The American president finally decided to pardon his son, one month before his departure from the White House.
Joe Biden had however insisted for months that he would not use this right of pardon.
Why did he make this decision, criticized from all sides as Donald Trump’s return to power approaches?
He had assured several times that he would not do so. Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter was a bolt from the blue in the Washington sky this Sunday evening. The American president finally uses his right of pardon to save his son from prison, who was awaiting sentencing in the coming days in cases of tax fraud and firearms possession.
Hunter Biden pleaded guilty in the first, and was found guilty in the second. The 54-year-old lawyer and businessman faced up to 17 years in prison for tax evasion, and 25 years for the use of firearms, even though legal experts agree that he would have only received a maximum of three years in prison in total (new window).
An open door to Trump
By granting him his pardon, Joe Biden offers the Republicans the possibility of confirming what they have always insisted, regarding a special regime from which Hunter would have benefited, whose antics were often used to attack his father. This presidential pardon also gives Donald Trump (even more) free rein to grant amnesty to the attackers of the Capitol in 2021, as he promised throughout his campaign.
Biden’s decision galvanizes conservatives, leaves Democrats unarmed, and taints his political legacy in the final moments of his term. How did the American president arrive at this choice?
His family, Biden’s backbone
Joe Biden’s family has been his greatest strength, but also his Achilles heel, since his beginnings in politics in 1972. Just elected senator from Delaware, even before the start of his mandate, he lost his wife Neilia and his wife. daughter Naomi, in a terrible road accident. His two sons, Beau and Hunter, aged three and two respectively, were seriously injured in the accident.
The young senator first raised his two surviving children alone, with the help of his sister, before remarrying in 1977 to Jill Jacobs. Throughout his four decades in the Senate in Washington, Joe Biden never stopped going back and forth with his family stronghold of Wilmington, to stay as close as possible to his sons and his daughter Ashley, born to his second marriage.
His eldest son Beau is his pride, and seems likely to follow in his footsteps, graduating in law, like him, from Syracuse University. Elected Attorney General of Delaware since 2007, he saw his remarkable career interrupted by the onset of brain cancer, which ultimately took his life in 2015, at age 46. Terribly affected by Beau’s death, Joe Biden gave up a few months later on getting involved in the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, after eight years as Barack Obama’s vice-president.
Hunter, the weak point
The trajectory of his second son is less straight. Subject to drug addiction and alcoholism, two addictions that he attributes to the trauma of the tragedy that took his mother and sister, Hunter Biden led a career as a lawyer, before turning to business at the turn of the 2000s. It was during his father’s two terms as vice-president, from 2008 to 2016, that his business choices began to weaken Joe Biden, accused by the Republicans of covering up, or even of to favor his son’s sometimes dubious affairs – particularly in Ukraine and China.
The conservative camp also used Hunter Biden’s multiple escapades to attack his father, such as during a leak of documents from his computer, likely orchestrated by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani. The tabloid New York Post had then published photographs showing him smoking crack while having sex, three days before the 2020 presidential election.
Recent precedents
Joe Biden is not the first president to use his right of pardon to get a member of his family out of trouble. Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother on his last day at the White House, in January 2001. At the end of his first term, Donald Trump pardoned his son-in-law’s father, Charles Kushner, of whom he has just announce that he will soon be its United States ambassador to France. But in both cases, these pardoned relatives had already served their prison sentence.
I hope Americans understand why a father and a president came to this decision
Joe Biden, President of the United States
“I hope Americans understand why a father and a president came to this decision”pleaded Joe Biden in his statement. For the outgoing president, the two trials suffered by his son are only the product of harassment by his political opponents. “No reasonable person looking at the facts in Hunter’s cases can come to any conclusion other than that he was targeted because he is my son.”he argues, going so far as to speak of a “miscarriage of justice”.
If Hunter Biden was indeed judged by independent magistrates, and his guilt is difficult to contradict, the files themselves could actually not have gone as far as trials, specialists estimated when they appeared. He had only illegally possessed a gun for eleven days, and his incomplete tax returns date back to a time when he was addicted to crack cocaine.
The fear of incarceration… and the purge
On the other hand, once independent magistrates have chosen to maintain the prosecutions, whatever the reasons for their choice, it is difficult to contradict the outcome. If Joe Biden chose to spare his son from prison, it is perhaps also because Hunter would have been incarcerated under a Trump administration.
In fact, the appointments announced by the future tenant of the White House may make the entire Democratic camp fear a logic of revenge, or even purge, on the part of the new government. To the point that certain soldiers and senior civil servants, opponents or simply critics of the former president, are very concretely considering departures abroad, recently reported the Washington Post (new window).
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Donald Trump was outraged by Joe Biden’s announcement, in a message published on his “Truth Social” network. “Does the pardon granted by Joe to Hunter include the January 6 hostages, who have been imprisoned for years? What abuse and what a miscarriage of justice!”writes the former and future president. Those he calls “January 6 hostages” are the people convicted for the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, who contested Joe Biden’s presidential victory.
Trump’s responsibility for these events will probably never be established in court, after the special prosecutor dropped the charges last week, with presidential immunity making the procedure impossible. By saving his son from prison, Joe Biden perhaps also wanted to prevent him from becoming Donald Trump’s “hostage” during his next term.
