By Samantha Schulz

On December 1, President Biden signed a pardon for his son Hunter. It was to spare his son from being imprisoned for charges under federal felony gun and tax convictions. Hunter was under federal investigation around December 2020. He would have faced 25 years in prison for the firearm case and 17 years for the tax case.

According to the BBC, Hunter was found guilty under three charges of lying after being under the influence of illegal substances while trying to buy a firearm by a jury in Delaware.  It was in June of 2018 where he was convicted in a federal court where the prosecutors said he lied. 

He pleaded guilty “to spare his family of embarrassment” in September in a federal tax case. He was under nine charges of failing to pay at least $1.4 million and file taxes around the years of 2016 to 2019, filing false returns, and tax evasion.

A presidential pardon is under Article 2, Section 2 of the United States Constitution. It’s a broad but limited power given to the president of the United States which implies it gives authority for them to forgive a convicted person, to reduce the penalty in terms of the number of years, or to alter the conditions. But the two limitations are that the president’s authority cannot be used in cases of impeachment and the clemency is only granted for “offenses against the U.S.,” meaning that the state criminal offenses and federal/state civil claims are not covered under this power.

With Biden pardoning his son, the power covers any of the federal crimes that Hunter committed during the period from January 2014 to December 2024. According to the TIME, Hunter’s legal team released a 52-page white paper titled as “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden” which lead to describing the president’s son as a threat to injure his father as a president and a 2020 candidate.

The statement released from the President Joe Biden said, “The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election. Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the courtroom – with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process.”

“I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice – and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision,” President Biden said.