The surreptitious and sweeping nature of President Biden’s maneuver to pardon his son was so jarring that it reportedly caught the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney off guard.
Days after a family Thanksgiving powwow in Nantucket, Biden, 82, publicly announced that he was breaking his and the White House’s longstanding public pledge and bestowing his troubled son with a blanket pardon for any offenses committed — or possibly committed — between Jan. 1, 2014, and Dec. 1, 2024.
Typically, presidents consult with the Office of the Pardon Attorney when making such decisions, but the office was surprised by his move, one source told Politico.
Standard practice for the Office of the Pardon Attorney generally recommends complete pardons for individuals who already completed their sentences. Hunter Biden wasn’t set to face sentencing until next week.
Therefore, the Office of the Pardon Attorney likely would not have recommended such action for the president’s scandal-scarred son, the New York Times first reported.
Moreover, the lame-duck president went a step further and departed from typical norms by issuing a “full and unconditional” pardon broader than any done in modern history except for former President Gerald Ford’s controversial clemency for his predecessor Richard Nixon.
Critics within the Democratic Party and progressive circles have fretted that Biden has given President-elect Donald Trump a fresh excuse and precedent to issue similarly broad pardons.
“I know that there was a real strong sentiment in, you know, wanting to protect Hunter Biden, 54, from unfair prosecution,” Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.) told CNN. “But this is going to be used against us when we’re fighting the misuses that are coming from the Trump administration.”
Still, presidents have long enjoyed sweeping discretion under the Constitution to grant clemency, with the major limitation restricting them from committing a crime such as bribery when issuing a pardon.
Biden is far from the first president to bypass the Office of the Pardon Attorney’s recommendations. Trump, 78, for example, granted clemency on numerous occasions to individuals who hadn’t been recommended by that office.
In issuing his pardon, the 46th president claimed that “Hunter was treated differently” and blamed his son’s prosecution on his political opponents, echoing Trump’s rhetoric on the four indictments he faced.
Ironically, it had been Biden’s own Justice Department that pursued the charges against the first son.
Trump decried the outgoing president’s pardon as “an abuse and miscarriage of justice.”
“Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years?” he added in a Truth Social post, hinting that he may pardon some of the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol rioters.
During the twilight days of his first term, Trump’s administration had received a request for a similarly broad pardon of former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), subsequent congressional testimony claimed. But that was rejected.
Trump also dangled a possible self-pardon, something that has been untested in the courts, but that idea was similarly turned down, the New York Times reported.
During the Biden administration, the Office of the Pardon Attorney fielded almost 12,000 requests for the president’s intervention.
Thus far, the president has doled out 157 clemencies, including 25 pardons to eliminate convictions and 132 commutations to shrink sentences, per data from the Office of the Pardon Attorney.
It is not clear if those statistics include the president’s pardon of Hunter Biden.
By contrast, Trump had granted clemency on 238 occasions, including 94 commutations and 144 pardons, according to the Office of the Pardon Attorney.
The Post contacted spokespeople for both the White House and the Office of the Pardon Attorney for comment.
On Tuesday, US District Judge Maryellen Noreika ordered that “all proceedings in this case are hereby terminated” for the three counts against him related to possession of a firearm while addicted to illicit drugs.
The nine-count tax evasion case in California was not marked closed as of 4 p.m. EST on Tuesday, though the defense team has filed a motion over the pardon.
