WASHINGTON — President Biden issued one of the most sweeping pardons in recent history Sunday to his son Hunter Biden — after the commander in chief’s role in his son and brother’s foreign business dealings spurred an impeachment inquiry against Joe, tax fraud and gun charges against Hunter and illegal foreign lobbying claims against both father and son.
The pardon is one of the most controversial in US history — with even fellow Democrats blasting the move — ranking alongside President Bill Clinton’s pardon of megadonor fugitive Marc Rich, in what was widely perceived as a corrupt pay-to-play arrangement, and President Gerald Ford’s pardon of his predecessor Richard Nixon, who had handed him the Oval Office after the Watergate coverup.
Biden, 82, had assured the American people he would not pardon Hunter, 54, but went back on his word and granted him federal legal immunity for any and all crimes committed in an 11-year window from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024.
The timeframe covers Hunter’s major foreign dealings during his father’s vice presidency — in which then-VP Biden frequently interacted with his son’s patrons from countries where he controlled US foreign policy — and from the more recent congressional investigation.
Hunter reaped millions in foreign income between 2014 and 2019, primarily from two Chinese state-owned companies and the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings, but the broad language of the pardon means he’s off the hook for any uncharged crimes from that period of time — such as alleged foreign-lobbying violations implicating his father and interstate sex crimes related to what IRS investigators say was his documented payments to prostitutes.
He also cannot face federal charges for any alleged misconduct in the years that followed.
Since his dad entered the White House in January 2021, Hunter has embarked on a controversial novice art career, seeking millions for his beginner works in what skeptics declared yet another influence-peddling scheme — with one of his dad’s commission appointees buying a pair of works and another appointee showing up at one of his art shows.
Hunter also gave allegedly false testimony to Congress this year and paid off his legal bills with roughly $6.5 million in loans from a powerful Democratic lawyer he met for the first time at a fundraiser for his dad in late 2019, which Republicans alleged could violate federal election law.
Corruption claims against Bidens
President Biden’s false claims that he would not pardon his son followed brazen falsehoods about his own role in the underlying business dealings.
During the final debate of the 2020 election, Biden told 63 million viewers that incriminating documents recovered from his son’s abandoned laptop were a “Russian plant.”
At the time, The Post had revealed emails showing that Joe Biden as vice president dined in April 2015 with a Burisma executive — despite claiming he “never” discussed business with his son or first brother James Biden — and a May 2017 email showing that Joe Biden, nicknamed the “Big Guy,” was penciled in for a 10% cut from a planned venture with the Chinese state-linked energy company CEFC China Energy that paid Hunter and James Biden and their associates $8.1 million that year.
The laptop’s authenticity was later broadly corroborated and even used in court against Hunter.
One of the Biden family’s associates, Tony Bobulinski, said he discussed the CEFC deal with Joe Biden in May 2017 and another associate, Rob Walker, later testified that Joe Biden met CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming in early 2017 at DC’s Four Seasons hotel shortly before an initial $3 million was transferred as a thank-you for work done by Hunter and his associates during the Obama-Biden administration.
Biden stuck to his denials and said last December and again in March that he “did not” interact with his family’s foreign partners — despite photos, emails and witness statements indicating otherwise.
In fact, House Republicans produced evidence that the president interacted with his relatives’ associates from the two Chinese government-linked business ventures and their patrons from Kazakhstan, Mexico, Russia and Ukraine, in addition to many of their domestic associates.
Congressional Republicans accused the elder Biden of abusing his power and obstructing their probe in a final impeachment inquiry report released in August after fellow Democrats forced him to relinquish the Democratic presidential nomination in July.
Some information about the Biden family’s foreign dealings remains murky — including controversies about how Joe Biden may have used his official power to benefits his family’s ventures, either directly or indirectly, beyond conferring the valuable appearance of influence to their associates.
For example, Biden’s use of $1 billion in US loan guarantees as leverage to force out Ukrainian prosecutor-general Viktor Shokin in 2016 remains hotly debated — though recently surfaced evidence indicates that senior US foreign policy officials were surprised at the elder Biden doing so and Hunter’s former Burisma board associate Devon Archer testified that the company’s leaders joined Hunter to call his father in DC at roughly the same time.
Some of Biden’s connections with associates remain poorly defined — including his meeting with Ye, who has since gone missing amid corruption allegations by China’s government.
A widely discussed $3.5 million transfer from former Moscow first lady Yelena Baturina to a firm held by Hunter Biden and Archer also remains murky — though evidence later emerged that Biden dined with Baturina and her husband in DC in 2014 and that Hunter helped the oligarch shop for US properties.
As part of the Burisma deal, Hunter chaired a geothermal subsidiary that laptop emails indicated featured Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitchko as a “core shareholder.” Klitchko, with whom Joe Biden has met on numerous occasions, denied any such role, though a former associate of the men corroborated the emails.
1974: Ford pardons Nixon
President Gerald Ford pardoned former President Nixon in 1974 after he resigned during the Watergate scandal, in which evidence emerged that he was indeed involved in shielding allies who broke into a Democratic office in June 1972
“Our long national nightmare is over,” declared Ford, who became vice president in December 1973 — after Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned due to an unrelated tax fraud case.
Nixon resigned when Republicans began to abandon him in impeachment proceedings and a “smoking gun” tape confirmed Nixon had ordered a coverup.
Though extremely controversial at the time, Ford said he pardoned Nixon to allow the nation to move on after an intense political scandal.
Ford’s own White House press secretary, Jerald terHorst, resigned in protest of the pardon after just a month on the job.
The press secretary wrote in his resignation letter that “it is impossible to conclude that the former President is more deserving of mercy than persons of lesser station in life whose offenses have had far less effect on our national wellbeing.”
Although his political opponents argued that there was a corrupt deal in which Ford pardoned Nixon in exchange for being made president, Ford denied it and defended his decision in congressional testimony.
“There was no deal, period,” Ford told a House subcommittee. “There never was at any time any agreement whatsoever concerning a pardon to Mr. Nixon if he were to resign and I were to become president.”
Evidence emerged that eight days before Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, Nixon adviser Alexander Haig raised a possible pardon with Ford, but Ford said he made no commitment.
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter leaned on the legacy to posthumously pardon Confederate President Jefferson Davis, saying, “Our Nation needs to clear away the guilts and enmities and recriminations of the past.”
2001: Clinton pardons Marc Rich
In his most controversial final-day pardon, President Bill Clinton pardoned billionaire fugitive Marc Rich after his ex-wife, Denise Rich, donated generously to Democrats.
The pardon was widely viewed as a legal form of bribery.
Rich fled to Switzerland in 1983 after he was indicted for evading $48 million in taxes and buying $200 million of Iranian oil in violation of a US embargo during the 1979 hostage crisis.
Denise Rich greased the wheels by giving more than $1 million to Democrats, including more than $100,000 to support Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate run and $450,000 to Bill Clinton’s presidential library.
The New York Times editorial board called the pardon “a shocking abuse of presidential power.”
Jimmy Carter called it “disgraceful” in a rare rebuke.
Even Clinton’s then-White House chief of staff, John Podesta, was strongly opposed, later telling Congress that “the staff informed the president that it was our view that the pardon should not be granted.”
However, former Clinton pollster and adviser Mark Penn claimed in a Sunday night X post that Hunter’s was truly “disgraceful.”
“This was not a pardon of just Hunter Biden but of Joe Biden himself as his son ran a scheme with Joe’s brother to shakedown adversaries of over $20 million and then didn’t even pay taxes on it,” Penn said.
“And the loot was distributed even to grand children. And this is yet another of the many issues the American public was shamefully gaslighted over,” he added.
“Biden of course falsely claimed he would not pardon his son, and so what else was Biden falsely saying before the election that he would have done had he been elected? We will never know but we sure can guess …”
