Despicable. Disgusting. Dishonorable.
Those are all words that came to mind Sunday night when I heard the news that President Biden had decided to pardon his son, Hunter Biden. It wasn’t simply that he decided to do it, even after he promised time and time again that he would not do so. It was the manner in which he did so.
Like many other Americans – perhaps even an overwhelmingly majority, many of whom may have even voted for him – I was not at all surprised that Biden decided to pardon Hunter. I never really believed his lies that he would never do so; that was clearly nothing more than a blatantly dishonest, cynical political ploy.
The only question was the timing. Had he run again and been reelected (don’t laugh, it was plausible), it would have been one of the first things he’d do after getting sworn into his second term. I never expected him to actually let the same rules that apply to everyone apply to his own family. There are several ways in which this was done that made it especially galling, however.
The first is that Biden has been relatively stingy about pardons. He’s issued fewer than a fifth as many as Donald Trump did in his first term. Now, many of Trump’s pardons were political and unworthy of clemency as well, but this is just a comparison of raw numbers. There’s a whole process for regular people to apply for presidential pardons or commutations of their sentences. In fact, it’s got a huge backlog of cases, and Biden has let it languish during his time in office. Keep in mind that this is something that the president of the United States can just do, and Joe Biden hasn’t taken the opportunity as often as prior presidents.
Another problem with this pardon is that it occurred before sentencing, let alone before any time was served. We don’t know what the sentence for Hunter Biden would have been, but as a first-time nonviolent offender he may well have not even seen any jail time. Even if he had been sentenced to some minimal amount of jail time, his father could have commuted his sentence rather than pardoning him. That would have left the conviction on his record without him having to serve any time or pay any fine. Now, in Hunter’s case, that’s a distinction without much of a difference, since his case is so well known, but politically, it would have been a better position to take.
This pardon is also overly broad. Biden didn’t just pardon Hunter in the two specific cases in which he was charged, but of all federal charges from 2014 to 2024. This is an incredibly sweeping pardon, on par with Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon or, in a lesser-known example, Ronald Reagan’s pardon of George Steinbrenner.
Other, similarly broad pardons have been granted for large groups of people, like Carter’s pardon of Vietnam draft dodgers and Andrew Johnson’s pardon of Confederate soldiers and officials. In some of those cases, it’s debatable whether they were good ideas, but there’s no question that each and every one of them short-circuited the criminal justice process. Moreover, they were politically disadvantageous: Carter and Ford both lost reelection, while Johnson further enraged Republicans in Congress.
This pardon, too, is politically disastrous for Democrats, and isn’t going to go away the minute Joe Biden is out of office. Let’s not forget that, whether rightly or wrongly, Democrats pursued legal charges against Trump at both the state and federal level. Trump constantly argued that every case against him was a case of political persecution rather than justice, an argument Democrats denounced.
In announcing his pardon of Hunter, Joe Biden made the same argument about the cases against his son, alleging that he was targeted for political reasons. Now, that’s a tough case to make when his attorney general runs the Department of Justice, but simply making the claim – along with the overly broad preemptive pardon – buttresses Trump’s similar claims in the mind of many. It also undermines the Democrats’ argument that the Department of Justice applies the law consistently to everyone.
Clearly at least one prominent Democrat doesn’t buy that argument: Joe Biden.
There is no doubt whatsoever that Biden’s pardon of his son is a disastrous, selfish mistake that benefits his own family at the expense of his party and his country. The only questions is how far-reaching the consequences end up being.
