“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong,” the president said in a statement, AzVision.az reports, citing Politico.
The pardon grants Hunter Biden sweeping legal protection for any crime he “has committed or may have committed” over a nearly 11-year period, from Jan. 1, 2014, to Dec. 1, 2024.
The president made the announcement Sunday before getting on a plane to Angola. The decision is a complete 180 for the president, who repeatedly promised not to pardon his son or commute his prospective sentences. Just last month, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that “our answer stands, which is no.”
But ultimately, Joe Biden used one of the most potent powers of the presidency to protect his son from a prosecution that he said would not have happened had he not occupied the Oval Office.
The president made the decision to issue the pardon over the weekend and informed senior staff today, according to a person familiar with the process who was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Hunter Biden was found guilty in June of three felony counts stemming from his 2018 purchase of a handgun while he was addicted to crack cocaine. He pleaded guilty in September of tax evasion and other federal tax crimes.
The pardon allows Hunter Biden to avoid two criminal sentencing hearings that had been set for this month. He had faced one sentencing in Delaware on Dec. 12 in the gun case and another in California on Dec. 16 in the tax case. In the tax case, he admitted that he failed to pay $1.4 million in taxes for tax years 2016 through 2019.
Federal authorities began investigating Hunter Biden during the first Donald Trump administration, but news of the probe did not become public until after Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020. Biden declined to replace the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney overseeing that case, instead letting him stay in the role to finish the investigation. And last year, Attorney General Merrick Garland made the U.S. attorney, David Weiss, a special counsel.
Both decisions helped stave off allegations that Joe Biden was meddling in the process. Hunter Biden’s legal team has long argued that Weiss was taking an unusually aggressive approach due to political pressure from Republicans.
Hunter Biden said in a statement Sunday that he has taken responsibility for “my mistakes” while he was struggling with addiction that have since been “exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport.”
“I will never take the clemency I have been given today for granted and will devote the life I have rebuilt to helping those who are still sick and suffering,” he said.
Joe Biden has long stressed that he would remain independent from the Justice Department, including on issues relating to his son. In an interview with ABC News in June, he committed he would not pardon his son and said he would accept the verdict no matter what. But allies and aides close to him had expected that Biden, who is close to his son and often speaks about the importance of family, would ultimately use his presidential power to pardon Hunter.
“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,” Biden said in his statement. “I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.”
Hunter Biden’s legal challenges hung over his father’s presidency, taking what aides close to him described as a psychological and emotional toll on the president, particularly during the trial and reelection campaign. Biden aides often danced around the subject, not wanting to anger or upset a president who was deeply concerned about Hunter and fearful that it would strain his only surviving son’s struggle with addiction.
Even after the guilty verdicts were delivered, White House officials continued to publicly insist that under no circumstances would the president pardon his son. The dramatic reversal is the latest stain on the Biden White House’s credibility, already damaged by transparency concerns regarding the president’s age and mental and physical fitness.
The president is scheduled to depart Washington on Sunday evening for Angola and return to Washington on Thursday. He is not scheduled to give a news conference on his foreign trip, although his press secretary will take questions off-camera from the reporters traveling with the president on Air Force One.
AzVision.az
