President Joe Biden, in a direct and unapologetic statement:

Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter. From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.

When the news broke Sunday evening that President Biden pardoned his son, Hunter, my first thought was good for him. I also knew I’d awake to a string of pearl clutching.

Sure enough, the deluge of denunciations came fast and furious. Almost every story led with the “reversal” of President Biden’s “previous pledges” to not pardon his son, with the “hypocrisy” of his decision “sparking backlash.” Republicans called him a “liar”, Democrats were “disappointed.”

I can’t get into President Biden’s head, but I think that once Trump won, a pardon was a fait accompli. I’m sure the prosecutors knew that, too, at least at some level. There was no way he’d let his son twist in the wind ahead of a vindictive incoming president who nominated Matt Gaetz/Pam Bondi as Attorney General and Kash Patel to lead the FBI. He may have “broken” his promise, but I believe that promise was made under very different circumstances, before the American public elected a criminal. At this point, I think there’s a bit of “fuck it” happening, and I’m OK with that.

I’m only surprised that he did it now, and not at 11:59 a.m. on January 20, 2025, as a massive, Dark Brandon middle finger to the incoming administration.

If Donald Trump’s children were facing jail time, is there any doubt in your mind that he would immediately use his one incontrovertible power as president and pardon them? Heck, I suspect he might do it preemptively as soon as he’s sworn in, just in case.

May I remind you that Donald Trump pardoned his daughter’s father-in-law four years ago, and then, last week, nominated him as ambassador to France?

Beyond that, Trump has a litany of self-serving pardons. I don’t recall the Right raising a ruckus about it four years ago.

Everyone’s hair is on fire because a president pardoned his son. Unprecedented? Sure. But only because the president’s son was prosecuted for a crime few other people would be charged with. As Biden notes in his statement:

Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form.

From that previously linked list of Trump pardons and commutations:

The rapper Kodak Black […] was granted a commutation. In 2019, he was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for lying on background paperwork while attempting to buy guns.

Sounds familiar. Except:

[Black] admitted to lying on background check forms while buying multiple firearms […].

Prosecutors said two of the guns were later found by the police at crime scenes, including one — with Black’s fingerprints and a live round in the chamber — that had been used to fire at a “rival rap artist.” […]

Another weapon was discovered in the trunk of a car as the rapper and his team attempted to cross the Canadian border into upstate New York in April. Black was charged with unlawful possession of marijuana and criminal possession of a firearm.

The underlying crimes are superficially similar. If Trump can commute a stranger’s sentence in this situation, why shouldn’t President Biden pardon his son for a less serious version of the same basic crime?

Unsurprisingly, the New York Times has the pearl-clutchiest of takes. Under the hed “Broad Pardon for Hunter Biden Troubles Experts,” writer Kenneth P. Vogel suggests the pardon

[…] is raising awkward historical comparisons and sharp questions about the use of presidential clemency.

Vogel then quotes one of those experts:

“It is extraordinarily hazardous to use the pardon power in a case where the person is an intimate of the president,” said Aziz Z. Huq, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

It’s unclear why the good professor believes this, providing no evidence to support his belief, only that:

[…] President Biden’s pardon of his son “really does strike at the rule of law.”

Except it doesn’t. The president has the absolute authority to issue pardons, which Vogel himself immediately notes:

Presidents have unchecked authority to issue pardons, which wipe out convictions, and commutations, which reduce prison sentences.

We may not like how some have used that authority, but it is very much within “the rule of law.”

I’m not big on bothsidesism, but in a world where the president-elect is a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist, who was granted “presidential immunity” by a stolen Supreme Court, and who successfully ran out the clock on his own prosecutions, I’m perfectly comfortable with President Biden exercising his power as a president, and as a father.

The hypocrisy of the Right and everyone else handwringing over this is staggeringly vomitous. Their side has—and will do—much, much worse.

Now, I’d like for President Biden to take it a million steps farther, and offer preemptive pardons and commutations to everyone incarcerated for minor drug offenses, sitting in jails pending bail, and all the people the president-elect has suggested will be targeted by his incoming “Justice” Department. To quote Keith Olbermann:

Literally offer a pardon to anybody Trump might go after for prosecuting him, criticizing him, covering him, or looking at him funny. I want a 1-800-PARDONME hotline. I want 10 million pardons.

After all, if the President’s decision to pardon his son will, says the reliably execrable Jonathan Turley,

be a decision that lives in infamy in presidential politics.

he might as well go all the way. He’s got nothing to lose.