President Joe Biden announced Sunday that he has pardoned his son Hunter Biden, who faced sentencing this month for federal tax and gun convictions, marking a reversal as he prepares to leave office.
“Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter,” the president said in a statement. It is a “full and unconditional pardon,” according to a copy of the executive grant of clemency.
This official grant of clemency cannot be rescinded by President-elect Donald Trump.
By pardoning his son, Joe Biden has reneged on a public promise that he made repeatedlybefore and after dropping out of the 2024 presidential race. The president and his top White House spokesperson said unequivocally, including after Trump won the 2024 election, that he would not pardon Hunter Biden or commute his sentence.
The pardon means Hunter Biden won’t be sentenced for his crimes, and it eliminates any chance that he’ll be sent to prison, which was a possibility. The judges overseeing his cases will likely cancel the sentencing hearings, which were slated for December 12 in the gun case and December 16 in the tax case.
The broadly crafted pardon explicitly grants clemency for the tax and gun offenses from his existing cases, plus any potential federal crimes that Hunter Biden may have committed “from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.” This time frame, importantly, covers his entire tenure on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma and much of his other overseas work, including in China. He had faced scrutiny for his controversial foreign business dealings, and Trump has repeatedly said he should be prosecuted for his activities in Ukraine and elsewhere.
Hunter Biden’s lawyers on Sunday night formally notified the judges in his criminal cases about the pardon — and he said in a sworn affidavit that he has accepted the pardon from his father.
In new court filings, Hunter Biden’s lawyers told the judges in both of his cases that the pardon “requires dismissal of the Indictment against him with prejudice and adjournment of all future proceedings in this matter.”
Joe Biden said in his statement that he decided to issue the pardon because his son was “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,” saying that “Hunter was treated differently” from people who commit similar crimes.
The president said his political opponents in Congress “instigated” the charges “to attack me and oppose my election.”
He said in his statement, “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. … I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.”
The president further claimed Hunter Biden was “singled out” for prosecution “only because he is my son” — allegations that were previously raised by Hunter Biden’s lawyers and resoundingly rejected by two federal judges. The judge who oversaw his gun trial in Delaware concluded that Hunter Biden’s theory of a a selective prosecution was “nonsensical under the facts here.”
In a social media post Sunday night, Trump called the pardon “such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!” In an apparent joke, Trump also asked whether the pardon includes his supporters who attacked the US Capitol during the January 6, 2021, insurrection — whom he has promised to pardon once he’s back in office.
End of a six-year saga
Hunter Biden was convicted by a jury in June of illegally buying and possessing a gun as a drug user, after a gut-wrenching trial that delved into his drug abuse and family dysfunction. He then pleaded guilty in September to nine tax offenses, stemming from $1.4 million in taxes that he didn’t pay while spending lavishly on escorts, strippers, cars and drugs.
Special counsel David Weiss, who was the Trump-appointed US attorney for Delaware, began investigating Hunter Biden in 2018 and filed both indictments in 2023. As president, Joe Biden had the authority to shut down the probe or direct the Justice Department to dismiss the charges — but he kept his pledge to stay out of the matter.
Holiday decision
As much as Joe Biden had hoped to remain deferential to the judicial system — and even after promising to stay out of the case — sources told CNN the president decided after Thanksgiving that a pardon was the right move.
“He feels Hunter was targeted in order for his political opponents to hurt him and that was cruel and he endured enough,” a White House official familiar with the situation told CNN on Sunday. “Once he made it, there was no sense in delaying it further.”
One thing that particularly swayed the president: a belief that Republicans were trying to “break Hunter,” as he said in his statement, while his son was still recovering from addiction. The president pointed to his son’s five and a half years of sobriety “even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution.”
