President Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter almost resembles a devilish joke on Washington — a Sunday night ambush designed to embarrass and shock him.
That was probably not Biden’s goal. But however unintentional, the pardon is a kind of sabotage.
It is a rich gift for those who want to blow up the justice system as we know it, and who claim that government is a self-dealing club for hypocritical elites. It’s a promise-breaking act that subjects Biden’s allies to yet another humiliation in a year full of wounds inflicted by Biden.
The decision comes as the nation prepares for an attack on federal law enforcement agencies led by President-elect Donald Trump and his appointees.
In recent days, Trump has appointed ideological hardliners, political operatives and family members to powerful jobs at the FBI, Justice Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The incoming president’s opponents have begun to oppose these appointments, viewing the country’s legal institutions as sacrosanct — and warning that Trump loyalists like Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard would plunder them.
It is difficult to reconcile this reverence for the apparatus of law enforcement with Biden’s decision to exempt his son from the justice they brought.
There is a case to be made for mercy for Hunter Biden. My colleague Ankush Khardori argued in a recent column for a commutation — a lesser form of leniency, and emphasized that the charges against Hunter Biden “probably wouldn’t have been brought against anyone else.”
“The reason we are here is because Trump and his Republican allies have effectively — and successfully — pressured Joe Biden’s own Justice Department to prosecute his son,” Khardori wrote.
But when he took office, Biden claimed he wanted to restore the Justice Department’s independence and took highly visible steps to move it out of his own control. That’s why he appointed a no-nonsense former judge, Merrick Garland, as attorney general, instead of a legally accomplished Democratic politician like Deval Patrick or Doug Jones. That’s why he left behind the U.S. attorney in Delaware, David Weiss, who was investigating Hunter Biden.
It’s also why Biden and his aides told the American people again and again that a pardon for Hunter Biden was off the table.
These are steps Biden didn’t have to take if he didn’t want to let the justice system do its job.
Instead, countless hours of work and public dollars have been spent securing indictments and sentences that the president annulled by fiat on a cold December evening.
Voters now know what his word as Biden is worth.
In his announcement of the pardon, Biden asked the country to view it as the act of a father for a son who was “selectively and unfairly prosecuted.”
What parent of a convicted criminal wouldn’t want to extend the same grace to their child? How many others get the chance?
Biden has rarely had the gift of excellent timing. The one major exception was his 2020 campaign, when the confluence of a tough Democratic primary, a self-harming Republican president and a once-in-a-century pandemic propelled Biden into the White House.
Before that, Biden repeatedly ran for president in years when he was unlikely to succeed, skipping several races he could have won. In 2024, he insisted on running a doomed re-election campaign just long enough to discredit the Democrats closing ranks around him, then left the party with an unprepared presumptive nominee in Kamala Harris.
As president, Biden abandoned his past law-and-order record just in time for a national crime wave that Republicans used against him. He abandoned his Obama-era hesitations about pursuing massive social policies to pursue Rooseveltian grandeur during an inflationary crisis. He spent his first year in office mulling internal party politics, just long enough to give Republicans the governorship of Virginia, before abruptly moving to pass a popular infrastructure bill that was blocked by Democratic infighting.
Now Biden is leaving a presidency that he insisted was about saving democracy by issuing a flashy vote of no confidence in the institutions his successor most clearly intends to attack.
There’s bad timing and then there’s this.
Last fall, as Hunter Biden faced trial and Republicans threatened impeachment, Democratic lawmakers emphasized the distinction between son and father. (Democrats have largely ignored that some of Hunter Biden’s alleged misdeeds — such as collecting millions of dollars from foreign clients and evading tax payments — appear to involve trading in his name.)
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat who is the party’s top member of the Judiciary Committee, called Hunter Biden “deranged” and admitted he may have done “inappropriate things.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin, another top Judiciary Democrat, argued against Republican efforts to impeach Joe Biden by emphasizing that his son would face consequences.
“You can’t impeach Hunter Biden,” Raskin said, “but he will be prosecuted.”
What will these lawmakers say next?
Whatever it is, they probably won’t be able to tell Biden himself: he has left the country for a trip to Angola.
