President Biden announced late Sunday that he had signed a full and unconditional pardon for his son Hunter Biden.
The pardon comes in the last weeks of President Biden's time in office and despite his public assurances in the past that he would neither pardon nor commute his son's sentence.
"I signed a pardon for my son Hunter," Biden said in a White House statement. "It is clear that Hunter was treated differently."
The pardon also comes less than two months before President-elect Donald Trump will return to the White House. In a Sunday night post on social media, Trump called Biden's pardon an "Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!" In his post, Trump asked if Biden's pardon would apply to people convicted of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress was certifying the 2020 presidential election.
Trump said during this year's presidential campaign that one of the first acts of his second term would be to free hundreds of the Jan. 6 rioters.
Hunter Biden was convicted in June of federal gun charges for lying about his addiction to crack cocaine when he purchased a gun. Three months later, he entered a guilty plea to tax offenses for failing to pay at least $1.4 million in federal taxes. Sentencing was expected later this month in both cases.
Both of the prosecutions were brought by Justice Department special counsel David Weiss. The cases were rooted in a period of time when Hunter Biden was wrestling with the death of his brother, Beau, and struggling with his own addiction to crack cocaine.
In June, President Biden promised not to pardon his son and said, "I will not pardon him" after his son was convicted for three federal gun charges.
The 82-year-old seemed to address this reversal in his statement.
"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," Biden wrote.
President Biden and his son Hunter spent the Thanksgiving weekend together in Nantucket, Mass. The Biden family is known to be very close.
"In trying to break Hunter, they've tried to break me — and there's no reason to believe it will stop here," Biden said. "Enough is enough."
Hunter Biden's legal troubles have long been viewed as a political liability for his father, and Republicans frequently sought to tarnish President Biden.
At the time of Hunter Biden's gun trial in Delaware in June, his father was still running for reelection in a what was seen as a tight race with Donald Trump. A bank of news cameras lined the walkway into the federal courthouse in downtown Wilmington.
By the time of the tax trial in early September, President Biden had dropped out of the race and the potential political impact of Hunter Biden's criminal conduct had largely disappeared.
In a statement emailed to NPR, Hunter Biden seemed to acknowledge how his legal issues had affected his father's political life.
"I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction — mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport."
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