White House spokeswoman defends Hunter Biden pardon
Taking questions from reporters aboard Air Force One as Joe Biden travels to Angola, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is attempting to explain why the president changed his mind and opted to pardon his son.
Biden has said for months that he would not exercise his presidential powers to end the prosecutions of his son on tax fraud and gun charges, even as it became clear that Hunter Biden could serve jail time after pleading guilty to the former, and being convicted of the latter.
Jean-Pierre, who as recently as last month said Joe Biden would not pardon his son, partially explained why he changed his mind.
“He wrestled with it. It was not an easy decision to make,” Jean-Pierre said, while declining to say if the president discussed the decision with Hunter as they spent Thanksgiving together.
In his statement pardoning Hunter, Biden criticized the “selective prosecution” of his son. Asked if the president still has confidence in the justice department, Jean-Pierre said: “The president does believe in the justice system and the Department of Justice. And he also believes that his son was singled out politically.”
Key events
Presidents can grant clemency and issue pardons at any time, but traditionally step up the tempo as they near the end of their time in the White House.
Jean-Pierre said that Biden will make more decisions about these cases in the weeks to come.
“He’s thinking through that process very thoroughly. There’s a process in place, obviously, and so … I’m not going to get ahead of the president on this, but you could expect more announcements, more pardons and clemency … at the end of this term,” she said.
As she continued taking questions from reporters, Jean-Pierre signaled that Joe Biden decided to pardon his son as it became clear that his political enemies would continue prosecuting him.
It appeared to be a nod towards the incoming Donald Trump administration, who could pursue further legal action against Hunter Biden once they take office.
“We have seen in last five years or so, the president’s political opponents say this … this is not the President saying it. They said it themselves. They were going after Hunter Biden and so he made this decision,” Jean-Pierre said.
White House spokeswoman defends Hunter Biden pardon
Taking questions from reporters aboard Air Force One as Joe Biden travels to Angola, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is attempting to explain why the president changed his mind and opted to pardon his son.
Biden has said for months that he would not exercise his presidential powers to end the prosecutions of his son on tax fraud and gun charges, even as it became clear that Hunter Biden could serve jail time after pleading guilty to the former, and being convicted of the latter.
Jean-Pierre, who as recently as last month said Joe Biden would not pardon his son, partially explained why he changed his mind.
“He wrestled with it. It was not an easy decision to make,” Jean-Pierre said, while declining to say if the president discussed the decision with Hunter as they spent Thanksgiving together.
In his statement pardoning Hunter, Biden criticized the “selective prosecution” of his son. Asked if the president still has confidence in the justice department, Jean-Pierre said: “The president does believe in the justice system and the Department of Justice. And he also believes that his son was singled out politically.”
From the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington, here’s more on Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s choice to lead the FBI who may wind up being his most controversial nominee since his short-lived pick of Matt Gaetz to lead the justice department:
Donald Trump’s plan to nominate as FBI director the “deep state” conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, a virulent critic of the bureau who has threatened to fire its top echelons and shut down the agency’s headquarters, is facing blowback in Congress as US senators begin to flex their muscles ahead of a contentious confirmation process.
Politicians from both main parties took to the Sunday talk shows to express starkly divergent views on Patel, whom Trump announced on Saturday as his pick to lead the most powerful law enforcement agency in the US. The move is dependent on the incumbent FBI chief, Christopher Wray, who Trump himself placed in the job in 2017, either being fired or resigning.
It is already clear that confirming Patel through the US Senate is likely to be less than plain sailing. Mike Rounds, a Republican senator from South Dakota, indicated that Patel could face a tough confirmation battle.
Rounds pointedly sang the praises of the existing FBI director in an interview with ABC’s This Week. He said that Wray, who still has three more years of his 10-year term to serve, was a “very good man”, adding that he had “no objections about the way that he is doing his job right now”.
The senator also emphasised the separation of powers between president and Senate, signaling possible trouble for Patel. Rounds said he gave presidents “the benefit of the doubt”, but also emphasised that “we have a constitutional role to play … that’s the process”.
Other Republican senators rallied to Patel’s side. Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, told CBS’s Face the Nation that he believed Patel would be confirmed.
“Patel is a very strong nominee to take on the partisan corruption of the FBI.”
Another story to watch this week is the reaction of Donald Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel to lead the FBI.
An unabashed Trump loyalist, Patel has claimed that the federal law enforcement agency is biased against Trump, and vowed to close its Washington headquarters and prosecute some agents as well as journalists. Patel worked as a national security and defense official in the first Trump administration, where some of his colleagues described him as unqualified for the job he was holding.
Those complaints may come back to haunt him when the Senate gets around to considering his nomination. The Wall Street Journal heard from two of Patel’s former colleagues, who offered starkly different views of his qualifications to lead the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency:
“He’s coming from outside the system,” said Michael Spivack, who worked with Patel when he was a federal public defender in Florida more than a decade ago. “If you really want to change the system, you need bright intelligent people coming from the outside.”
But some who supervised Patel during the first Trump administration warn that he is unfit for the job.
“He’s absolutely unqualified for this job. He’s untrustworthy,” said Charles Kupperman, who served as Trump’s deputy national-security adviser and worked closely with Patel. “It’s an absolute disgrace to American citizens to even consider an individual of this nature,” he said.
A second Democratic congressman representing a swing district has objected publicly to Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter Biden.
Greg Landsman, who just won re-election representing to a district encompassing the city of Cincinnati, wrote of the pardon on X:
As a father, I get it. But as someone who wants people to believe in public service again, it’s a setback.
More top House Republicans joined in on condemning Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter.
Including the majority leader, Steve Scalise, who wrote on X:
You’ve been lied to every step of the way by this Administration and the corrupt Biden family. This is just the latest in their long coverup scheme. They never play by the same rules they force on everyone else. Disgraceful.
And judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan, a leader of the effort to impeach the president for alleged corruption. He said:
Democrats said there was nothing to our impeachment inquiry. If that’s the case, why did Joe Biden just issue Hunter Biden a pardon for the very things we were inquiring about?
Republican House speaker says justice system ‘irreparably damaged’ by Hunter Biden pardon
House Republicans have spent the past two years attempting to prove that Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings and legal troubles are evidence of wider corruption involving Joe Biden and his family. They never turned up enough evidence to prove the link, and their attempt to impeach the president fell flat.
Leading the pursuit of the president and his son was House speaker Mike Johnson, who had this to say about Joe Biden’s decision to pardon Hunter:
President Biden insisted many times he would never pardon his own son for his serious crimes. But last night he suddenly granted a “Full and Unconditional Pardon” for any and all offenses that Hunter committed for more than a decade! Trust in our justice system has been almost irreparably damaged by the Bidens and their use and abuse of it. Real reform cannot begin soon enough!
Legal experts who spoke to Politico noted the scope of Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter, saying that it is comparable only to the pardon Gerald Ford granted to his White House predecessor, Richard Nixon.
Rather than pardoning his son of the individual offenses that he faced, as is typical, Biden pardoned him of offenses over a period of more than 10 years – likely so the incoming Trump justice department can’t levy new charges against him.
Here’s more, from Politico:
Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.
“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.
“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.
Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.
So rather than merely pardoning his son for the gun crimes for which he was convicted and the tax crimes for which he pleaded guilty, the president’s pardon covers all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024. That language mirrors the language in Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which did not merely cover the Watergate scandal but extended to “all offenses against the United States” that Nixon “has committed or may have committed” between Jan. 20, 1969, and Aug. 9, 1974 — the exact span of Nixon’s presidency.
Joe Biden is currently in the air, heading for Luanda, Angola, as part of a last-minute visit to sub-Saharan Africa that will be the first by any US president in eight years.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is scheduled to take questions at some point during the flight from Sal, Cabo Verde, where Biden made a brief stop earlier today. No doubt reporters will pepper her with questions about the president’s decision to pardon his son – something Jean-Pierre was saying as recently as a few weeks ago that he would not do.
Gaggles on Air Force One are not held on camera, and it’s unclear if this one will be broadcast live in an audio-only format. We’ll let you know what Jean-Pierre has to say when we find out.
In the hours since Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter, signs have emerged that some Democrats are not pleased with the decision.
Among the first lawmakers to speak out against it was congressman Greg Stanton, who represents a swing district in Arizona. He said:
I respect President Biden, but I think he got this one wrong. This wasn’t a politically-motivated prosecution. Hunter committed felonies, and was convicted by a jury of his peers.
We’ll let you know what other Democrats have to say about Biden’s pardon as the day goes on.
Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter following his federal gun and tax cases may have sent shockwaves through Washington but it isn’t the first time a president has used his power to help his family.
As my colleague David Smith notes, Donald Trump pardoned the father of his son-in-law Jared Kushner for tax evasion and retaliating against a cooperating witness.
Bill Clinton as president also pardoned his half-brother Roger for cocaine charges in 2021, after he served his sentence ten years earlier.
Clinton also pardoned his former business partner Susan McDougal, who had been sentenced to two years in prison for her role in the Whitewater real estate deal.
You can read David’s full analysis below
With Donald Trump set to retake power in early 2025, its a reminder of how the legal travails faced by the president-elect interwove with those by Hunter Biden.
Before he was prosecuted, Hunter Biden’s legal team requested the federal gun and tax cases against him be thrown out after Trump-appointed judge Aileen Cannon dismissed a classified documents case in Florida.
Both Biden and Trump were prosecuted by special counsels appointed by the US attorney general, Merrick Garland.
In dismissing the Trump case, Cannon ruled that the appointment of the special counsel who prosecuted Trump, Jack Smith, violated the constitution because he was appointed directly to the position by Garland instead of being nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
Biden’s lawyers said on Thursday that that’s exactly what happened in his case, as Weiss in his role as special counsel filed cases against Biden in California and Delaware and separately brought charges against a former FBI informant charged with lying about the Bidens.
However, the move proved ultimately unsuccessful, with those two cases going ahead in June and September.
What is a presidential pardon?
The US constitution says that a president has the power to grant clemency, which includes both pardons and commutations.
A pardon forgives federal criminal offenses; a commutation reduces penalties but isn’t as sweeping.
The power has its roots in English law – the king could grant mercy to anyone – and it made it over the ocean to the American colonies and stuck around.
The US supreme court has found the presidential pardon authority to be very broad.
Donald Trump granted 237 acts of clemency during his four years in office and Barack Obama granted clemency 1,927 times in his eight years. Presidents have forgiven drug offences, as mentioned in our post at 11.59 GMT, fraud convictions and Vietnam-era draft dodgers, among many other things.
But a president can only grant pardons for federal offences, not state ones. Impeachment convictions also aren’t pardonable.
*The Associated Press
Who else has Joe Biden’s pardoned since he was elected president?
Coming just weeks before he leaves office, Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter has already attracted controversy and driven debate in Washington.
But it isn’t first time he has exercised his power to benefit those convicted of criminal offences.
He previously pardoned thousands of people given criminal records for marijuana use and possession on federal lands and also granted clemency to 11 people serving what the White House called “disproportionately long” sentences for nonviolent drug offences.
No one was freed from prison under last year’s action, but the pardons were meant to help thousands overcome obstacles to renting a home or finding a job.
Democrats criticize Biden’s decision to pardon son Hunter
Joe Biden’s decision has split Democrats on Capitol Hill (we reported on some Republican reaction in our previous post).
Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, criticized Biden’s decision.
“While as a father I certainly understand President Joe Biden’s natural desire to help his son by pardoning him, I am disappointed that he put his family ahead of the country,” Polis said on X, as reported by NBC News, which was the first to break the news of the presidential pardon.
“This is a bad precedent that could be abused by later Presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation.”
Arizona congressman Greg Stanton, also a Democrat said he thought Biden “got this one wrong.”
“This wasn’t a politically-motivated prosecution,” Stanton said, also on X. “Hunter committed felonies, and was convicted by a jury of his peers.”
However, former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, now an independent, wrote on X, “Joe Biden pardoning Hunter looks bad but most fathers would do the same thing under the circumstances.”
Hunter Biden pardon: What we know so far
If you’re just waking up, here is a round-up of developments since US president Joe Biden announcing he was pardoning his son following his convictions for federal gun and tax offences.
Joe Biden’s previous statements on pardoning Hunter
The US president has come under criticism for a perceived reversal over his stance on pardoning his son.
As recently as 8 November, days after Trump’s victory, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre ruled out a pardon or clemency for the younger Biden, saying, “We’ve been asked that question multiple times. Our answer stands, which is no.”
“I said I’d abide by the jury decision, and I will do that. And I will not pardon him,” Biden also told reporters at the G7 summit in June
When asked if he planned to commute Hunter Biden’s sentence, the president mouthed “no”, according to the BBC.