In a reversal of his pledge to remain out of the legal procedures against his younger son, who pleaded guilty to tax irregularities and was found guilty of guns charges, U.S. President Joe Biden said on Sunday that he has pardoned his son, Hunter Biden.
I signed my kid Hunter’s pardon today. “Even as I witnessed my son being unfairly and selectively prosecuted, I remained true to my pledge to not meddle in the Justice Department’s decision-making from the day I took office,” the president said in the statement.
Hunter is a recovering heroin addict who has been under fire from Republicans, including President-elect Donald Trump, and the White House has consistently said that Biden would not pardon or commute his sentence.
Biden claimed in a statement just before departing for Africa that “no reasonable person looking at the facts of Hunter’s cases can come to any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son.”
Hunter Biden was given a complete and unconditional pardon for all acts committed between January 1, 2014, and December 1, 2024, according to the mercy grant.
This month, Hunter Biden was set to get his punishment for both having a handgun and making false statements. He entered a guilty plea in September to federal accusations of evading taxes on $1.4 million while lavishing money on expensive goods, drugs, and prostitutes. In that case, the court set December 16 as the date for his sentencing.
Hunter Biden, who has been sober for more than five years, said in a statement on Sunday, “I have acknowledged and accepted responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport.”
I wasted a lot of chances and advantages when I was addicted. I will dedicate the life I have rebuilt to helping others who are still sick and in pain, and I will never take the compassion I have received today for granted.
The president’s choice was condemned by Republicans.
Does Joe’s forgiveness for Hunter include the J-6 hostages’ years-long incarceration? What a travesty of justice and abuse! Trump made reference to people convicted of storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, after he falsely claimed to have won the 2020 election, in a post on his Truth Social website.
The head of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, Representative James Comer, said Joe Biden has continuously misrepresented his family’s criminal influence-peddling operations.
According to the president, whose son Beau passed away from brain cancer in 2015, his opponents tried to discredit Hunter by selectively prosecuting him.
People were nearly never convicted for felonies based on how they filled out a firearms form, he said, and those who paid taxes late because of addiction but paid them back with interest and penalties, like his son, usually had their cases resolved without a criminal conviction.
Hunter obviously had different treatment. “They only brought charges in his cases after a number of my congressional political rivals incited them to attack me and oppose my election,” Biden said. They have attempted to break me in an attempt to break Hunter, and there is no reason to think that this will end. Enough is enough.
In August 2023, Hunter Biden’s attorneys asserted that prosecutors had not fulfilled their pledge to settle the tax and gun allegations through a plea agreement. The plea agreement would have been a just and appropriate conclusion to Hunter’s proceedings, the president said on Sunday.
Biden claimed that over the weekend, he made the decision to pardon. Before heading back to Washington on Saturday night, the president, his wife, Jill Biden, and their family—including Hunter—spent the Thanksgiving holiday in Nantucket, Massachusetts.
The reality is that, although I have struggled with this, I also think that raw politics have corrupted the legal system, resulting in a miscarriage of justice. Vice President Biden stated that there was no point in further postponing his decision after making it this past weekend.
I’m hoping that Americans will get the reasoning behind a president and father’s decision.
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