President Biden and his son Hunter Biden walk through downtown Nantucket, Massachusetts, on Friday. Jose Luis Magana/AP Hide caption
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Jose Luis Magana/AP
President Biden announced late Sunday that he had signed a full and unconditional pardon for his son Hunter Biden.
The latest pardon came in the final weeks of Biden’s presidency, even though he had publicly promised in the past not to pardon or commute his son’s sentence.
“I signed a pardon for my son Hunter,” Biden said in a White House statement. “It’s clear that Hunter was given special treatment.”
The pardon also comes less than two months before President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House. President Trump criticized Biden’s pardon in a social media post Sunday night, calling it “an absolute abuse of justice and a miscarriage of justice!” In his post, President Trump asked whether Biden’s pardon would apply to those convicted of storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, as Congress certified the 2020 presidential election. Ta.
During this year’s presidential campaign, Trump said one of his first acts in his second term would be to release hundreds of participants in the January 6 riot.
Hunter Biden was convicted on federal gun charges in June for lying about his crack cocaine addiction when purchasing a gun. Three months later, he pleaded guilty to tax violations for failing to pay at least $1.4 million in federal taxes. Sentencing in both cases is scheduled for later this month.
Both charges were brought by Justice Department Special Counsel David Weiss. The roots of the case date back to a time when Hunter Biden was grappling with the death of his brother Beau and battling his own crack cocaine addiction.
President Biden promised in June that he would not pardon his son, saying he would not pardon him after he was convicted on three federal firearms charges.
The 82-year-old appeared to refer to the reversal in a statement.
“I believe in the judicial system, but as I have worked on this issue, I also believe that raw politics has infected this process and that it has led to miscarriages of justice,” Biden wrote.
President Biden and his son Hunter spent Thanksgiving weekend together in Nantucket, Massachusetts. The Biden family is known to be very close.
“They tried to break Hunter, they tried to break me, and there’s no reason to believe it’s going to stop here,” Biden said. “That’s enough.”
Hunter Biden’s legal troubles have long been seen as a political liability for his father, and Republicans have frequently sought to discredit the president.
At the time of Hunter Biden’s gun trial in Delaware in June, his father was still running for re-election in what was seen as a close race against Donald Trump. News cameras lined the hallway leading to the federal courthouse in downtown Wilmington.
By the time of the tax trial in early September, President Biden had dropped out of the race and Hunter Biden’s criminal activities had little chance of impacting politics.
In a statement emailed to NPR, Hunter Biden appeared to acknowledge how his legal troubles affected his father’s political career.
“I have acknowledged and taken responsibility for the mistakes I made during the darkest days of my addiction. Those mistakes were exploited to shame and humiliate me and my family as a public political sport. Ta.”
