Joe Biden pardons his son Hunter’s tax convictions, despite a promise that he would not

U.S. President Joe Biden on Sunday night pardoned his son Hunter, sparing the younger Biden a possible prison sentence on federal gun charges and tax convictions and 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 his convictions in the two Delaware and California cases.

The move comes weeks before Hunter Biden receives his sentence following his trial in the gun case and guilty plea to tax charges, and less than two months before President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House .

It caps a long-running legal saga for the president’s son, who publicly disclosed he was under federal investigation in December 2020, a month after Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, and puts the elder Biden’s legacy in jeopardy.

Biden, who repeatedly promised Americans that he would restore rules and respect for the rule of law after Trump’s first term, eventually used his position to help his son, breaking his promise publicly to Americans that he would do no such thing. .

In a statement released Sunday evening, Biden said, “I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with it, I also believe that crude politics has infected this process and led to a miscarriage of justice.”

The president’s blanket pardon covers not only these crimes, but also any other “crime against the United States that he committed or committed or participated in during the period between January 1, 2014 and December 1, 2014.” 2024″.

In June, Biden categorically ruled out a pardon or commutation for his son, telling reporters as his son faced trial in the Delaware gun case: “I respect the jury’s decision. I will do it and not the I will forgive.”

On Nov. 8, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre ruled out a pardon or clemency for the younger Biden, saying, “We’ve been asked that question several times. Our answer is firmly, which is no “.

“Hunter was outstanding,” says the president

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 countless missteps as a political fight against his father: In a hearing, lawmakers showed photos of the president’s half-naked drug-fueled son in a seedy hotel .

House Republicans also sought to use the younger Biden’s years of questionable foreign dealings in a since-abandoned attempt to impeach his father, who has long denied involvement in his son’s dealings or benefit from it in any way.

“The charges in their cases came only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” Biden said. “No reasonable person looking at the facts of Hunter’s cases can come to any conclusion other than that Hunter was singled out only because he is my son.”

“I hope the American people will understand why a father and a president would make this decision,” Biden added, saying he made the decision this weekend.

The president had spent the Thanksgiving holiday in Nantucket, Mass., with Hunter and his family, and was due to leave for Angola later Sunday in what could be his last foreign trip as president before to leave office on January 20, 2025.

Legal problems

Hunter was convicted in June in federal court in Delaware of three felonies for buying a gun in 2018 when, prosecutors said, he lied on a federal form claiming he was not an illegal drug user or addict. .

He was tried 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 began.

David Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Delaware who negotiated the deal, was later appointed special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland to have more autonomy over the prosecution of the president’s son.

Hunter Biden said he pleaded guilty in the case to spare his family further pain and shame after the gun trial aired salacious details about his struggles with crack cocaine addiction.

The tax charges carry up to 17 years behind bars and the weapons charges are punishable by up to 25 years in prison, though federal sentencing guidelines were expected to call for much less time, and it was possible he would avoid prison time completely.

Hunter Biden was supposed to be sentenced this month in the two federal cases, which the special counsel filed after a deal with prosecutors that likely would have spared him prison time fell apart under a judge’s scrutiny. Under the original deal, he was supposed to plead guilty to lesser tax offenses and would have avoided prosecution in the gun case as long as he stayed out of trouble for two years.

But the hearing quickly fell apart last year when the judge raised concerns about unusual aspects of the settlement. The younger Biden was later charged in both cases.

Hunter Biden’s legal team released a 52-page white paper this weekend titled The Political Prosecutions of Hunter Biden, in which it describes the president’s son as a “surrogate to attack and injure his father, as much as the candidate 2020 or later as President.”

Lawyers for the younger Biden have long argued that prosecutors bowed to political pressure to indict the president’s son amid sharp criticism from Trump and other Republicans of what they called the plea deal “of love”.

‘The justice system needs to be fixed’: Trump spokesman

Rep. James Comer, one of the Republican chairs leading congressional investigations into Biden’s family, criticized the president’s pardon, saying the evidence against Hunter was “just the tip of the iceberg.”

“It’s a shame that instead of coming clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability,” Comer said on social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

Biden is not 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 several allies convicted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Trump announced this week his plans to nominate the elder Kushner as the US envoy to France in his next administration.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump, who has pledged to dramatically overhaul and install loyalists throughout the Justice Department after he was prosecuted for his role in trying to subvert the 2020 presidential election, said in a statement: “This justice system must be fixed. and due process must be restored for all Americans, which is exactly what President Trump will do when he returns to the White House with a mandate overwhelming the American people.”

“Mistakes during the darkest days”

Hunter Biden said in an emailed statement that he will never take the relief he was granted for granted and vowed to dedicate 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 were used 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 let them go immediately, citing the pardon.

A spokesman for Weiss, the special counsel who brought the cases, did not respond to messages seeking comment Sunday night.