Biden’s Pardon of Hunter Further Undermines His Legacy

For the first seven months of 2024, in that long period before Joe Biden was finally forced to reckon with both the realities of his diminished capacities and popularity, an essential question to ask the aging President was how he understood the singular priority of his job: insuring that Donald Trump did not regain control of the executive branch. He began the year by campaigning for reëlection, but during the debate with Trump in late June, he wheezed through confusing answers and sent the Democratic Party into a full-blown panic. Over the next month, Biden stubbornly and selfishly insisted on running a doomed campaign. Even after he eventually relinquished the nomination, he often appeared bitter and grumpy about having been forced to step aside.

This drama was often cast as a tragedy—a good man forced, at last, to face mortality and relinquish power. A more worrying analysis, however, arose from the strong impression that throughout this drama, the national interest was not at the forefront of Biden’s mind. On Sunday night, Biden pardoned his son Hunter with the stroke of the Presidential pen. Earlier this year, Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges, and was scheduled to be sentenced later this month. He had also been convicted in June of three federal gun charges. He will now face no punishment in either case, and the pardon extends to any “offenses” he “has committed or may have committed” starting in 2014. Some rushed to cast the drama in terms of decency—a father, understandably, rescuing his child from a prison term. But Biden has once again forced Americans to ask whether he is acting in the national interest, or in response to private whims and grievances.

Many will make the argument, as the Bidens do, that Hunter was definitely a mess, deeply flawed, but the only reason he was facing a long prison term was because he was the President’s son in an age of political war. But, in fact, Biden is not an ordinary man and, by pardoning his son he is once more losing sight of his overriding objective: to diminish Donald Trump’s capacity to do violence to the liberal-democratic institutions which Biden claims his Presidency centered on upholding. Indeed, regardless of whether Biden’s age (now eighty-two) or his character is to blame, the statement he released about the pardon makes clear that he does not grasp the differences between his responsibilities to his job and his responsibilities to his family. “I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision,” Biden wrote.

This is a strange utterance for the President of the United States to make about official business. Americans should not be expected to understand why “a father” is making this decision; it is simply the wrong standard by which the most powerful man on Earth should ask to be judged. Worse, it is a more maudlin parallel of the manner in which Biden’s predecessor and successor operates—not as the head of a democratic government but, far too often, as the leader of a gangster family. (Trump has already announced that he is appointing two of his children’s in-laws for government roles; this type of insider dealing will seem quaint within weeks of his Inauguration.)

Biden, in his statement, claimed that his son had been charged “selectively” and “unfairly.” Legal experts disagree about exactly how unfair the prosecution was: the tax case is widely seen to have merit whereas the gun charges seem to be rare and targeted. At any rate, the charges were brought by Biden’s own Department of Justice. Then, Biden continued, “a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the court room—with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process.” But the likelihood of political pressure influencing a plea deal is not sufficient cause to short-circuit the judicial process. The rest of Biden’s statement is a combination of his more blustery side (“enough is enough”) and soggy paeans to the wisdom of the American people (“For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: just tell the American people the truth. They’ll be fair-minded.”). By any measure, it falls short of explaining why Biden made this decision—especially after promising repeatedly that he would not, and having his staff do the same.

The Trump team must surely be pleased today, because every conceivable argument it could make for allowing a man like Kash Patel to lead the F.B.I. may now sound just a bit more convincing to any wavering Republican. (This should not, of course, be an excuse for any senator who votes for Patel, or any other unqualified and dangerous Trump nominee.) More broadly, Biden’s decision allows Republicans to engage in the same cynicism about the system being rigged and corrupt, and Trump being no different than any other politician, that they have engaged in for nearly a decade. This couldn’t be further from the truth—especially the part about Trump’s corruption and self-dealing being no different from the norm—but Biden is doing the work of people who want to wreck the best aspects of America’s democratic ethos.

The pardon now gives Trump and his allies the opportunity to call Biden a hypocrite and proceed having their own way with the law. “Most Americans can sympathize with a father’s decision to pardon his son, even if they disagree,” Senator Tom Cotton said on Monday. “What they can’t forgive is Biden lying about it repeatedly before the election. . . . Democrats can spare us the lectures about the rule of law when, say, President Trump nominates Pam Bondi and Kash Patel to clean up this corruption.” Cotton is being predictably disingenuous, but Democrats now can only hope that slightly more reasonable Republican senators than Cotton will not fall for this logic.

Biden’s defenders will surely use Patel and his ilk to justify the President’s move, because Trump and his team have promised to go after his political enemies—including, in Biden’s case, his children. Based on this understanding, the pardon preëmpted what is coming from the next Administration. But, if that were the reason for the pardon, why did Biden pardon only his son? And if he was willing to offer Hunter a pardon for any crimes, even ones that he has not been charged with, why not extend the same to Anthony Fauci, Andrew McCabe, Barack Obama, or anyone else on the (long) list of people Trump wants to prosecute and persecute? And, if Biden plans to pardon some of these people, why would he begin this perhaps understandable campaign with his son? Needless to say, this particular motive is not mentioned in Biden’s solipsistic and self-pitying statement.

It would be comforting to think that this nearly final act from Biden is a break from his legacy, and his Presidency—the regrettable lapse in judgment of an aging lion who has given his country a life of service and made it a better and fairer place. Biden, as a senator and President, has many accomplishments to his name, and one hopes that the most substantive of them, such as the Inflation Reduction Act, survive the next four years. But the unfortunate possibility is that his behavior this past year will overshadow his achievements in the history books, and even in the memories of the minority of Americans who approve of his Presidency. By putting his selfish aspirations above his responsibilities, Biden paved Trump’s path back to Washington. On Sunday night, he let personal desires take over again. The consequences of the latter action won’t be nearly as dire, but that decision was made for the same reasons. It’s a fitting coda to a tragic Presidency. ♦