President Joe Biden on Sunday issued a “full and unconditional” pardon for his son Hunter Biden, who has been dogged by Republican attacks for years. The president’s son is scheduled to be sentenced this month on federal gun charges and federal tax evasion charges following a conviction and a guilty plea, respectively.
The president’s decision marks a clear reversal after he repeatedly vowed not to use his executive authority to pardon his son or commute his sentence. In a White House statement Sunday, Biden said he issued the pardon because he believes the charges were politically motivated.
“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.
He added:
For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: just tell the American people the truth. They’ll be fair-minded. Here’s the truth: 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 — and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.
The pardon comes just weeks before Biden’s term ends and President-elect Donald Trump, whose attacks on Hunter Biden helped focus congressional and federal scrutiny on the president’s son, returns to the White House. Hunter Biden is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 12 for his June conviction on federal gun charges. He is also set to be sentenced on Dec. 16 in a separate federal tax evasion case after pleading guilty in September. He faced up to 42 years in prison, though it was expected he would receive a much lighter sentence given he was a first-time offender, among other factors.
The pardon is expected to cover both his gun charges and his tax charges, reported NBC News, the first outlet to report on the decision. It covers any offenses the 54-year-old “has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”
A representative for special counsel David Weiss, whom Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed in 2023 to investigate Hunter Biden, did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment. Hunter Biden’s attorney Abbe Lowell also declined to comment.
Hayley Miller is the senior blog editor for MSNBC. Previously, she was a senior reporter on HuffPost’s breaking news team. Before she was a reporter, she was a senior editor on HuffPost’s blog team.
