In his sweeping pardon of Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden didn’t just protect his son. He also handed newly elected President Donald Trump a template to protect his own allies and expand pardon power even further.
Legal experts say Trump now has new precedent — and political cover — to issue extended pardons, exempting his allies not just from specific offenses but even from any unspecified crimes they may have committed.
With the special exception of Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, no modern American president had ever granted such a broad pardon until Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional” pardon of his son on Sunday night. The younger Biden has now been effectively cleared of legal consequences for every federal law he is alleged to have broken over a period of nearly eleven years.
These terms are so unusual — and the process that led to them was so secretive — that the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, which typically advises the president on clemency issues, was taken by surprise, according to a person granted anonymity to discuss publicly to make the details.
According to congressional testimony, at least one close ally — former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) — requested a similarly sweeping pardon in the final days of Trump’s first term. But top White House aides made clear it was a nonstarter.
Now that Joe Biden has crossed the Rubicon, legal experts and former Trump aides say it will be harder to contain Trump next time. He now has a ready-made reason to follow suit when he returns to office.
“It certainly creates an acceptability for that model,” said James Trusty, a former criminal defense attorney for Trump.
In fairness, Trump took a liberal approach to pardons in his first term, granting clemency to accomplices like former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, longtime adviser Roger Stone, 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort and White House aide Steve Bannon . However, all of these clemency requests were related to specific investigations and crimes for which these men had been accused or convicted. (Significantly, the men were also all involved in investigations that could involve Trump himself.)
During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised to use the pardon power even more aggressively. Most notably, he pledged to pardon many of the rioters who stormed the Capitol in his name on January 6, 2021.
Almost immediately after Hunter Biden’s pardon was announced, Trump hinted that he might cite it as justification for granting broad clemency to the January 6 suspects.
“Does Joe’s pardon for Hunter include the J-6 hostages?” he asked on social media, describing the rioters in terms rooted in his attempts to downplay the violence they inflicted on police that day.
Joe Biden deviated from past practices by appealing to fairness — rather than acceptance of responsibility — as the alleged criterion for forgiving his son, said Samuel Morison, an attorney who spent 13 years at the Office of the Pardon Attorney worked. Trump is now freer to use that same reasoning to provide broad protection to his own allies.
“I think this gives Trump more leeway to exercise the pardon power in ways he might otherwise have hesitated, because it gives Trump more political cover to do what he wants,” Morison said. “How can you say the president can’t issue a pardon to correct something he believes is unjust? Biden just did it.”
Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer during Trump’s first term and a prominent Trump critic since, agreed.
“Trump doesn’t really need excuses to act selfishly or vindictively,” Cobb said. “But this gives him one on a silver platter.”
Opposition to broad pardons during Trump’s first term
Trump has already wrestled with how far to push the pardon power — but has largely left it to wary advisers.
According to testimony before the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, Trump mused shortly before leaving office in January 2021 about forgiving family members, staff, nonviolent members of the January 6 mob and even himself.
Trump’s White House adviser Pat Cipollone and other top advisers told the committee they were working to suppress some of those proposals.
Cipollone said he was considering resigning because of “some of the clemency measures that were being proposed.” Another aide, Johnny McEntee, said he witnessed Cipollone successfully convince Trump to grant a blanket pardon for nonviolent Jan. 6 rioters. And a third adviser, Eric Herschmann, said he recalled a discussion about pardons for Trump family members but said “it didn’t go anywhere,” mainly because “it was clear the family didn’t want a pardon.” (Trump has pardoned Charles Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s father-in-law — and last week he chose Kushner as the next ambassador to France.)
And Herschmann told the panel that he and another White House aide, Deputy Counsel Pat Philbin, were confused when Trump loyalist Gaetz (who was under investigation for sex trafficking at the time) asked them for a sweeping pardon that ” would have covered everything’. that happened once.”
Herschmann recalled that such broad terms would be “unprecedented” and virtually impossible to come up with.
“How are you ever going to put that into words?” he testified in 2022. “How was the pardon office supposed to write this? What could we conceivably do?”
While the first Trump administration failed to issue an essentially limitless pardon, the Biden White House did not. The language in the Hunter Biden pardon – which covers all “crimes against the United States that he committed or may have committed or participated in” from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024 – is closely aligned with language of Ford’s pardon of Nixon, who received protection for all crimes he allegedly committed during his presidency.
Before Joe Biden issued the broad pardon, there was a debate in the West Wing about whether the president should grant a much more limited form of clemency, according to a Democrat who was in contact with the White House and was granted anonymity to discuss the matter. give. private conversations. Some senior officials believed that Joe Biden should simply commute the sentences Hunter Biden would receive in the coming weeks for gun and tax crimes.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates disputed that there was any internal debate on the issue, saying, “That’s not true.”
The president opted for a full pardon — a broadly worded pardon that extends to other potential crimes — because he wanted to protect his son from retaliatory criminal investigations by Trump’s Justice Department, the Democrat said. Trump’s calls for investigations into his opponents, including the Biden family, have been the centerpiece of his campaign.
Joe Biden’s pardon, meanwhile, conflicted with his long-standing commitment to honor the outcome of his son’s criminal proceedings and withhold any clemency.
The Democrats are bracing themselves
Few Democrats have defended Hunter Biden’s pardon, and some have spoken out against it.
“As a father, I sympathize with his family’s situation,” said Sen.-elect Andy Kim (D-N.J.). “But as you know, as an American, as a person who works here in these types of jobs, I’m very disappointed. I don’t think this was the right decision to make. I think it contributes to a lot of what I find challenging right now when it comes to the people I talk to who are so suspicious. politics.”
And the current president’s provocative pardon comes as Democrats in Congress gird themselves for what will all be the next president’s mission to expand executive power.
“This was an improper use of power,” said Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.). “It erodes trust in our government, and it encourages others to bend justice to their interests.”
Part of Trump’s mission could include a general pardon of the Jan. 6 defendants shortly after he is inaugurated — a prospect that worries even one Trump-appointed judge. Another immediate component, Trusty suggested, is a pardon of Carlos de Oliveira and Walt Nauta, the two Trump aides accused of helping him obstruct the investigation into the classified documents Trump kept at Mar-a-Lago after he left office.
“To me, that’s a no-brainer,” Trusty said. “And perhaps out of an abundance of caution, he will follow the language of Hunter Biden’s very broad pardon.”
Jonathan Martin and Robbie Gramer contributed to this report.
