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President Joe Biden on Sunday issued a full and unconditional pardon for his son Hunter, a controversial decision that reverses his <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/06/13/biden-pardon-hunter-commute-sentence/" target="_blank">long-standing pledge</a> not to use his presidential powers to protect his only surviving son, who was found <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/09/05/hunter-biden-alford-guilty-plea-taxes/" target="_blank">guilty of gun-related charges</a> in Delaware and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/06/11/hunter-biden-verdict-gun-trial" target="_blank">pleaded guilty</a> to tax evasion in California.

Using his executive authority in the waning days of his presidency, Biden lifted the legal cloud that has hung over his son for several years. While the president had pledged several times not to pardon or commute Hunter Biden’s sentences for federal crimes, many close to him had expected the pardon would come, given the president’s loyalty to his family. Biden faces few political ramifications for the move, since he is leaving office and voters have already rendered their verdict on his administration by electing <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a>  to a second term.

In a lengthy statement on Sunday night, released just as he was preparing to depart for Africa that evening, the president said that his son had been “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.” He said that he did not interfere with the cases but insisted that they were brought about because of political pressure on federal prosecutors.

“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,” he said. “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

Biden said he came to the decision over the weekend, which coincided with the family being together in Nantucket, Massachusetts, for Thanksgiving. Hunter Biden’s attorneys <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/30/hunter-biden-defense-sentencing-pardon/" target="_blank">this weekend also mounted a vigorous public defense</a>, releasing a 52-page paper on Saturday titled “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden.”

“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, which was released shortly after news of his decision was first reported by NBC News. “… I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.”

According to the text of the pardon, it applies to all offenses that Hunter Biden “has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”

Hunter Biden on Sunday night also released a statement noting his recovery from addiction and his sobriety.

“I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction — mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport,” he said.

“In the throes of addiction, I squandered many opportunities and advantages,” he added. “In recovery we can be given the opportunity to make amends where possible and rebuild our lives if we never take for granted the mercy that we have been afforded. 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 Biden was convicted in June by a federal jury in Delaware for lying on a gun-purchase form in 2018 when he checked a box saying he was not using illegal drugs, and then illegally owning that weapon as a drug user for 11 days.

Separately, he pleaded guilty in September to nine federal tax charges, a last-minute plea that came just before jury selection was scheduled to begin for that trial in California.

Both cases were prosecuted by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/08/11/doj-merrick-garland-hunter-biden-weiss/" target=_blank>special counsel David Weiss</a>, who was named to preserve the cases’ independence from a Justice Department overseen by Hunter Biden’s father.

Biden is not the first president to pardon family members and others close to them as their term in office expires. President Bill Clinton on the day he left office <a href="https://www.justice.gov/pardon/pardons-granted-president-william-j-clinton-1993-2001" target=_blank>pardoned his half brother Roger Clinton</a> for cocaine distribution convictions from 1985. Trump <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/charles-kushner-paul-manafort-roger-stone-trump-pardons/2020/12/23/05cf013a-456d-11eb-975c-d17b8815a66d_story.html" target=_blank>pardoned Charles Kushner</a>, father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, in December 2020 shortly after losing his bid for reelection.

Charles Kushner, a New Jersey real estate developer, had pleaded guilty to making false statements to the Federal Election Commission, witness tampering and tax evasion. On Saturday, Trump, now the president-elect, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/30/donald-trump-charles-kushner/" target=_blank>said he would nominate</a> Charles Kushner as the U.S. ambassador to France.

Hunter Biden’s gun conviction carried a potential prison sentence, although some legal analysts said that was relatively unlikely given that he was a first-time offender who owned the gun for only 11 days and never used it. But the tax charges were more serious and — because the guilty verdict in the gun case made Hunter Biden a felon — the sentence could have been harsher.

When Hunter Biden pleaded guilty in September, U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi asked him in court if he understood a guilty plea would mean he could face up to 17 years in prison and fines of up to $1.3 million. Biden said he did, and as each of the charges was read, he repeated that he was pleading guilty. Sentencing in each of the cases was scheduled to take place over the next two weeks, and on Sunday night Hunter Biden’s attorneys filed documents in California and Delaware alerting the judges to the pardon and asking them to drop the case.

The gun trial put on public display some of the ugliest and most difficult moments in Hunter Biden’s life, as his daughter Naomi, for example, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/06/07/hunter-biden-gun-trial-naomi-testifies/" target=_blank>testified</a> about the way his drug use troubled their relationship. The trial showcased the family’s pain following the 2015 death of Hunter’s brother, Beau, which sent Hunter into a deep spiral of drug addiction.

The question of whether to pardon his son has been a difficult one for Biden both personally and politically, in part because one of Democrats’ central accusations about Trump is that he has sought to manipulate the justice system for his own benefit.

But Biden has felt protective of his son throughout a life marked by family tragedy. Hunter and Beau were badly injured in a 1972 car crash that killed their mother and their baby sister. And Beau died of brain cancer in 2015.

Biden <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/06/11/hunter-biden-verdict-gun-trial/" target=_blank>said publicly</a> several times that he would not pardon or commute Hunter’s sentence. In the days after the gun trial in Delaware, when the president was attending the Group of Seven summit in Italy, he reiterated that he trusted the deliberations of a jury that found his son guilty and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/06/13/biden-pardon-hunter-commute-sentence/" target=_blank>would not issue a pardon</a>.

As Biden was walking away from the stage, he was also asked whether he would reduce its severity by commuting his son’s sentence. “No,” Biden responded.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated that decision on several occasions. “No,” she told reporters on Air Force One, just after Hunter Biden’s guilty plea in the tax case in California. “It is still very much a no.”

“Our answer still stands,” she repeated as recently as Nov. 7. “Which is no.”

It has long been a point of pride with the president that he had not interfered in the justice system. Many in the Bidens’ circle say prosecutors would never have gone after Hunter so aggressively if his father were not the president. The two sides were near a plea agreement at one point, but it <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/08/11/doj-merrick-garland-hunter-biden-weiss/" target=_blank>fell apart in August 2023</a> amid scrutiny by a judge and complaints from Republicans.

The complex relationship between father and son has been one of the consistent themes of Biden’s presidency. When the former vice president announced in April 2019 he would run against Trump, Hunter Biden was still in the depths of his addiction. During the campaign, Hunter was often seen as a liability and became a frequent target of Trump, who would taunt the Democratic nominee by demanding, “Where’s Hunter?”

But during Biden’s presidency, his son — who has moved beyond his addiction, remarried and had a son — emerged as a source of comfort for the president. Hunter Biden appeared by his father’s side during jubilant moments, such as his trip to Ireland, and trying ones, when he explained why he was dropping his reelection bid in an Oval Office address.

Still, Biden’s political adversaries spent much of his presidency continuing to pursue Hunter and accuse him of financial wrongdoing. Two Republican-led House committees spent years investigating Hunter, whose <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/18/hunter-biden-family-name/" target=_blank>business career had long benefited from his father’s name</a>.

Trump posted on <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113580801259196546" target=_blank>social media</a> on Sunday night calling the pardon “an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!”

Hunter Biden himself has largely defended his actions but says he had “poor judgment” by exposing his father to political attacks in some instances, such as by serving on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, at a time that his father was President Barack Obama’s point man on Ukraine.

The federal indictments came after a lengthy Justice Department investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings while his father was vice president, a period that Republicans have cited as evidence of broad corruption in the Biden family. No evidence has surfaced publicly to suggest any wrongdoing by Joe Biden.

Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky), who as chairman of the House Oversight Committee launched investigations into the Biden family, ridiculed the decision and said that “President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability.”

Democrats were divided over it, with former attorney general Eric Holder <a href="https://x.com/EricHolder/status/1863389327310692525" target=_blank>saying the pardon was warranted</a> because most U.S. attorneys would not have prosecuted such crimes. But Gov. Jared Polis (D-Colorado) said that while he understood the president’s desire to help his son, “this is a bad precedent that could be abused by later Presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation.”

“Hunter brought the legal trouble he faced on himself,” <a href="https://x.com/jaredpolis/status/1863392145669046677" target=_blank>he wrote on social media</a>, “and one can sympathize with his struggles while also acknowledging that no one is above the law, not a President and not a President’s son.”

White House Correspondents' Association's Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House Coverage, 2023

Gerald R. Ford Journalism Award for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency, 2021

White House Correspondents' Association's Merriman Smith Award, recognizing presidential news coverage under deadline pressure, 2016

Finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists for national reporting, 2014

Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress, 2013, "Broken City" series

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Matt Viser is a White House reporter for The Washington Post. He joined The Post in October 2018, covering the midterms and the 2020 presidential election before moving over to the White House to cover President Biden's administration. He was previously deputy chief of the Washington bureau for the Boston Globe.

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