On Monday, Dec. 1, President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter. The pardon was an unconditional pardon covering any crimes that he may have committed between January 2014 and the day that the pardon was issued. The pardon was controversial, drawing backlash from both Republicans and some Democrats. The scope of the pardon is nearly unprecedented; it applies to any crimes committed during the timeframe, not just the ones that he was charged with. The only other pardon of this kind was the one that Gerald Ford gave Richard Nixon after Watergate, which covered any crimes committed during his time in office.
However, pardoning Hunter was the correct thing to do. His prosecution was undeniably political. Both the prosecutor and the judge in his case were appointed by Donald Trump, the man who was impeached for trying to get a foreign government to give him evidence against Hunter Biden. While he did commit the crimes in question (he was convicted for the gun charge and pled guilty to the tax charge), the charges that were brought against Hunter are almost never brought against average people under similar circumstances. The charge of lying on a gun purchase form is usually only brought when the gun is used in another crime, and the felony tax fraud charge is almost never brought when the person has paid back their tax debt. However, because his father was the president, Hunter Biden was stuck facing these unusual charges.
Hunter Biden’s lawyers worked out a plea deal that would allow him to avoid jail time. However, the judge in that case made the unusual decision to reject that plea deal, which forced Hunter to go to trial. Republicans quickly took credit for causing the plea deal to collapse, with many of them calling it a “sweetheart deal.” After being convicted at trial, Hunter’s fate would have been put in the hands of the judge, a Trump appointee who already appeared biased against him due to the rejection of the plea deal.
With Donald Trump set to retake office in a few months, the pardon makes even more sense. On the campaign trail, he promised that his inauguration day would be “judgement day” for “radical left lunatics.” Given his choice of Kash Patel as FBI director and his failed choice of Matt Gaetz for attorney general, it is reasonable to assume that he intends to follow through on these threats. Since Hunter Biden is someone whom Republicans have been targeting for years with meritless investigations in the House of Representatives, combined with the fact that he actually committed some of the crimes that he’s accused of, it is reasonable for President Biden to be worried that they will continue to go after Hunter.
Even if this move was truly unprecedented, the circumstances that I’ve highlighted above would probably make it okay. However, it is not unprecedented. Abraham Lincoln pardoned his sister-in-law for aiding the Confederacy. Including Biden, three of the last five presidents have pardoned members of their families. On his final day in office, President Bill Clinton pardoned his brother, Roger Clinton Jr., for his 1985 conviction on charges of conspiracy to distribute cocaine. Trump, who has heavily criticized Biden’s pardon, also pardoned a member of his family. Charles Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law’s father, was convicted of tax fraud, retaliating against a cooperating witness and making false statements to the Federal Election Commission. The witness retaliation charge stemmed from Kushner hiring a prostitute to seduce a witness against him and make a sex tape of the two of them. He then sent the sex tape to the witness’s wife (who was also his own sister). He also tried unsuccessfully to have a prostitute seduce another witness in the case. Not only did Trump pardon Kushner in 2020, he appointed him ambassador to France for his second term. So when Trump criticizes Biden for pardoning family, you should remember that he did the same thing.
There is some false information going around regarding presidents pardoning family members, so I will take a moment to address some of it. Jimmy Carter did not pardon his brother Billy Carter. While Carter was accused in the press of acting as a foreign agent for Libya, he was never tried or convicted. Five years after the end of Carter’s presidency, it was revealed that the journalist who had supposedly uncovered “Billygate” had made up the story to help Ronald Reagan win the election. George H.W. Bush also did not pardon his brother Neil. There is also no evidence that Woodrow Wilson pardoned a half-brother named Hunter DeButts. In fact, there is no evidence that this was even a real person. This claim, originally shared by “The View” host Ana Navarro-Cardenas, appears to have been made up by ChatGPT.
One of the main arguments used on the left against a pardon for Hunter is that it gives Donald Trump a precedent to pardon the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. However, Trump is not the kind of person to wait for a precedent before doing whatever he wants. There was no precedent for the president to tell the public to ingest bleach to cure a deadly virus or to incite a violent insurrection after losing reelection, but he did those things anyway. Trump also has a controversial history with pardons. In addition to Kushner, Trump pardoned several former aides involved in a variety of crimes, including soliciting Russian interference with the 2016 election, lying to the FBI and fraud.
All of this is to say that the Hunter Biden pardon is not as bad as people are making it out to be. Several presidents have pardoned family members in the past. None of their presidencies were defined by it, and it did not hurt them in the next election. There is no reason for this pardon to be any different.
