By Jeff Mordock – The Washington Times – Sunday, December 1, 2024
President Biden pardoned his son Hunter Biden on tax and gun charges, condemning the prosecutions as politically motivated while reversing his promise not to use his executive authority to save his son from potential prison sentences.
In a statement Sunday night, Mr. Biden called the convictions “a miscarriage of justice” and accused Republicans of injecting “raw politics” into the judicial process.
Hunter Biden was scheduled for sentencing Dec. 12 in Wilmington, Delaware, for his conviction on three federal gun charges and Dec. 16 in Los Angeles after his guilty plea to nine federal tax evasion charges.
The pardon by the 82-year-old president near the end of his term will ensure that Hunter Biden will spend no time in prison.
Hunter Biden was staring down a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison and a $750,000 fine in the gun case. The tax charges carried a maximum sentence of 17 years in prison. He would have likely received far less than the maximum sentence because he is a first-time offender.
Presidential pardons are absolute and cannot be overturned by the courts or Congress.
Mr. Biden’s statement blamed House Republicans for investigations he said were aimed at damaging his reelection chances after years of hounding his son to make him a political liability.
The president bowed out of the 2024 White House race in July weeks after a devastating debate performance against former President Donald Trump.
“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,” Mr. Biden said. “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution.”
The president said that “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.”
Mr. Biden said the charges against his son arose after several of his “political opponents in Congress instigated them” to derail his reelection.
He accused House Republicans of interfering with the plea deal Hunter Biden reached with the Justice Department, which unraveled last year amid intense scrutiny from a federal judge in Wilmington.
The pardon marks a major reversal for the president, who in recent months repeatedly insisted that he would not use his power to pardon his son or commute his sentence.
“I will not pardon him,” Mr. Biden said in June after a Wilmington jury found him guilty on three federal gun charges.
As recently as last week, the White House insisted that Mr. Biden would not issue clemency for his son.
“The president has spoken to this,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates told reporters on Air Force One. “I don’t have anything to add to what he said already.”
Earlier this month, when pressed on the issue, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded, “We’ve been asked that question multiple times. Our answer stands, which is ‘no.’”
Traditionally, presidents issue pardons at the end of the year and/or their terms, saving the most potentially explosive ones for the “lame duck” weeks before a successor is inaugurated.
In his statement, Mr. Biden didn’t address why he reversed his stance but said he kept his promise not to interfere with the justice system by waiting until after the cases were resolved to issue the pardon.
Had Hunter Biden been pardoned at the conclusion of his trial in Delaware on federal gun charges, it would have erupted into a political headache for his father, who was running for reelection.
In a statement, Hunter Biden said he has “admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes.”
“I will never take the clemency I have been given today for granted and will devote the life I have rebuilt to helping those who are still sick and suffering,” the president’s son said.
His sister, Ashley Biden, took to Instagram to thank their father.
“What they have tried to do to my brother is cruel + politically motivated. Period. Proud Sister + Daughter!” she wrote.
Republicans have long argued that Hunter Biden was receiving favorable treatment from the Justice Department because of his father’s political clout.
House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, Kentucky Republican, who was investigating the Biden family business dealings, including Hunter Biden’s questionable dealings with foreign officials, said the pardon was an effort to escape accountability.
He said Mr. Biden lied about the scope of the business dealings and his promise not to pardon Hunter Biden.
“The charges Hunter faced were just the tip of the iceberg in the blatant corruption that President Biden and the Biden Crime Family have lied about to the American people,” Mr. Comer said. “It’s unfortunate that, rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can do to avoid accountability.”
Mr. Trump addressed the pardon by bringing up those who had been arrested and charged for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
“Does the pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of justice,” he wrote on Truth Social.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, wrote on X that the Democrats howled and impeached Mr. Trump during his first term for asking Ukraine to look into Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
“Democrats said there was nothing to our impeachment inquiry. If that’s the case, why did Joe Biden just issue Hunter Biden a pardon for the very things we were inquiring about?” he wrote.
Rep. Greg Stanton, Arizona Democrat, became the first House member of Mr. Biden’s party to criticize the pardon.
“I respect President Biden, but I think he got this wrong,” he wrote on X. “This wasn’t a politically-motivated prosecution. Hunter committed felonies and was convicted by a jury of his peers,” Mr. Stanton wrote on X.
Roughly one hour after Mr. Biden’s pardon, the first son’s legal team filed notices with the courts in both criminal cases saying the action “moots Mr. Biden’s pending and yet to occur sentencing and entry of judgement in this case and requires an automatic dismissal of the indictment with prejudice.”
Hunter Biden had planned to resolve the long-running federal investigation into his business dealings with a plea bargain deal with prosecutors that would have avoided an embarrassing trial ahead of the presidential election.
Under the deal, he would have pleaded guilty to misdemeanor tax offenses in California and avoided prosecution in the Delaware gun case if he stayed out of trouble for two years.
The deal collapsed under scrutiny from U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika, who was nominated by Mr. Trump. She questioned several unusual stipulations in the proposed agreements, and neither defense attorneys nor prosecutors could agree to a new deal.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed David Weiss, the U.S. attorney from Delaware, as special counsel in August 2023. He indicted Hunter Biden on gun and tax charges roughly a month later.
Hunter Biden was found guilty on two charges of making a false statement in the purchase of a gun by saying he was not an “unlawful user of substances or addicted to controlled substances.” He was also found guilty on a separate charge of possession of a firearm by a person addicted to drugs.
Hunter Biden’s history of drug abuse is well known and documented in his 2021 autobiography, “Beautiful Things,” in which he talked about smoking crack every 20 minutes and described numerous anecdotes about his interactions with drug dealers.
Defense attorneys argued that he didn’t lie because he purchased the gun shortly after leaving a drug rehabilitation facility and, therefore, didn’t consider himself an addict.
In the tax case, Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to three felony tax offenses related to his failure to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes. The surprise guilty plea was entered just days before jury selection was supposed to start in a Los Angeles federal courtroom.
In a statement at the time, Hunter Biden said he pleaded guilty to spare his family from “more pain, more invasions of privacy and needless embarrassment.”
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
