use the three-day trip to counter China's influence by highlighting an ambitious US-backed railway project.
The Lobito Corridor railway redevelopment in Zambia, Congo and Angola aims to advance U.S. presence in a region rich in the critical minerals used in batteries for electric vehicles, electronic devices and clean energy technologies.
Mr Biden first stopped in the Atlantic Ocean island nation of Cape Verde for a brief, closed-door meeting with Prime Minister Ulisses Correia e Silva. In Angola, Mr Biden plans to meet with Angolan President João Lourenço, visit the National Slavery Museum and travel to the port city of Lobito for a look at the rail project.
Mr Biden promised to visit Africa last year after reviving the US-Africa Summit in December 2022. The trip was pushed back to 2024 and delayed again this October because of Hurricane Milton, reinforcing a sentiment among Africans that their continent is still low priority for Washington.
The last US president to visit sub-Saharan Africa was Barack Obama in 2015. Mr Biden did attend a United Nations climate summit in Egypt in North Africa in 2022.
