With 49 days left in office, Joe Biden pardons ‘selectively, and unfairly’ prosecuted son Hunter

For a jubilant Republican Party, the last treat of Thanksgiving arrived late. On a frigid Sunday night, during the last embers of the national holiday weekend, with the 49ers playing the Bills in a snowstorm in Buffalo and the turkey carcasses in millions of kitchens, the news broke that president Joe Biden had decided to confer a presidential pardon on his son, Hunter.

The younger Biden had been due to face federal charges for illegal possession of a handgun on December 12th and a sentencing for tax evasion on December 16th. The charges carried sentences of 17- and 25-year maximum confinements. During his son’s trial, in Wilmington in June, the president had vowed that he would not intervene with the processes of justice.

But over the past fortnight, the Democratic wing of America and many international observers have watched on in stunned wonder as president-elect Donald Trump pieced together a radical-conservative cabinet which leaves even the most seasoned political insiders utterly in the dark as to what the next 24 months will bring. Biden’s volte-face coincides with the latest appointment by Trump of Kash Patel, a Maga loyalist, as director of the FBI and fears that the retribution will be general.

Explaining his decision in a statement, president Biden said he had honoured his word not to “interfere with the justice department’s decision making” even though he had watched his son “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted”.

He said most Americans “are almost never bought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form” and that those with serious addictions are usually given “non-criminal resolutions” for late tax payments.

“It is clear that Hunter was treated differently,” he said.

Biden noted that a plea-deal in the gun-charge case, agreed with the department of justice, fell apart in the courtroom with “a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process”.

“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. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five-and-a-half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

In that high-profile case in June, Hunter Biden was convicted in a federal court of three felonies based on prosecutorial arguments that he had lied on a federal form when he declared, in writing, that he was not using illegal drugs at that time.

He later pleaded guilty to tax evasion charges amounting to $1.4 million in a separate case in California. The president’s son said he had pleaded guilty to avoid a repeat of the public and humiliating anguish his family had suffered in the summer trial when “the same prosecutors were focused not on justice but on dehumanising me for my actions during my addiction”.

Both trials bracketed the implosion of president Biden’s hopes for a second term in office. The Delaware trial, which the first lady, Jill Biden, attended daily, served as an ominous prelude to Biden’s disastrous presidential debate performance in Atlanta, which led to his decision to relinquish his nomination three weeks later.

By September, the national and international focus was fixated on what seemed to be a primordial struggle between Biden’s replacement candidate, Kamala Harris, and Donald Trump, in messianic mode after his various legal challenges faded even as he survived an assassination attempt in July.

As the election reached a fever pitch, there was something of a ghost-ship dimension to Joe Biden’s closing phase in the White House. The past few weeks have seen a few prestige international trips and the sense that the best china and photographs are already packed in soft tissue and cardboard boxes in the White House. Sunday night’s decision thrust the Biden administration back under the full glare of the spotlight for the first time since he dropped out.

The pardon contains within a sense of the generalised fear among Democrats and the outgoing administration that the second Trump term will be characterised by a vengeful period of going after those perceived to be enemies in the arenas of politics, law, and media. But the Republicans have argued that the series of prosecutions which Trump dealt with this year, including his 34-count felony conviction in Manhattan, was a blatant use of the weaponisation of the justice system by the outgoing administration.

It was a point that Steven Chueng, communications director for the new Trump administration, was quick to make on Sunday evening.

“The failed witch hunts against President Trump have proven that the Democrat-controlled DOJ and other radical prosecutors are guilty of weaponising the justice system,” he wrote in a social media post.

“That system of justice must be fixed, and due process must be restored for all Americans, which is exactly what President Trump will do as he returns to the White House.”

Biden’s change of heart was an acknowledgment by the outgoing president that he no longer holds faith in the system that will be ratified in January. And it was also a de facto admission of the extraordinary reversal of fortunes Trump has engineered over the course of a year which began with him facing a seemingly impossible gauntlet of federal charges. Now, he has the powers of those same federal justice offices at his disposal.

Biden’s decision prompted a series of condemnatory messages issued from the sofas of the gilded Republican households, starting with president-elect Trump himself, who wondered, mostly in capitals: “Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!”

Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the symbols of Maga Republicanism, used the announcement to declare that “Joe Biden is a liar and a hypocrite, all the way to the end.” And even 91-year-old Chuck Grassley, the veteran Iowa senator who would have toiled with Biden during the more civilised Senate decades, offered his condemnation: “I’m shocked president Biden pardoned his son Hunter because he said many times he wouldn’t & I believed him. Shame on me.”

Sunday evening, then, the first night of December, was further evidence for Democrats, if they needed it, that the Republicans have the conch now. There are 49 days of the Biden administration to go.