He justified his action on the ground that his son had been “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.” In his statement, he said, “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 is something to this argument. The president’s political adversaries have long been obsessed with trying to prove that Mr. Biden was somehow involved with his son’s misdeeds, many of which appear to have stemmed from his long-term addiction to drugs. Despite years of pursuit, including a spurious impeachment investigation, Mr. Biden’s critics never came close to proving that he had anything to do with his son’s criminal behavior, or that he benefited in any way from it.
President-elect Trump’s promise to seek retribution against his enemies also probably played a role in Mr. Biden’s decision. The unusually broad scope of the pardon suggests that Mr. Biden was attempting to forestall attempts by the new administration to prosecute his son.
The fact remains that Hunter Biden stood convicted of 12 felonies — and he was, in fact, guilty of all of them. Prosecutors played hardball with the younger Mr. Biden, which is something that prosecutors sometimes, even often, do. But those other guilty defendants didn’t have the president of the United States to bail them out. Mr. Biden’s love for his son, as well as his anger about the way he was treated, was understandable, but the president’s consummate act of nepotism has stained the record of the Biden presidency.
Mr. Biden’s merciful treatment of his son might be more defensible if he had extended the same kind of grace to others who received rough treatment in the legal system. But to date, he has issued only 26 pardons and 132 commutations. (In eight years, President Barack Obama issued 212 pardons and 1,715 commutations.) Mr. Biden had earlier made two grand announcements about pardons, but they amounted to less than they appeared. Last December, he said that he was planning to pardon everyone who had been prosecuted for simple possession of marijuana under federal or District of Columbia law. This past June, he announced that he was going to pardon members of the armed services who had in previous years been subjected to courts-martial for being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or intersex. But those actions were mostly symbolic. Though thousands of people were theoretically eligible for these pardons, few chose to go through the cumbersome process: about 200 for marijuana and not even 100 for the courts-martial.
It’s true that other presidents have exercised the pardon power to reward their relatives and punish their political enemies. In his final days in office, President Bill Clinton pardoned his half brother, who had years earlier been convicted and served a prison sentence for drug trafficking. President George H.W. Bush blamed the independent counsel Lawrence Walsh for his failed re-election campaign and pardoned all of the defendants in Mr. Walsh’s prosecutions in the Iran-contra affair.