WASHINGTON — Former first son Hunter Biden is claiming that his father only pardoned him because Donald Trump reclaimed the presidency in November 2024 — and “would not have” done so under “normal circumstances” while the appeals process played out.
“Donald Trump went and changed everything,” Hunter said in an interview released Monday on journalist Tommy Christopher’s Substack platform. “And I don’t think that I need to make much of an argument about why it changed everything.”
The 55-year-old — who pleaded guilty last year to evading $1.4 million in back taxes to the IRS and was also convicted on felony gun charges — declined to mention that he had apparently been present for discussions on pardons during Joe Biden’s final months in the White House.
“I’ve said this before,” Hunter went on. “My dad would not have pardoned me if President Trump had not won, and the reason that he would not have pardoned me is because I was certain that in a normal circumstance of the appeals [I would have won].”
The Biden scion pointed out that Trump was conducting a “revenge tour” against his father, which would have made himself the “easiest target to just to intimidate and to not just impact me, but impact my entire family into, into silence in a way that at least he is not — it’s not as easy for him to do [with] me being pardoned.”
“I realize how privileged I am,” Hunter went on. “I realize how lucky I am; I realize that I got something that almost no one would have gotten.
“But I’m incredibly grateful for it and I have to say that I don’t think that it requires me to make much of a detailed argument for why it was the right thing to do, at least from my dad, from his perspective.”
Elsewhere, Hunter added that he was shocked Trump had “just commuted George Santos’ sentence” fewer than three months into the former House Republican’s seven-year federal prison for defrauding campaign donors.
“Why did he do it? To show that he can do anything — anything he wants,” the former first son groused.
Ex-White House chief of staff Jeff Zients spilled last month that Hunter “was involved” in clemency talks and even “attended a few meetings,” a source with knowledge of the Biden official’s testimony to the House Oversight Committee told The Post.
A second source familiar with the testimony didn’t comment directly on Biden’s son being looped into the discussions but acknowledged that the 46th president “valued input from a wide variety of advisors and experts” but always made “the final decisions” himself.
Neither Zients nor his attorney denied the characterization at the time of the Sept. 18 grilling before the Oversight panel.
Joe Biden pardoned Hunter of the tax and gun felonies on Dec. 1, 2024 — and also shielded him from prosecution for any crimes potentially committed since Jan. 1, 2014 and the clemency date.
The 46th president also granted blanket pardons to other family members, including first brother James Biden, who had been targeted in a federal investigation for business dealings that may have enriched his older brother.
Zients approved the 11th-hour acts of clemencies in an email on Jan. 19, the night before Biden left office. Unlike Hunter’s hand-signed pardon, most of Joe Biden’s last acts in office were authorized with the president’s autopen.
“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,” Hunter said in a statement at the time.
Then-President-elect Trump declared it “an abuse and miscarriage of justice.”
Biden had repeatedly rejected the notion that he would ever pardon Hunter when asked by the press during the federal cases in both Delaware and Los Angeles — but claimed in the clemency order that his son had been “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.”
The nine counts for tax delinquency and three counts for illegally buying a handgun while addicted to crack cocaine were immediately expunged upon Hunter’s pardon, which came down days before his scheduled sentencing.
“Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form,” Biden explained.
“Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given non-criminal resolutions. It is clear that Hunter was treated differently.”
However, nearly identical cases involving the same crimes — in some cases committed by celebrities — had resulted in convictions and prison sentences.
Hunter had also evaded charges of failing to register as a foreign agent while conducting business with or on behalf of entities in Ukraine and China, among other countries, though special counsel David Weiss considered doing so.
Joe Biden often said he “never” discussed business with Hunter or James and “did not” interact with their associates. Emails and witness statements compiled by both Weiss and a parallel Republican investigation in Congress into the Biden family’s lucrative foreign engagements contradict that.
Hunter Biden served on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings from 2014 to 2019, earning up to a $1 million salary per year.
Joe Biden, then vice president, was overseeing US policy toward Ukraine during the first half of that period — and infamously called for the ouster of a state prosecutor investigating Burisma for corruption in December 2015.
He also met with executives from a Chinese state-linked energy conglomerate that paid millions of dollars to Hunter and James Biden in 2017 — with a smoking-gun email in May of that year outlining a 10% stake held by Hunter for the “big guy.”
Though Hunter acknowledged the reference was to his father, he later told House lawmakers in a closed-door interview that Joe Biden was never involved in the deal.
