President Joe Biden announced Sunday that he has pardoned his son Hunter Biden, who faced sentencing this month on gun crime and tax convictions, marking a reversal as he prepares to leave office.
“Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter,” the president said in a statement. It is a “full and unconditional pardon,” according to a copy of the executive grant of clemency.
This official grant of clemency cannot be rescinded by President-elect Donald Trump.
By pardoning his son, Joe Biden has reneged on a public promise that he made repeatedly before and after dropping out of the 2024 presidential race. The president and his top White House spokesperson have said unequivocally, including after Trump won the 2024 election, that he would not pardon Hunter Biden or commute his sentence.
The pardon means Hunter Biden won’t be sentenced for his crimes, and it eliminates any chance of his being sent to prison, which was a possibility. Once the judges overseeing his cases are notified of the pardon, they’ll likely cancel the sentencing hearings, which were slated for December 12 in the gun case and December 16 in the tax case.
The pardon covers any potential federal crimes that Hunter Biden committed “from January 1, 2014, through December 1, 2024,” which, importantly, covers his entire tenure on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma. He had faced scrutiny for his controversial foreign business dealings.
Joe Biden said in the statement that he decided to issue the pardon because his son was “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,” saying that “Hunter was treated differently” from people who commit similar crimes.
The president said his political opponents in Congress “instigated” the charges “to attack me and oppose my election.”
“I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision,” he said in the statement.
Hunter Biden was convicted by a jury in June of illegally buying and possessing a gun, after a gut-wrenching trial that delved into his drug abuse and family dysfunction. He then pleaded guilty in September to nine tax offenses, stemming from $1.4 million in taxes that he didn’t pay while spending lavishly on escorts, strippers, cars and drugs.
Special counsel David Weiss, who was the Trump-appointed US attorney for Delaware, began investigating Hunter Biden in 2018 and filed both indictments in 2023. As president, Joe Biden had the authority to shut down the probe or direct the Justice Department to dismiss the charges – but he kept his pledge to stay out of the matter.
Both criminal cases revolved around Hunter Biden’s decadeslong struggle with drug and alcohol addiction, which he discussed openly, including in his 2021 memoir. From the start, Hunter Biden’s lawyers argued that he was being targeted by overzealous prosecutors who caved to public pressure from Trump and congressional Republicans.
As much as Joe Biden had hoped to remain deferent to the judicial system, the president came to believe that “raw politics had infected the process,” one White House official familiar with the decision told CNN on Sunday.
“He feels Hunter was targeted in order for his political opponents to hurt him and that was cruel and he endured enough,” the official said. “Once he made it, there was no sense in delaying it further.”
One thing that particularly swayed the president: a belief that his political opponents were trying to “break Hunter,” as he said in his statement, as Hunter Biden was recovering from addiction. The president pointed to his son’s five and a half years of sobriety “even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution.”
He said he “wrestled” with the decision and came to his conclusion this weekend. The Bidens spent the Thanksgiving holiday together in Nantucket, where the president and his son were seen having lunch, attending a tree lighting and going to Mass.
Joe Biden spoke strongly – but also as a father – in his Sunday evening statement: “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.”