ANALYSIS || Until this Sunday, Joe Biden had not intervened in the proceedings against his son and the White House has always insisted that he would not do so. This could be seen as a stain on his legacy and his credibility
Biden’s pardon of his son fuels Trump’s claims about the politicization of justice
analysis of Stephen CollinsonCNN
President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter deepened a tangle between politics and the rule of law that has tarnished faith in American justice and which will almost certainly worsen in Donald Trump’s second term.
Sunday night’s action was a surprising event, as Biden came into office promising to restore the Justice Department’s independence, which had been eroded during Trump’s first term, and because he had repeatedly said he would not pardon his son.
Now, weeks before he leaves the White House, Biden has exercised presidential power to acquit his son before he is convicted later this month on two gun and tax charges that were not subject to due process.
Joe Biden’s decision came days after special counsel Jack Smith called for the dismissal of federal cases against Trump – for election interference and hoarding of confidential documents – on the grounds that presidents cannot be prosecuted.
Taken together, the convergence of legal controversies raises questions about the fundamental notion underpinning the justice system in the United States that everyone — even presidents and their families — are equal before the law.
Until Sunday, Biden had not intervened in the proceedings against his son and the White House has always insisted that it would not do so, although the change in the political environment caused by Trump’s electoral victory last month seemed likely to change its calculations. Biden began informing staff of his decision on Saturday night, a source familiar with the matter told CNN’s Arlette Saenz, and his team regrouped on Sunday morning to iron out the details.
Important political repercussions
Politically, Biden’s about-face could be seen as a stain on his legacy and credibility. It makes for an ignominious end to a presidency that dissolved in his disastrous June debate performance and that will now be remembered as much for paving the way for Trump’s return to the White House as for ousting him four years ago.
Representative Glenn Ivey, Democrat from Maryland, acknowledged to Kasie Hunt on “CNN This Morning” this Monday that the pardon will be used politically against Democrats.
“I honestly have mixed opinions on the matter,” Ivey said.
The president may also have offered an opening for Trump’s party to rally behind Kash Patel, the loyalist the president-elect picked Saturday night to lead the FBI and serve as an apparent agent of his political revenge campaign.
There is no evidence of any infraction on the part of the President. An impeachment inquiry by House Republicans that looked into Biden and his son’s business relationships – which Democrats saw as an attempt to inflict political damage before the election – came up empty. And the cases against Hunter Biden lack the constitutional gravity or historical importance of the charges against Trump and his frequent attacks on the rule of law.
But the political impact of Sunday night’s drama could be profound. Republicans are already arguing that the pardon for Hunter Biden shows that the current president, and not the next one, is most to blame for politicizing the justice system by granting favorable treatment to his son. His statement may not be accurate, but it may be politically effective.
During his first term, Trump used pardons to protect numerous aides and political contacts, including his daughter’s father-in-law, who is now his pick for ambassador to France. But whenever, in the future, Trump is criticized for his use of the pardon power, he will be able to argue that Biden did the same to protect his own relatives.
This could be especially significant when, in the coming months, Trump comes under pressure from his supporters to pardon those convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol – many of whom are still in prison.
Yet Biden, after a life of tragedy and heartbreak, asked Americans to judge him as a father who was clearly concerned about the impact of a potential prison sentence on his son, a recovering drug addict.
Trump and Biden now argue that the Justice Department has been politicized
Hunter Biden was convicted by a jury in June of illegally purchasing and possessing a gun after a trial that exposed his drug abuse and family dysfunction. In September he pleaded guilty to nine tax infractions, resulting from $1.4 million in taxes he failed to pay while he spent lavishly on escorts, strippers, cars and drugs.
There is some validity to the President’s claim in his statement Sunday that his son was “treated differently” because of who his father is. Charges related to illegal possession of a firearm when you are addicted to a controlled substance and making a false statement about it are quite rare, for example. And the Republican Congress’ investigations into the matter, which imploded due to lack of evidence, looked like attempts to harm the President.
“No reasonable person analyzing the facts of Hunter’s cases can come to any conclusion other than that Hunter was chosen solely because he is my son — and that is wrong,” Joe Biden said in the statement. “There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been sober for five and a half years, even in the face of relentless attacks and selective accusations. By trying to break Hunter, they tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop there. Enough is enough.”
This statement is extraordinary because Biden is now arguing something very similar to Trump – that his own Justice Department has been unfairly politicized. Biden was referring to the way the Hunter Biden case was handled by David Weiss, a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney from Delaware who originally investigated the president’s son and was later appointed as special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
But at the same time, Hunter Biden put himself in a position where he created a political vulnerability and a potential conflict of interest for his father. Furthermore, his business activities in Ukraine and China while his father was vice president and thereafter have raised serious ethical questions, although Republicans have been unable to provide evidence for allegations that the current president benefited from those transactions.
It is significant, therefore, that Joe Biden’s pardon includes any activity by his son from January 1, 2014 – the year Hunter Biden joined the board of directors of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company – while his father, who was then vice president, was deeply involved in US policy toward Kiev.
While the pardon is a separate controversy, it may not have happened if not for the extraordinary circumstances of a difficult political moment, with Trump returning to power on January 20, 2025.
Given the selection of Patel to run the FBI and Trump’s second pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi, there is reasonable reason to expect that Hunter Biden would be among the targets of the president-elect’s loyalists, given his promises to use his powers to chase your enemies.
And now that he has acted to protect his son, Joe Biden may be asked to expand his pardon authority, perhaps to include prosecutors who worked on cases against Trump, including his attempt to overturn the 2020 election results.
The president-elect quickly capitalized on the situation with a comment that will raise expectations that he will grant pardons to those convicted of January 6 soon after taking office again.
“Does Joe’s pardon for Hunter include the J-6 hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years?” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Sunday. “An abuse and a miscarriage of justice!”
And Trump’s Republican allies sought to use the situation to bolster the chances of Senate confirmation of some of his most provocative choices. “Democrats can spare us the lectures on the Rule of Law when, say, President Trump nominates Pam Bondi and Kash Patel to clean up this corruption,” Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton wrote in X.
No morals for Trump
Still, the idea that there is any morality to Trump — who issued a series of seemingly politicized pardons during his first term — is laughable. On Saturday, for example, the president-elect announced that he had chosen Charles Kushner, his daughter Ivanka’s father-in-law, as ambassador to Paris. Trump pardoned him for tax evasion, one count of retaliation against a federal witness — Kushner’s brother-in-law — and another count of lying to the Federal Election Commission.
Trump also issued pardons to other associates and people well connected to his family and inner circle, including longtime fixer Roger Stone and 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
The most recent cloud of politicization surrounding the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation dates back to 2016 and then-FBI Director James Comey’s decision to reopen an investigation into the candidate’s use of a private email server. Democrat Hillary Clinton, just days before the election. Many Democrats blame their decision for Hillary Clinton’s defeat and have never regained their trust in the FBI.
Then, the investigation into the Trump campaign’s 2016 ties to Russia soured the confidence of many of the 45th president’s supporters in the judicial system. The investigation culminated in the Mueller report, which concluded that although the Trump campaign hoped to benefit from Russian interference, there was no evidence of collusion.
Trump’s obsession with the FBI and the Justice Department, which produced his retaliatory votes, only worsened when he was investigated and indicted for his election interference scheme and his hoarding of confidential documents – both based on voluminous evidence and harmful.
If Trump responds to those who he says have weaponized the system against him, it could leave faith in the system irreparably damaged in the eyes of millions of Americans for decades.
