Hunter Biden said his father’s pardon of him in December 2024 was not just a legal act. It was a choice between a son and a political legacy, and he said Joe Biden chose him.
Speaking Friday on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s podcast, Hunter Biden said the pardon told the world that his father “chose me over his legacy.” He added that the decision would be one of the first things written about the former president’s post-White House record, underscoring how personal and politically costly it was.
The pardon came shortly before Hunter Biden’s scheduled sentencing in two criminal cases and not long before Joe Biden left office. It wiped away the gun conviction in Delaware and the tax case that ended with guilty pleas to three felony charges and six misdemeanor tax charges, ending the immediate threat of prison time that had followed him through much of 2024.
Hunter Biden said his father had told him he would not issue a pardon, and that he believed that until the political map changed. Donald Trump’s election to a second term, along with Trump’s wish to install Matt Gaetz as attorney general, convinced him the risk had become different, he said. In that environment, Hunter Biden said, he would have been under the supervision of the Bureau of Federal Prisons for the next four years.
Joe Biden had repeatedly said he would not interfere in his son’s federal tax and gun cases, even as the investigation that became those cases began during the first Trump administration and kept moving after Merrick Garland left in place the U.S. attorney who had been handling it. But when he signed the pardon, the elder Biden said “raw politics” had “infected” the prosecutions and had “led to a miscarriage of justice.” The move came after the president had already been accused by the judge in the California matter of trying to “rewrite history” when he complained that his son had been “unfairly” prosecuted.
That split remains the central fact of the pardon: Joe Biden publicly said he would stay out, then issued a full and unconditional pardon anyway. Jill Biden later told’s TODAY that she supported the decision, saying, “of course” and arguing that “the process was not fair to Hunter” and had become political after the administration changed. The unanswered question is not whether the pardon happened. It is what finally made Joe Biden decide that protecting his son mattered more than preserving the clean line he had promised to keep.
