President Joe Biden’s decision to break his word and pardon his son Hunter has spurred a broader discussion about what else he should be doing with the broad clemency powers of the presidency before he leaves office in January, including whether he should even be pardoning Donald Trump.

Mr. Biden on Tuesday (December 3, 2024) ducked questions on his decision on his son, ignoring calls for him to explain his reversal as he was making his first presidential trip to Angola.

He dismissed shouted questions about the matter with a laugh during a meeting with Angolan President João Lourenço at the presidential palace, telling the Angolan delegation: “Welcome to America.” Mr. Biden was not scheduled to take questions from the press during his trip to Africa, and he has largely avoided interactions with reporters since President-elect Trump’s victory last month.

Mr. Biden’s decision to offer his son a blanket pardon for actions over the past 11 years has sparked a political uproar in Washington, after the president repeatedly had said he would not use his extraordinary powers for the benefit of his family. Mr. Biden claimed that the Justice Department had presided over a “miscarriage of justice” in prosecuting his son, using some of the same language that Mr. Trump uses to describe his own legal predicaments.

Tiden’s reversal drew criticism from many Democrats, who are working to calibrate their approach to Mr. Trump as he prepares to take over the Oval Office in seven weeks. There is concern the pardon – and Mr. Biden’s claims that his son was prosecuted for political reasons – will erode their ability to push back on the incoming president’s legal moves. And it has threatened to cloud Mr. Biden’s legacy as he prepares to leave office on Jan. 20.

Hunter Biden is the closest presidential relative ever to be granted clemency, but other leaders have pardoned family members and close friends. Bill Clinton pardoned his brother Roger for drug charges after Roger Clinton had served his sentence. By the time Mr. Trump left office after his first term, he had issued 144 pardons, which included Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in law, Jared Kushner. He also pardoned fervent supporters Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and other people convicted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

In the months after the 2020 election, Mr. Trump and his allies were trying to overturn his loss, a failed effort that culminated in the violent riot by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. There were discussions at the time over whether Mr. Trump would pre-emptively pardon some of those involved in the effort – and maybe even himself – before he left office. But that never happened.

Now, Democrats are having similar discussions about pre-emptive pardons on their side because of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail. He’s made no secret of his desire to seek revenge on those who prosecuted him or crossed him. He talks about “enemies from within.” He’s circulated social media posts that call for the jailing of Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, former Vice President Mike Pence and Sens. Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer. He’s also taken aim at Liz Cheney, a conservative Republican who campaigned for Ms. Harris, promoting a social media post that suggested he wanted military tribunals to punish her because she was guilty of treason.

Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, said last week on Boston Public Radio that Mr. Biden might consider broad pardons to protect people against whatever wrath Mr. Trump may seek, but also as a way to move the country past this acrimonious and divided time.

“I think that without question, Mr. Trump is going to try to act in a dictatorial way, in a fascistic way, in a revengeful first year at least of his administration toward individuals who he believes harmed him,” Mr. Markey said.

Presidents enjoy expansive pardon powers when it comes to federal crimes. That includes granting clemency to people who have not yet been charged, as President Gerald Ford did in 1974 when he pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon over the Watergate scandal. The decision at the time caused an uproar but has been seen in the ensuing decades as a move that helped to restore order.

Mr. Markey cited Mr. Ford’s pardon as way for the country “just to close that chapter and move on to a new era.” Mr. Biden could do the same, Mr. Markey said, to help the country move on “to an agenda that deals with the ordinary families.”

Sen. Joe Manchin, the Democrat-turned-independent from West Virginia, took it a step further and suggested Mr. Biden should even pardon Mr. Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, federal charges that are now evaporating with Mr. Trump’s upcoming return to the White House.

“Why don’t you go ahead and pardon Donald Trump for all his charges?” he asked in an interview with CNN. “It would have gone down a lot more balanced. I’m just saying, wipe them out.”

At the same time, Democratic lawmakers and criminal justice reformers are pushing Mr. Biden to grant pardons to broad groups of Americans. Democrats Ayanna Pressley, Jim Clyburn and Mary Gay Scanlon wrote to Mr. Biden on Nov. 20, asking him to use his clemency powers to “address longstanding injustices in our legal system, and set our nation on the path toward ending mass incarceration.”

The letter, also signed by 61 others, suggested Mr. Biden could use his powers to send a powerful message of criminal justice reform and would “rectify unjust and unnecessary criminal laws passed by Congress and draconian sentences given by judges.”

“We encourage you to use your clemency powers to help broad classes of people and cases, including the elderly and chronically ill, those on death row, people with unjustified sentencing disparities, and women who were punished for defending themselves against their abusers,” they wrote.

So far, Mr. Biden has only pardoned 25 people, none with direct ties to him. Most presidents tend to grant a flurry of clemency requests at the end of their terms and it’s likely Mr. Biden will do likewise. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has said Mr. Biden is “thinking through that process very thoroughly.”

President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter, on Sunday (December 2, 2024) night, sparing the younger Biden a possible prison sentence for federal felony gun and tax convictions and reversing his past promises not to use the extraordinary powers of the presidency for the benefit of his family members.

The Democratic President had previously said he would not pardon his son or commute his sentence after his convictions in the two cases in Delaware and California. The move comes weeks before Hunter Biden was set to receive his punishment after his trial conviction in the gun case and guilty plea on tax charges, and less than two months before President-elect Donald Trump is set to return to the White House.

It caps a long-running legal saga for the younger M”r. Biden, who publicly disclosed he was under federal investigation in December 2020 — a month after his father’s 2020 victory — and casts a pall over the elder Mr. Biden’s legacy. Mr. Biden, who time and again pledged to Americans that he would restore norms and respect for the rule of law after Mr. Trump’s first term in office, ultimately used his position to help his son, breaking his public pledge to Americans that he would do no such thing.

In June, Mr. Biden categorically ruled out a pardon or commutation for his son, telling reporters as his son faced trial in the Delaware gun case, “I abide by the jury decision. I will do that and I will not pardon him.”

As recently as Nov. 8, days after Mr. Trump’s victory, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre ruled out a pardon or clemency for the younger Mr. Biden, saying, “We’ve been asked that question multiple times. Our answer stands, which is no.”

The elder Mr. Biden has publicly stood by his only living son as Mr. Hunter descended into serious drug addiction and threw his family life into turmoil, before pulling himself out in recent years. His political rivals have long used Hunter Biden’s myriad mistakes as a political cudgel against his father: in one hearing, lawmakers displayed half-naked photos of the drug addled president’s son in a seedy hotel.

And House Republicans sought to use the younger Mr. Biden’s years of questionable overseas business ventures in a since-abandoned attempt to impeach his father, who has long denied involvement in his son’s dealings or benefiting from them in any way.

In a statement released Sunday evening, Mr. Biden said, “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.”

“The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” Mr. Biden added. “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.”

“I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision,” Mr. Biden added, claiming he made the decision this weekend. The President had spent the Thanksgiving holiday in Nantucket, Massachusetts with Mr. Hunter and his family, and was set to depart later Sunday on what may be his last foreign trip as president before leaving office on Jan. 20, 2025.

Hunter Biden was convicted in June in Delaware federal court of three felonies for purchasing a gun in 2018 when, prosecutors said, he lied on a federal form by claiming he was not illegally using or addicted to drugs.

He was set to stand trial in September in the California case accusing him of failing to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes. But he agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor and felony charges in a surprise move hours after jury selection was set to begin.

David Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney in Delaware who negotiated the plea deal, was subsequently named a special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland to have more autonomy over the prosecution of the President’s son.

Hunter Biden said he was pleading guilty in that case to spare his family more pain and embarrassment after the gun trial aired salacious details about his struggles with a crack cocaine addiction.

The tax charges carry up to 17 years behind bars and the gun charges are punishable by up to 25 years in prison, though federal sentencing guidelines were expected to call for far less time and it was possible he would avoid prison time entirely.

Hunter Biden was supposed to be sentenced this month in the two federal cases, which the special counsel brought after a plea deal with prosecutors that likely would have spared him prison time fell apart under scrutiny by a judge. Under the original deal, Mr. Hunter was supposed to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax offenses and and would have avoided prosecution in the gun case as long as he stayed out of trouble for two years.

But the plea hearing quickly unraveled last year when the judge raised concerns about unusual aspects of the deal. He was subsequently indicted in the two cases.

The sweeping pardon covers not just those offenses, but also any other “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”

Hunter Biden’s legal team this weekend released a 52-page white paper titled “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden,” describing the president’s son as a “surrogate to attack and injure his father, both as a candidate in 2020 and later as President.” Hunter Biden’s lawyers have long argued that prosecutors bowed to political pressure to indict the president’s son amid heavy criticism by Mr. Trump and other Republicans of what they called the “sweetheart” plea deal.

Both cases against the younger Mr. Biden were somewhat unusual. Criminal tax cases generally are rare, legal experts have said, and gun offences are usually brought alongside other more serious charges. In Hunter Biden’s case, his lawyers noted that he had the gun for 11 days and never fired it. And the back taxes he owed were repaid before he was supposed to stand trial.

Rep. James Comer, one of the Republican chairmen leading congressional investigations into Mr. Biden’s family, blasted the President’s decision to issue his son a pardon, saying that the evidence against MR. Hunter was “just the tip of the iceberg.”

“It’s unfortunate that, rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability,” Mr. Comer said on X, the website formerly known as Twitter.

Mr. Biden is hardly the first President to deploy his pardon powers to benefit those close to him.

In his final weeks in office, Mr. Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in law, Jared Kushner, as well as multiple allies convicted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Mr. Trump over the weekend announced plans to nominate the elder Mr. Kushner to be the U.S. envoy to France in his next administration.

Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Mr. Trump, who has pledged to dramatically overhaul and install loyalists across the Justice Department after he was prosecuted for his role in trying to subvert the 2020 presidential election, said in a statement, “That system of justice must be fixed and due process must be restored for all Americans, which is exactly what President Trump will do as he returns to the White House with an overwhelming mandate from the American people.”

Hunter Biden said in an emailed statement that he will never take for granted the relief granted to him and vowed to devote the life he has rebuilt “to helping those who are still sick and suffering.”

“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,” the younger Mr. Biden said.

Hunter Biden’s legal team filed Sunday night in both Los Angeles and Delaware asking the judges handling his gun and tax cases to immediately dismiss them, citing the pardon.

A spokesperson for Weiss did not respond to messages seeking comment Sunday night.