Prez Biden issues full pardon to his son Hunter

Upon seeing this news as reported by the New York Times, under the headline “Biden Issues a ‘Full and Unconditional Pardon’ of His Son Hunter Biden,” I am tempted to joke that Prez Biden decided to use the long holiday weekend to pardon one last turkey.  Here are the basics:

President Biden fully and unconditionally pardoned his son Hunter on Sunday night, using the power of his office to wave aside years of legal troubles, including a federal conviction for illegally buying a gun, and Republican attacks that hounded the Biden family throughout the last four years.

In a statement issued by the White House, Mr. Biden said he had decided to issue the executive grant of clemency for his son “for those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024.”

He said he did so because the charges against his son were politically motivated and designed to hurt the president politically. “The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” Mr. Biden said in the statement. “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.”…

Many of the president’s allies and critics had expected him to use the unique authority vested only in his office, even though the president’s spokeswoman had denied for months that Mr. Biden had any intention of doing so. NBC News first reported Sunday evening that Mr. Biden had in fact decided to pardon his son.

The reversal by Mr. Biden came just 50 days before he is set to leave the White House and transfer power to President-elect Donald J. Trump, who spent years attacking Hunter Biden over his legal and personal issues as a part of series of broadsides against Mr. Biden’s family….

It is not the first time a president has used his executive power to commute the sentence of a family member. On his last day in office, President Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother Roger Clinton for old cocaine charges. A month before leaving office, Mr. Trump pardoned his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, for tax evasion and other crimes.

Both Roger Clinton and Charles Kushner had long since completed their prison terms, and the pardons were about forgiveness or vindication rather than avoiding time behind bars. Over the weekend, Mr. Trump said that he would nominate Charles Kushner to be the U.S. ambassador to France.

The full statement from Prez Biden is available at this link, and it concludes this way: 

For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: just tell the American people the truth. They’ll be fair-minded. Here’s the truth: I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice — and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision. 

I fully understand why a father would want to exempt a troubled son from the strictures of the criminal law, but I do not respect a President’s decision to show grace here only to his child when there are many thousands of others who have sought clemency and arguably merit grace even more than does this father’s privileged son.