“I hope the Americans will understand“, it is with these words that Joe Biden concludes a press release published Sunday December 1, 2024, to announce the pardon granted by the president to his 54-year-old son.
Hunter Biden was waiting to hear his sentence in two cases to which he had pleaded guilty in 2024, thus avoiding high-profile trials as the presidential election approached. He faced up to 25 years in prison for the first case, lying about his drug addiction when purchasing a weapon in the state of Delaware, and up to 17 years in prison for the second, concerning a case of tax fraud and false declarations for an amount of 1.4 million dollars. Two cases closed therefore, with this presidential pardon from which Hunter Biden will benefit.
“No reasonable person looking at the facts can come to any other conclusion than this […] Hunter was only singled out because he's my son – and that's not okay“, justifies Joe Biden, 50 days before his departure from the White House.
However, the American president had adopted a radically different line in recent months. As President and candidate for his re-election, then as support for his vice-president, he had repeated several times that he would not intervene in his son's legal troubles, and that there was no question of granting him a grace. It was even a powerful marker, on the Democratic side, of a practice of power different from that of Donald Trump and the Republican camp. Promise gone.
“I said I would not interfere with the decision-making of the Department of Justice and I kept my word, even when I saw my son being selectively and unfairly prosecuted.“, argues the American president, before putting a caveat that destroys his principle. “I believe in the justice system, but I also believe [qu’une forme] crude politics has infected this process and [que] this led to a miscarriage of justice“.
The personal conviction of a father, at the end of his career, therefore takes precedence over the positions of a president, who uses his last breath of power to pardon his son, at the twilight of his mandate and his political life, denying his promise and calling into question a democratic foundation. Joe Biden may well argue that others have done it before him like Clinton or Trump, but he is paving the way for all the excesses, and giving his former rival something to grind for.
Donald Trump will obviously seize what appears to be a gift from heaven for him. The president-elect will be able to rightly claim that he “told us so“, and will have complete freedom to use and abuse a weapon that he has already wielded. Freshly appointed future ambassador to France, Charles Kushner, who is none other than the father of Donald Trump's son-in-law, has thus benefited from a pardon of the same type in 2020, after his convictions for tax fraud and witness tampering.
How will the Democratic Party now be able to express the slightest criticism of these practices? Impossible. And how can we challenge the pardon promised to hundreds of rioters, heavily condemned for the assault on the Capitol, and whom Donald Trump describes as “hostages“? With this decision, Joe Biden is clearly dealing a severe blow to a faltering American democracy, damaged by populism, disinformation and denials. One more nail on the coffin, in the absence of a coup de grace.
