WASHINGTON (AP) – President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter, on Sunday night, freeing the younger Biden from a federal prison sentence for gun and tax crimes and reversing his earlier promises not to use the president’s extraordinary powers to help. of his family members.
The Democratic president has previously said that he will not pardon his son or revoke his sentence after he was convicted in two cases in Delaware and California. The move comes just weeks before Hunter Biden’s sentencing after his gun and tax fraud convictions, and less than two months before President Donald Trump returns to the White House.
The legal saga took a long time for the younger Biden, who publicly revealed that he was being investigated in December 2020 – months after his father’s 2020 victory – and affects the legacy of the elder Biden. Biden, who always promised the American people that he would restore morality and respect for the law after Mr. Trump’s first term in office, later used his position to help his son, breaking his promise to the American people that he would not do so. .
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In June, Biden ruled that his son should be pardoned or paroled, telling reporters as his son faced a Delaware gun charge, “I obey the court’s decision. I will do that and I will not forgive him.”
As recently as November 8, days after Trump’s victory, the press secretary in the White House, Karine Jean-Pierre, refused to condone or sympathize with the young Biden, saying, “We have been asked that question many times. Our solution is static, which is not. “
In a statement released Sunday night, Mr. Biden said, “Today, I signed an apology for my son Hunter,” calling his son’s lawsuit politically motivated and “a lapse in judgment.”
“His allegations came after several of my opponents in Congress urged them to attack me and oppose my nomination,” Biden said. “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s affairs can come to any other conclusion than that Hunter was chosen only because he is my son.”
“I hope the American people will understand why the father and the president are coming to this election,” Biden added, saying he made the election this week. The president had spent Thanksgiving in Nantucket, Massachusetts with Hunter and his family, and was due to leave later Sunday for his last trip abroad as president before he leaves office on January 20, 2025.
Hunter Biden was convicted in June in a Delaware federal court of three felony gun counts in 2018 when, prosecutors said, he lied on a federal form saying he had no illegal drug use or addiction.
He would appear before the court in September in a California case accusing him of failing to pay 14 million dollars in taxes. But he agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor and criminal charges in an unprecedented move hours after the jury was initiated.
Hunter Biden said he is pleading guilty in the case to spare his family the pain and shame after the gun trial revealed evidence of a struggle with an addiction to crack cocaine.
Tax charges carry up to 17 years in prison and gun charges carry up to 25 years in prison, although federal sentences were expected to call for less time and it was possible for him to avoid prison time altogether.
The broad amnesty covers not only those crimes, but also any “crimes against the United States that he committed or may have committed or participated in during the period from January 1, 2014 to December 1, 2024.”
Biden is not the first president to use his pardon powers to help those close to him.
In his final weeks in office, Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and several others who were convicted in Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Trump this week announced plans to nominate senior Kushner to be the US ambassador to France in his next administration.
Hunter Biden said in an emailed letter that he would never take the relief he was given for granted and vowed to dedicate the life he has rebuilt “to helping those who are still sick and suffering.”
“I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the worst days of my addiction – mistakes that were used to publicly embarrass and embarrass me and my family on the political stage,” the younger Biden said.
A spokesman for attorney general David Weiss, who brought the cases, did not respond to messages seeking comment Sunday night.
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He joined reporter Josh Boak in Nantucket, Massachusetts for this report.