The Daily - When the President Pardons His Son

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

President Biden went back on his word by pardoning his son Hunter Biden. His stated rationale for granting the pardon will inevitably muddy the political waters as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to take office with plans to use the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to pursue “retribution” against his political adversaries.Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent, discusses where Mr. Biden’s decision leaves the U.S. justice system.Guest: Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump now agree on one thing: The Biden Justice Department has been politicized.Mr. Biden is facing criticism for absolving his son after insisting he would not.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. Today, why President Biden went back on his word to pardon his own son, and where that decision leaves the U.S. system of justice. Chief White House correspondent Peter Baker is our guest. It's Tuesday, December 3rd. Peter, we are reaching you in, of all places, Angola, where you are traveling with President Biden. It's pretty late there for you. Yeah, exactly.

Yes. Air Force One just landed here in Luanda, the capital, and he got off the plane for the start of a couple day visit here. Didn't talk with the reporters on the plane or those on the ground about anything going on back home, but obviously that's top of mind for a lot of people. Right. It seems impossible to imagine that the subject of what he did before he left for Angola is not very much chasing him there.

Yeah, exactly. I think it's one of these foreign trips that will be shattered now by a domestic issue that he dealt with literally just hours before getting on the plane, his decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden. Well, Peter, I wonder if you can describe your reaction to that announcement, because I think for a lot of us, for me at least, it was a real double take moment. I'm sorry, what?

What just happened? And I wonder what your reaction was as a close student of Joe Biden's for decades as chief White House reporter and as a really historically minded kind of thinker about the presidency. Well, it's a big deal for a president to use his power of clemency to protect his own son from the justice system, right? This is something that hasn't happened before. There have been a couple of occasions where presidents used the power of the pardon

or commutation to help people who are close to them, even members of the family. Bill Clinton pardoned his brother Roger, who had had old drug charges, and President Donald Trump pardoned Jared Kushner's father from old tax evasion charges. But this is the first time we've seen a president use the power for his own son

and to head off any punishment for that member of the family. There's both the previous examples came after their sentences had been served and were basically meant as statements of forgiveness, not preventing accountability. In this case, President Biden is actually interceding before his son is even sentenced,

saying, no way I'm letting him go to prison. And so in that moment, with the stroke of a pen, he has done something extraordinary by upending the judicial system that he has spent his career, and particularly the last four years defending and The pardon of his son now gives ammunition to Republicans including Trump to say that the justice system Doesn't work. It is politicized. Why do they say that because now Joe Biden has said that and I think that's a big big moment

for Joe Biden's legacy. We're going to return, Peter, to the implications of all of this, the meaning of it, and how it's going to fit into Biden's legacy. But I wonder if we can start with how Biden got to this place. Because pardoning his son, Hunter, fully and unconditionally, is something that Biden said repeatedly that he would never, ever do. And I want to talk with you about why he said he would never do it and what you've come to understand about why Biden ultimately changed his mind. Right, exactly. Well, Biden, of course, campaigns for office and comes to office after the 2020 election

by accusing President Trump of politicizing the Justice Department, of making decisions about law enforcement subject to his political will, going after his enemies and favoring his friends. And he said he wasn't gonna do that. He was gonna restore the system of justice. But when he comes to office,

he understands that his own son is already being investigated by a US attorney in Delaware on a number of possible issues. And that US attorney has been made into a special counsel, which is meant to insulate that prosecution from politics. And Biden makes a decision from the beginning, he's going to keep that special counsel, or at least not going to do anything to stop that special counsel from continuing. And then Merrick Garland, his attorney general, makes the decision to keep that same special

counsel in place to demonstrate that they're not trying to influence this in any way, that the special prosecutor should have the right to pursue the facts as he chooses. So Biden was taking a hands-off approach. That's what he said. He was going to take a hands-off approach. Right. And in that sense, he's really putting his money where his mouth was during this period, because he's saying to the world,

you certainly could understand why I might want to intercede on behalf of my son, but I refuse on principle. Exactly. He makes it a point of principle, he makes it a point of contrast with his predecessor and now successor, Donald Trump. And he uses this, in fact, to make the case that the Justice Department is, in fact, to make the case that the Justice Department is in fact neutral

and making politics-free decisions when they go after Trump. Because his point is, hey, the Justice Department that is prosecuting Trump is also prosecuting my son, and I'm not having anything to do with either one of those things. This is just based on facts and law. That was the argument he was making. Right. Because to cast doubt on one of those investigations was to potentially cast doubt on all of them,

which is why he's going to withhold judgment, steer clear of all this stuff. Exactly, right. But parallel to all this, of course, is a separate track, which is a partisan investigation by the House Republicans who are going after Hunter on all kinds of sometimes unproven theories about all the different ways he might've abused his father's influence to make money. And so you have these two tracks going on. One, the professional prosecutors

who end up charging Hunter Biden with gun charges and tax charges. And then the parallel House Republican investigation, which is seen certainly in the White House as just an effort to damage the president. But eventually the official legal proceedings intensify and Hunter Biden is charged and brought to trial. And he's found guilty by a jury of his peers

of lying on a firearms application form. And then in a separate trial, he pleads guilty to tax evasion. And these are real charges, not brought by members of Congress, but by professional prosecutors, with judges, and in one case, a jury that makes a finding. And so Hunter faces a sentence that could last

up to 25 years in one case, though as a first-time offender, he would likely expect a shorter sentence, possibly even just parole. As we sit here in Normandy, your son Hunter is on trial, and I know that you cannot speak about that. We reporters are asking President Biden the obvious question. Will you accept the jury's outcome, their verdict, no matter what it is? Yes. And have you ruled out a pardon for your son?

Yes. You have. Are you going to pardon your son? And he tells us no. The second one, will the president pardon or commute his son if he's convicted? So I've answered this question before. It was asked of me not too long ago. And his press secretary, Green Jean-Pierre, says it again and again.

We've been asked that question multiple times our answer stands, which is no that question has been answered Our answer is still the same. No, he will not intervene. It's still a no It will be a no it is a no and I don't have anything else to add. Will he pardon his son? No, right and they don't leave we should say any wiggle room whatsoever, they don't say well we should say, any wiggle room whatsoever. They don't say, well, he's thinking about it, and we'll get back to you. They emphatically say, he's not going to do this. And he's not going to do this because it betrays his stated values and his expectations about

how the system should work and the role that politics should or shouldn't play in the justice system. Exactly. In fact, President Biden, one point he says that he accepts the outcome of the first trial in which his son is convicted and he respects the judicial process, which is a way of signaling to the world at large

and specifically in contrast to Donald Trump, that he believes in the system. He will not get involved himself. He will not abandon what has been done there on behalf of his own family. But obviously, that's not the end of the story. And this is the part where I would normally ask you what changed specifically, but I think we can intuit that a big thing that changed was that Donald Trump won the presidency. Is that ultimately what seems to tip the scales here from the emphatic nose and the principled position

of I will not muddy the system to I'm going to pardon my son? Yeah, I think obviously the only thing that's changed between June when he begins saying that and today, December, when he gives this pardon is the election. And you can look at it a couple of different ways. You can look at it in a way of him not being honest in the summer, that he really was in fact considering this but didn't want to say before an election

because it would be politically damaging. And only after the election does he admit that in fact he is going to use his extraordinary power for his son. Or, and this may be an and or, you can also look at it as waking up to the reality of a Trump-run justice department in which this new president is promising retribution and specifically to go after Hunter Biden. And a president who's on the way out thinking, I'm not going to let that happen.

I'm not only going to pardon him for this tax and gun charges, I'm going to protect him from the next guy who's making very clear he's going to use the FBI for retribution. And why would he think that? Well, he has only to look at who Trump has been naming to run the nation's law enforcement agencies. Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general, he will nominate for attorney general. And Cash Patel, a former aide to him, will be confirmed by the Senate, the FBI director, both of them are known as sharply partisan warriors who have subscribed to Trump's conspiracy theories, his election lies, and his taste for retribution against his enemies. And so you can tell Biden is protecting his son from Trump

by the way he boards it in the pardon. The pardon just said... Well, talk about that. Talk about the way the pardon is articulated, the ground it covers, and what that reveals. The pardon is rather extraordinary because it doesn't just say that we absolve Hunter Biden of the convictions for which he has already been found,

but we absolve him of any crimes he may have committed on any kind of topic for 10 years, starting in 2014 until 2024. We haven't seen a pardon like that, as sweeping as that in decades, probably not since Watergate. And what it says is, in effect, that no matter what Trump and his Republican allies

may come up with about Hunter, they can't prosecute him for that. And it's really a way of insulating Hunter, not just from the convictions he's already facing, but from any future investigation by in what Biden would believe to be a politicized Trump administration justice department. Right. It's like a flashing red light that says don't even bother to investigate Hunter

Biden because this pardon means that the places you would look and the charges you might bring, I have just made it impossible for you to charge him for anything during that period. Absolutely. It's a 10-year get out of jail free card, right? Anything he might have done wrong, including all the different suspicious things that Republicans think that they have been looking into about trading influence with businesses and so forth. None of that is prosecutable anymore.

Well, what if anything does Biden say about his reasoning for why he issued such a sweeping pardon? On the one hand, he says, understandably, that this is the act of a father, right? He says, I hope Americans will understand why a father and a president would come to this decision. Those are his words. And he's referring to the struggles

that his son has had with addiction over the years and that in his view, drug and alcohol addiction is really behind the crimes for which he was convicted. That lying on the firearms form and the tax evasion were all a symptom of this larger struggle that he is now in theory overcome. If he had left it at that, that might be one thing

I think a lot of people would have understood that even if they didn't think it was the right thing to do. But instead he adds to that a very blistering attack on the prosecution against his son. He says that his son would never have been brought for felony charges if it hadn't been for his last name, that he's being singled out. He says in fact, in the statement he puts out

with the pardon, that 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 this is not, to your earlier point, a blistering attack just on partisan Republican congressional investigations into his son. This is a pretty blistering attack

really on his own department of justice and the lawyers and prosecutors within it who brought cases against his son. Right. He doesn't explicitly say the Justice Department is bad the same way Trump does all the time, but he does say that raw politics, that's his phrase, raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice. His words. How is it infected? does say that raw politics, that's his phrase, raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice, his words. How has it affected it?

He doesn't exactly say, but obviously, who would it affect would be his own Justice Department. That he's saying that his own Justice Department, through the special counsel, which does have some insulation from politics in theory, has in fact been influenced by the Republicans who have been out there banging the drums about Hunter Biden and been tougher on his son in effect because of that.

And what really struck me in reading this statement was how much it sounded like another president, Donald Trump, who's been saying a lot of the same things about a broken justice department infected by politics. And now suddenly that gives a whole new complexion to this debate about the role of justice in American society. We'll be right back.

Peter, in reflecting on what you said just before the break, it feels like what Biden is asking the country to do with this pardon is to accept the idea that the justice system made serious mistakes and was politicized in this one case involving its pursuit of his son, but that we shouldn't apply that same thinking to other cases that this Justice Department has taken up, including and perhaps above all, those brought against Trump. Right. Exactly.

And that's the kind of situational judgment that is, of course, problematic because either the justice system is something you have faith in or it's a corrupted department at this point and Trump and his allies very quickly seized on this pardon to say, see, we were right. Even Biden now says that the justice department can be infected by politics, can be used as a weapon against somebody and it's been used against our guy, Donald Trump, in these other cases,

which are far more serious, by the way, than anything Hunter Biden's been accused of, but that distinction gets lost, right? It ends up becoming a false equivalence but one that's very useful politically. Right, and that's the risk that Biden, I think, quite consciously understood he was taking here, that he was going to be, to some degree, undermining people's faith in the system.

But if you're Biden, there is kind of a reality, right, Peter, that Trump and his appointees and his whole approach to the Justice Department does present a unique threat to Hunter Biden and that I don't think many people doubt that Trump wanted to go after Hunter Biden, said so, and if we've learned anything about Trump, it's to believe him when he says he's going to do something. So if you're Biden and you want to protect your son, is there a reality that you have to begin to operate on Trump's terms? And that's really what happened here. Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. He is operating in some ways on Trump's terms. And that's really what happened here. Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it.

He is operating in some ways on Trump's terms. He doesn't actually say that in the statement, which is interesting, right? He talks about the current prosecutions that his son has faced being unfair and selective. He doesn't say the other part, which you just rightly focused on, which is that he is guarding against politicization

of the Justice Department by his successor, right? He could have framed it that way, but he didn't. But the net effect of what he did by making it a 10 year sweeping pardon for any and everything that his son might have done does have that effect. And it does tell you what was probably going through his mind when he decided to issue the pardon.

And that makes me wonder, do you think that President Biden, and this is a difficult question, I'll just preface it by saying that, would have issued this pardon if Trump had lost and his vice president, Kamala Harris, had won the election? Because that would have meant there was a much lower level of threat to Hunter Biden under a Kamala Harris Department of Justice. Yeah, that's an excellent question and one that we didn't get an answer to when we asked level of threat to Hunter Biden under a Kamala Harris Department of Justice? Yeah, that's an excellent question and one

that we didn't get an answer to when we asked the White House. But you're right to ask it because it does make you wonder how much of this is about saving him from the possible prison terms he might have under the guilty verdicts he already has versus looking ahead at what's in store. And it is possible that had the Democrats won, whether it had been him when he was running or Harris when she was running,

that he wouldn't have felt compelled to do this. But we won't know. And he hasn't said. Mm-hmm. Peter, you mentioned how Trump and his Republican allies are responding to this pardon, but I'm curious about how Democratic elected officials and operatives are feeling about this decision.

Because you could see a world where some of them might welcome it, they might cheer it, and say, finally, President Biden and Democrats, you are living in the kind of hand-to-hand combat world of Donald Trump. You're meeting him where he is, to use the phrase we just did a couple of minutes ago, you're meeting him on his terms. You could just as easily, however, see Democrats say, President Biden, you just stooped to

Trump's level. You betrayed what you said you stood for, and you've tarnished our entire political brand in the process, all to protect your son. Well, and Democrats being Democrats, they're saying both those things. Right? There are a number of Democrats out there who are saying, look, you know, the president is right. His son was targeted because he was his son that there's no way he would have gotten such

harsh treatment had his name been Hunter Smith instead of Hunter Biden. You hear that most prominently, for instance, from Eric Holder, former attorney general under President Obama. And there's some truth to that, according to experts we have interviewed in the past, saying that a lot of these cases like Hunter Biden's wouldn't have gone as far as his did.

On the other hand, it's also worth pointing out that when Biden says his son is being prosecuted for his last name, he didn't have any complaints when his son was profiting in business using his last name. Right. Did all the companies give him millions of dollars because his name was Hunter Biden, not Hunter Smith. So, you know, being the son of a president

has its benefits and its drawbacks. And in this case, obviously, you can argue that it's had both of those things. But there are other Democrats, as you rightly point out, who are upset about this, who say, no, this is not a good thing. While it's totally understandable what a father might wanna do,

it undercuts the independence of the justice system and it undercuts the debate against Trump's corruption of it. I talked to Senator Michael Bennett, a Democrat from Colorado, who says, totally understands what a father must feel like in this, he said, but, and he quotes here, another instance of putting his personal interests ahead of his responsibility to the country. Hmm. And when Senator Bennett says another instance,

is he referring to the first instance being Biden staying in the race for president too long? Exactly. This pardon comes at a moment when Democrats are already pretty upset at Biden over the election result, blaming him more than Kamala Harris for losing to Donald Trump, believing that he put the Democrats in this position because he decided to run for reelection, even though everyone knew he was going to be 86 by the end of the second term, and therefore would be problematic, and that he himself knew his own approval ratings were pretty low and didn't give the next generation a chance in a primary fashion to come up with

a candidate, whether it be Kamala Harris or somebody else, who would be tested and a proven commodity by the time it came to a general election against Donald Trump. So there's a lot of consternation about President Biden among Democrats. This has stirred it even further. Peter, it strikes me that the decision Biden made to stay in the presidential race as long as he did, what Michael Bennet just referred to, and this decision to pardon his son Hunter, that they have some similarities. Because in both cases, it feels to me anyway,

Biden had to choose between a personal desire and a pretty big principle. The principle in the campaign decision was, should I step down for the good of my party and the good of my country? In the decision around his son, it was, should I step down for the good of my party and the good of my country? In the decision around his son, it was, do I choose my son or do I choose the integrity of the system that I have defended for decades? Yeah, I know this is a Shakespearean quality to the story, right? In both those instances.

Look, presidents by definition are people with a certain degree of hubris. They believe inevitably in their own greatness. Otherwise, how can you look in the mirror and say, I am the person who should be president of this country more than any of the other 330 million people who live here. But it's also a very human story. It is the story of a president who had to make a decision between principle on the one hand and defending a system,

even if you thought it had mishandled the situation and allowing your son to go to prison. And there's a sense of guilt there, right? Again, this is Shakespearean. He feels guilty the hunter has been targeted. He feels guilty about all that has happened to his son over these last few years. That it isn't just hunter's fault because of his addiction

and because of those mistakes that led to convictions, that his life't just Hunter's fault because of his addiction and because of the mistakes that led to convictions, that his life has been torn upside down, that he's been tortured in a public setting because of him, the president, and that he can make it right only by issuing this pardon. Peter, I just want to end on the very question of pardons. And I feel like I always return to a feeling of bewilderment that anyone has been endowed in our democratic system with this singular power. I had that feeling when Trump was pardoning Jared Kushner's father. I had that question when Bill Clinton was pardoning a relative of his.

If I'm being honest, I have this question now when Joe Biden is pardoning his son. Yeah, it is a kingly kind of power, right? And the founders knew that when they wrote that into the Constitution. But they also viewed it as a check on a system that could go awry, right? And they didn't necessarily envision it being a check on a system going awry against the president's own family. What they saw it as was a way to correct errors in the system against ordinary Americans who are every day subjected to the justice system and in some cases unfairly treated. And that's why there is a pardon office in the Justice Department that sends recommendations

to the president that has a process that tries in fact to correct the wrongs of the system because of course the system gets things wrong, every system does at some point or another. But what happened here with Biden's pardon and a lot of Trump's pardon for that matter too is that it didn't go through any process. And that raises a lot of questions. What is justice in America? Who says it's fair and not tainted? How do you take politics out of it?

And we seem to be putting more politics into it with each passing day. Well, Peter, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. In a letter on Monday, the outgoing Senate Majority Leader, Democrat Chuck Schumer, urged his Republican colleagues to push for traditional confirmation hearings and FBI-led background checks for Donald Trump's cabinet picks. The letter comes as Trump and those around him signal an eagerness to fill his cabinet

through recess appointments that bypass Senate votes, and without FBI background checks that might uncover embarrassing facts about his choices. And the CEO of the computer chip giant Intel has stepped down in the latest sign of the company's troubles. On Monday's show, we used Intel as a case study of why President Biden's plans to revive U.S. manufacturing will be so challenging. The Biden administration hopes to invest billions of dollars into Intel to promote domestic manufacturing. But Intel has failed to keep up with its rivals and has increasingly lost the confidence of tech companies that rely on advanced computer chips. Today's episode was produced by Carlos Prieto, Jessica Chung, and Luke Vanderplug, with help from Eric Krupke.

It was edited by Michael Benoit, with help from Paige Cowan, contains original music by Marian Lozano, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderlay. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Baboro. See you tomorrow.