Joe Biden's pardon of his son fuels debate over president's legacy
The isolated Massachusetts island with wind-beaten sand dunes and cobblestone streets has been the place where President Joe Biden and his family have gathered for decades to celebrate Thanksgiving – and the place where Biden has weighed some of the most consequential decisions of his career.
Nantucket is where, on Thanksgiving weekend a decade ago, Biden’s sons, Beau and Hunter Biden, urged him to run for president – a race he would ultimately decide not to enter following Beau’s death from brain cancer a few months later.
It’s where, two years ago, Biden’s family encouraged him to run for reelection despite voters’ concerns that he was too old to serve a second term in the White House. And it’s the place where, last weekend, he made a decision that his critics and even some of his supporters fear will tarnish his legacy long after he has left office.
On Sunday, just hours after returning to Washington following another Thanksgiving weekend on Nantucket, Biden announced that he had granted a “full and unconditional pardon” to Hunter Biden, who had been convicted of federal gun charges and also pleaded guilty to federal charges of tax evasion.
The Democratic president had insisted for months that he would not pardon his 54-year-old son. But the White House said, after agonizing over the decision, he changed his mind because he felt Hunter Biden had been unfairly targeted by political opponents who were looking to break him by going after his family.
The backlash against the 82-year-old lame-duck chief executive was predictable, swift and bipartisan.
“Joe Biden is a liar and a hypocrite, all the way to the end,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., wrote on X.
“It sets a bad precedent,” conceded Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who will soon be sworn as his state's junior senator.
Biden leaves office in just a little more than a month, but the precedent-setting nature of the sweeping pardon issued in the final stretch of his presidency could shape how he is remembered for years to come.
“The problem that President Biden has legacy-wise is he said he wouldn't pardon his son,” said Douglas Brinkley, presidential historian and professor of history at Rice University. “He gave his word, crossed his heart, and then alas, he ended up doing it. It will strike some people as unfair and other people will say it’s a father doing what he had to.”
In the end, Brinkley said, the pardon will be “a dark mark” on Biden's legacy.
“There's nothing positive about it,” he said.
'An albatross around his father's neck'
Interviews with Biden’s supporters, historians and political experts, along with the president's own memoir and statements from lawmakers following the pardon, make clear that his legacy will be defined by his two sons – and his nemesis Donald Trump, whose two nonconsecutive terms as president will serve as bookends to Biden’s single term in office.
Biden entered the White House in January 2021 promising Americans that he would offer competent leadership, a steady hand and a return to normalcy after four chaotic years of Trump, who he had defeated in a close, hard-fought election. The country was still in the throes of the COVID pandemic, so Biden took on the task of mobilizing vaccination shots and instituting an unpopular mask mandate. Over time, COVID deaths declined, Biden lifted the mask mandate, and Americans went on with their lives.
But Biden’s presidency also was at times rocked by turmoil. Inflation rose to a 40-year high, 13 soldiers died during the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, migrants poured into the country illegally along the southern border, and wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip tested the nation's influence on the world stage.
Biden’s last-minute decision to end his bid for a second term amid questions about whether he could beat Trump again and Vice President Kamala Harris’ entry into the race as the Democratic nominee injected uncertainty in the presidential contest. Harris’ loss to Trump in November was a serious blow to Biden and his legacy since many of his accomplishments in office will almost certainly be wiped out by Trump when he returns to the White House in January.
Biden’s pardon of his son complicates his legacy even more.
“Hunter Biden's been an albatross around his father's neck for the entire presidency,” Brinkley said.
'We want you to run'
Both of Biden’s sons had wanted him to run for president and urged him, during the family Thanksgiving weekend on Nantucket, to enter the race to succeed Barack Obama. Biden was vice president at the time.
On Nov. 30, 2014, just after returning from Thanksgiving dinner in Nantucket, Biden sat on a couch in the Naval Observatory, the vice president’s official residence in Washington, D.C., and made a diary entry, he wrote in his 2017 memoir “Promise me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose.”
“NavObs, November 30, 2014, 7:30 p.m.,” Joe Biden wrote. “Just home from Nantucket. I pray we have another year together in 2015. Beau. Beau. Beau. Beau.”
That Thanksgiving meal in 2014 would be the last he would have with Beau. The eldest Biden son, a former Delaware attorney general and Delaware National Guard member who served in Iraq, died of brain cancer six months later on May 30, 2015, at age 46.
Court records: President Biden bypassed Justice Department in pardoning son Hunter
In his memoir, Biden chronicles balancing his duties as vice president and wrestling with the question of running for president in 2016 during the gut-wrenching period while Beau Biden fought for and lost his life.
“You’ve got to run. I want you to run,” Joe Biden recalled Beau saying.
Hunter Biden agreed, telling his father: “We want you to run.”
“Hunt kept telling me that of all the potential candidates I was the best prepared and best able to lead the country,” Biden wrote. “But it was the conviction and intensity in Beau’s voice that caught me off guard. At one point he said it was my obligation to run, my duty. ‘Duty’ was a word Beau Biden did not use lightly.”
Still grieving the loss of his son, Biden decided to sit out the 2016 presidential race and watched from the sidelines as Trump scored an upset victory against the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. Four years later, Biden would adhere to both of his sons’ wishes and run for the nation’s highest office, defeating Trump in a race that was so acrimonious that Trump refused to concede he lost.
Meanwhile, Beau Biden’s death crushed his younger brother, who descended into depression and began drinking heavily, using crack cocaine and indulging in other self-destructive behavior.
A Yale-educated lawyer, Hunter Biden was involved in a number of foreign financial dealings in Ukraine and China that would dog his father’s White House campaign in 2020 and would become the target of investigations by the Justice Department and congressional Republicans. Trump's attempts to pressure Ukraine into investigating Joe and Hunter Biden resulted in his first impeachment, which ended in a Senate acquittal.
Last summer, Hunter Biden's legal troubles exploded into public view. In June, a Delaware jury convicted him of three charges for lying about his drug use on a document that he had filled out when buying a handgun in 2018. In September, he pled guilty to federal tax evasion charges for a period spanning from 2016 to 2019. He had been scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 12 for his conviction on federal gun charges and Dec. 16 on the tax charges.
Joe Biden’s sweeping pardon clears his son in both of those cases – both of which have since been terminated – and applies to any other federal crimes Hunter Biden may have committed over the past decade. That is significant because Trump had threatened to continue and amplify the federal investigation into the Biden family’s business dealings upon his return to office.
In his statement announcing the pardon, Joe Biden said he watched his son “being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.”
“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,” the president wrote. “In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here.”
'Unprecedented': Hunter Biden pardon 'very unusual,' experts say
Ultimately, Trump's election victory may have forced Biden's hand.
"If it had been a different type of Republican being inaugurated president in January, Biden may have thought twice," Brinkley said. "But the thought of Trump in the end having control over his son's future in a federal prison was a bridge too far."
Biden's supporters say they understand the president’s desire to protect his son.
“It is his only (living) son, and Trump being the vindictive man, he would have persecuted Hunter further simply to make a point,” said Shekar Narasimhan, a donor and longtime supporter of the president. “I cannot put myself in Joe Biden’s shoes. But I cannot criticize this decision given the circumstances.”
Even so, the criticism of Biden’s actions has been unrelenting and came not just from the expected Republican corners, but also from his fellow Democrats.
Sen. Michael Bennett, D-Colo., said on X that Biden’s “decision put personal interest ahead of duty and further erodes Americans’ faith that the justice system is fair and equal for all.”
Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash., said Biden’s pardon confirmed a common belief she hears in southwest Washington: that well-connected people are often gifted special treatment by a two-tier justice system.
“The President made the wrong decision. No family should be above the law,” she wrote on X.
Bipartisan criticism: President Biden faces backlash from Democrats for breaking promise by pardoning son
Biden accused of trying to 'rewrite history'
Presidents have broad authority under the Constitution to grant pardons for federal crimes, but many, like Biden, have faced criticism for how they’ve used that power.
Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon probably cost him a second term. Bill Clinton was pilloried for granting a series of pardons in his final hours in office, including one for his brother Roger Clinton, who had been convicted of selling cocaine to an undercover police officer. Trump pardoned dozens of people during his first term, including including his son-in-law's father and some of his closest allies who were convicted of crimes ranging from financial fraud to witness tampering and more.
Biden, however, is the first president to pardon one of his children.
U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi, who on Tuesday ended the criminal tax case against Hunter Biden following his pardon, took a shot at the president’s characterization of his son's prosecution. The Trump-appointed California federal judge wrote that the Constitution gives the president broad authority to grant clemency, "but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history."
“For example,” Scarsi wrote, “the President asserts that Mr. Biden ‘was treated differently’ from others ‘who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions,’ implying that Mr. Biden was among those individuals who untimely paid taxes due to addiction. But he is not.”
Melissa DeRosa, a Democratic strategist and author, said the Democratic Party is going to be further splintered by Biden’s decision.
“Now you have a split within the party about whether or not this was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do at a moment when the party is already so fractured coming out of this election and trying to figure out who it is,” she said.
Americans can sympathize with a parent wanting to help their child, she said, but Biden’s actions undermine his credibility and his legacy and who people believed he was at his core.
“He was always known as an honorable man with integrity,” DeRosa said. “And this calls that into question.”
Contributing: Bart Jansen and Michael Collins.
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is a White House Correspondent for USA TODAY. You can follow her on X @SwapnaVenugopal
(This story has been updated with new headlines.)
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Joe Biden's pardon of his son fuels debate over president's legacy