President Joe Biden with his sister Valerie Biden and son...

President Joe Biden with his sister Valerie Biden and son Hunter Biden at the White House in July. Credit: The Washington Post/Demetrius Freeman

President Joe Biden's sweeping pardon of his son Hunter for past federal criminal convictions, as well as inoculating him against any future ones, is a mistake. The president's statement Sunday night justifying his action because his son was "selectively and unfairly prosecuted" is a failure to defend our rule of law and the institutions that deliver it.
Hunter Biden was to have been sentenced this month in two separate federal cases, a jury conviction in his home state of Delaware for falsely filing a gun purchase form and a guilty plea in a California case to nine felony charges for late filing of taxes, which were eventually paid. Now he faces no consequences for those two convictions which exposed him to considerable prison sentences, however unlikely, as well as $1.3 million in fines. A less egregious choice would have been more limited — a commutation of any prison sentence that would nevertheless have allowed the convictions to stand. The blanket pardon insulates Hunter Biden from any new federal charges for any actions from 2014 to the end of last week.

In his statement, Biden noted his son Hunter had serious drug and alcohol addiction issues — but there are a lot of federal inmates who could make the same claim as a rationale for their wrongdoing. The president went even further saying the prosecution of those cases by a Justice Department special counsel was motivated by his political opponents. But a credible counter argument is that any failure to prosecute Hunter Biden was due to favoritism or privilege for the politically connected.

Biden, when he was running for a second term, promised that he would not pardon his son. What changed is that the Democrats lost the White House. Certainly, the Biden family had reason to believe the incoming Trump administration, which has promised to hunt down political enemies, would have started investigating Hunter Biden. Indeed Kash Patel, Donald Trump's proposed FBI director, stated in a television interview a year ago that Hunter Biden "was guilty of violating" the Foreign Agents Registration Act for working with a Ukrainian energy company and should be prosecuted. 

On a personal level, Biden wanting to protect his son is understandable. Yet, his claim that the prosecutions were political  has already fed into Trump's false narrative that the Justice Department and FBI are totally corrupt and need to be swept clean. That was Trump's rationale for his attempt to make Matt Gaetz attorney general and for his ridiculous choice of Patel at the FBI. 

It's foolish to say that Trump, having lowered the bar for pardons when he left office in 2020, now has even more reason to issue sweeping pardons, especially for those convicted for their roles in the Jan. 6 riots. That plan was already baked before this past weekend. 

But Biden's decision is further evidence that we are verging on an era where no rules will apply. That should be more worrisome than the fate of Hunter Biden. 

MEMBERS OF THE EDITORIAL BOARD are experienced journalists who offer reasoned opinions, based on facts, to encourage informed debate about the issues facing our community.

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