President Joe Biden’s blanket pardon of his son Hunter represents an extraordinary exercise of executive power, prompting accusations from both parties that it risks further damaging both the president’s place in political history and the public’s faith in the justice system.
But, for Biden, staring down the prospect of an incoming president who has threatened to exact revenge on his political enemies, it may simply have been worth the risk, according to allies interviewed after his abrupt Sunday night decision. The president, they said, faced a decision that pitted his responsibility as a father against political considerations — after a decades-long effort to balance the two.
“In the president’s situation, he could not be objective — everyone knows what his family means to him and especially given the tragedies in his life,” said former Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), a longtime Biden friend and ally. “If you are a father and you have this power, I don’t see how anybody could fault the president of the United States for telling the world that his son has been through enough.”
Some Democrats have criticized the pardon, accusing Biden of putting his personal interest ahead of the country and worrying it would hand President-elect Donald Trump more ammunition to justify weaponizing his federal authority once in office.
Others, while sympathetic to the dilemma Biden faced, warned such a sweeping pardon would only amplify scrutiny of Hunter and the broader Biden family, rather than tamp it down.
But the decision ultimately came down to his overriding belief that Hunter had been through “enough” — and faith that the American people would understand, or at least not care enough for it to matter.
Biden, who said he resolved over the Thanksgiving weekend to wipe out Hunter’s crimes, had grown worried that his son’s upcoming sentencing would be especially hard for Hunter and his broader family to bear, said a person familiar with the matter, who was granted anonymity to discuss private deliberations.
The pardon is likely to be one of the last and most personally consequential acts of a term where Biden found himself shadowed by a series of unflattering revelations tied to Hunter’s drug and alcohol abuse. And it amounts to a tragic bookend of sorts for a career that began with a similarly wrenching personal decision: whether to remain in politics after a car crash killed his first wife and daughter just weeks after Biden’s election to the Senate.
Then, it was the young Hunter and his older brother, Beau, who made Biden second guess whether to be sworn in and commute between Washington and Delaware. Biden opted to serve his term, setting off a decadeslong climb accompanied by moments of intense grief, including Beau’s death in 2015 due to cancer and Hunter’s descent into addiction.
While Joe Biden often cited Beau as a driving force in his decision to seek the presidency in 2020, it was Hunter who has colored his last couple years in office.
Biden refused to distance himself from his son during the federal trials that resulted in Hunter’s convictions, despite the urging of advisers who worried about the personal toll it exacted and the risk of political blowback. Hunter later emerged as an increasingly visible advocate for staying in the presidential race as his father weighed whether to continue following his disastrous June debate — a role some officials viewed with suspicion given his lack of political experience and outsized personal interest.
Biden maintained throughout that he would not pardon Hunter, insisting in June he would “abide by the jury decision.” White House officials, including press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, also repeatedly ruled out a pardon in the months afterward.
“Our answer stands, which is no,” Jean-Pierre said earlier this month.
That reversal triggered its own swell of criticism apart from the pardon itself, with both reporters and lawmakers questioning when Biden had changed his mind. On Monday, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) told reporters that he, too, would have pardoned his son — but he objected to the “lie.”
“Don’t tell us you’re not going to do it and then do it,” he said.
Some allies privately believed he’d always relent and grant a pardon. But the calculation appeared to more definitively shift after the election, and as Hunter’s sentencing date approached. Trump’s victory raised the likelihood that Hunter would be subjected to years of additional investigations — a prospect that Biden concluded primarily aimed to “break” his son and disrupt his attempt at recovery. And with Biden set to exit politics in less than two months, the personal price of going back on his word would be far less than before.
“I think anyone who doesn’t understand why he would issue this pardon has never loved anyone who suffered from an addiction,” said Lisa Goodman, the founder of Equality Delaware, who has known the Biden family for decades. “He is a family man, through and through. And so I was not surprised that, in the big picture, that he would issue a pardon.”
The decision has nevertheless troubled some who now worry that the broad nature of the pardon — which covers any crimes over the past decade — will end up muddling the distinction Biden sought to draw during his presidency as a leader dedicated to restoring norms following Trump’s institution-bending first term.
“He was right to pardon his son,” said Anthony Coley, a former Biden Justice Department official. “His rationale for doing it, which is that the prosecutions are political, is wrong. Republicans will use Biden’s rhetoric as a supposed proof point to try to reform and recreate DOJ in Donald Trump’s image.”
Trump immediately seized on the pardon to renew his call for pardoning insurrectionists involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, while other Republicans sought to use it to fan doubts about the Justice Department and FBI.
“Joe Biden was elected to bring order after chaos, to restore institutions, restore norms,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian and research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “And this pardon blurs the lines in an unnecessary way.”
Biden’s defenders pointed to the various legal experts who have supported his decision, noting that the crimes Hunter was convicted of are rarely prosecuted so aggressively, if at all. One alum of Biden’s 2020 campaign waved away Democrats’ worries about its broader impact on the public, arguing parents as well would agree with Biden’s decision.
On Monday, Jean-Pierre cast the move as a difficult one that Biden made because he believed Hunter had been unfairly targeted, attempting to separate it from his faith in the justice system overall.
“Two things could be true: The president does believe in the justice system and the Department of Justice. And he also believes that his son was singled out politically,” she said.
But at its core, allies said, Biden believed his son had done the hard work of turning his life around. He worried that another prolonged period of attacks and investigations could jeopardize that recovery. And for two more months, he was in the unique position to make it all go away. So he did.
“Let’s just be candid: I think the president blames himself for his public service that his political enemies have used against Hunter, have exploited against Hunter unfairly — and you can’t divorce yourself from that as a human being, as a father,” Jones said. “I don’t think this was an easy decision for Joe Biden, I really don’t … But this ended up being much, much more personal. And the stakes got raised so much higher.”
Connor O’Brien contributed to this report.
