US President, Joe Biden has granted presidential pardon to his son, Hunter Biden. The pardon was granted on Sunday night. This pardon is a reversal of President Biden’s earlier promise that he would not use his executive authority to pardon his son or commute his sentence.
“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,” Biden said in his statement.
Hunter Biden was scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 12 and 16 for his conviction on federal gun charges and federal tax evasion respectively.
According to the White House statement, the president issued a “full and unconditional pardon” for any offenses Hunter Biden has “committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024″
The president decided to pardon his son over the weekend and started telling his senior aides on Sunday, a senior White House official told NBC News, which broke the story first.
In his remarks on Sunday night, the president also discussed his son’s battles with addiction and claimed that his political rivals were attempting to “break” him by targeting Hunter.
“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,” Biden said in his statement. “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. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”
