Hunter Biden was in an increasingly perilous position.
After Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the presidential election, it was clear that some of his most vociferous critics were poised to assume power and carry out the promise of retribution for Trump’s enemies.
Biden was also set to be sentenced to months, and potentially years, in prison after he was convicted of illegally purchasing a handgun and pleaded guilty to tax crimes.
Within his circle and the broader Biden family orbit, there were growing fears that his status as a political and legal target would only become more acute. A white paper penned by his lawyers and circulated over the long Thanksgiving weekend outlined the risks and the grave threats he faced.
But on Sunday night, the clouds lifted.
In receiving the pardon that his father, President Biden, had repeatedly said he would never grant, the younger Biden was now free of all those criminal entanglements. With the stroke of a pen, the president had given his son expansive immunity for 11 years of conduct, for any and all federal offenses.
The pardon came at a deep price for his father, who was roundly criticized by Democrats and Republicans alike.
For Hunter Biden, the pardon is an extraordinary chance at a reset after climbing out of the wreckage of crack cocaine and alcohol addiction.
“He was pleased. He’s grateful,” said Mark Geragos, one of Biden’s defense attorneys. He declined to elaborate.
Bobby Sager, a friend of Biden and his second wife, Melissa, saw the couple last week and spoke to Biden in recent days. The pardon offered relief, Sager told The Times.
“It’s been a long, difficult road,” said Sager, who attended Biden’s criminal trial in Wilmington, Del., and dined with the family at night after court. “They’ve been under constant, aggressive scrutiny for something like six years,” he said. “Today is the first day they can wake up and not have that as part of their first thoughts.”
‘Wants to find ways to be helpful’
Hunter Biden’s next act is unclear.
The 54-year-old promised to “devote the life I have rebuilt to helping those who are still sick and suffering,” according to a statement he issued Sunday. The president’s son did not respond to several messages seeking comment.
The fortune that was at the heart of his federal tax case and fueled his years-long drug binge derived from foreign business deals, legal work and consulting. He was also a board member of the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma, a post that paid $500,000 to $1 million per year.
More recently, his income has come from the sale of his paintings, his 2021 memoir, “Beautiful Things,” and millions of dollars in loans from his friend, attorney and confidant, L.A.-based lawyer Kevin Morris.
For the last several years, Biden has lived in a string of rentals across L.A. and Malibu while he has publicly committed to remaining sober from crack cocaine and alcohol. Paparazzi have snapped photos of him hiking with his wife, shopping at the Grove and two weeks ago taking his young son Beau to Disneyland.
Sager said Biden could continue writing, venture into podcasting or some other public speaking effort, press on with his artistic ambitions or pursue another path.
“He wants to find ways to be helpful to other people that are healing — healing in their addiction or from life in general,” Sager said, adding that “the country” also needed “healing.” “He is in a lot of ways uniquely qualified to be a constructive voice in that conversation.”
Biden has been trailed for years by a documentary crew in a project backed by Morris.
The filmmakers have shot intimate moments in Biden’s life: painting at home in Malibu, confronting criticism over his efforts to sell his art, and defying a congressional subpoena in Washington. In June, the filmmakers sat through much of Biden’s criminal trial in Delaware and shot outside court as jurors deliberated and ultimately convicted him of illegally purchasing a handgun.
The current status of the documentary project is unclear.
Biden wrote in his book that in recent years he was also focused on “trying to make good on my debts — both figurative and literal,” as well as on his sobriety. He’s relied on Morris and others in the recovery community for guidance.
“We’re making sure our connections are active in our daily lives so that they’re fully available in a moment of crisis,” Biden wrote in his memoir.
The legal trials and public scrutiny have hit the family hard. Geragos, his defense attorney, noted that the specter of the tax trial coming on the heels of the Delaware case with a “parade of witnesses that would be nothing more than character assassins” was especially difficult. It also was among the reasons Biden pleaded guilty, he said.
“I don’t think Hunter wanted to put his family through that again,” said Geragos. “People don’t understand how intrusive and abusive and challenging that is to someone who is five years sober.”
‘The threat against Hunter is real’
Biden’s father had long said that he would not pardon his son and that he would respect the judicial and legal process in the criminal cases, including the jury’s verdict. The president’s press secretary reiterated that promise just last month.
But he and his aides said he reconsidered over Thanksgiving in Nantucket, Mass., where he spent the holiday with Hunter and his grandchildren.
Pressure came from the court calendar: Mere days remained before judges were to sentence Biden, and his lawyers had compiled letters from loved ones to submit to the court, begging for mercy and attesting to his character.
Into the mix, his lawyers added another tactic.
On Saturday, the legal team publicly circulated a 52-page white paper arguing that Trump and his allies had turned Biden into a “political tool” and that his prosecutions were sought to influence the 2020, 2022 and 2024 elections. The document chronicled a sequence of events dating from 2017 in which Trump or his allies used Biden “to attack and injure his father.” It singled out how the attempt to impeach President Biden by focusing on his son had relied on Russian disinformation.
“With the election now decided, the threat against Hunter is real,” said the white paper, released by Winston & Strawn, the law firm of Biden’s defense attorney, Abbe Lowell. “It is clear Trump and fellow Republicans seem intent to see Hunter and members of his family prosecuted further.”
Within hours of the document’s public release, the president informed aides that he planned to pardon his son. His public statement Sunday echoed the theme of political victimization — and aggrievement — laid out by his son’s attorneys.
“As I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice,” he said in the statement. “In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”
Critics question president’s reasoning for pardon
The move drew scorn from both sides of the political spectrum. Republicans painted President Biden as a liar for recanting his public vows to refrain from pardoning his son.
Among Democrats, the pardon was criticized as a political gift to the incoming administration.
Jon Lovett, a former speechwriter for President Obama turned podcast host, questioned how President Biden’s rationale made no mention of Trump but instead highlighted his son’s sobriety.
“There’s a lot of people on whom the gears of justice have turned while they were trying desperately to maintain their sobriety — and no pardons for them,” Lovett said on “Pod Save America.” Co-host Jon Favreau cast the pardon as a time when the elder Biden’s “ego, again and again, has gotten in the way.”
NYU Law professor Rachel Barkow, who focuses on criminal and constitutional law and served as a member of the United States Sentencing Commission, identified a different problem: thousands of petitions for pardon that have gone unsigned.
“Biden has not done anything on those,” Barkow told The Times. “It’s a tale of two cities. You can’t do this for your son and ignore everyone else — other people’s children matter too.”
Barkow said that not maximizing his pardon power in office and extending that power to his son was a stain on his legacy.
“If he made regular use of this to give regular people remedy from injustice, it wouldn’t stand out as it does. But because he has such a low clemency rate, it sticks out like a sore thumb.”
What’s next
Taking stock of the pardon and its impact, Fox News host Sean Hannity asked two top Republican lawmakers Monday if the clemency spelled the end of criminal exposure for Hunter Biden and his family.
“Is this over? Is this over for Joe Biden?” Hannity asked.
“I think the new Trump Justice Department is going to have a lot on its platter,” replied Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the chair of the House Oversight Committee, also indicating that other Biden relatives, including President Biden’s brother James, would remain in the crosshairs of his committee and the incoming administration.
Both Comer and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) predicted that James Biden would receive a pardon before the end of the president’s term.
For Hunter Biden, the path is clear. He’ll remain out of prison in the twilight of his father’s life and for the arrival of his first grandchild next year; daughter Naomi announced her pregnancy last month.
“I don’t fear the future anymore. … This story already has a happy ending,” Biden wrote near the end of his memoir, which detailed how his crack addiction took him from the suites of the Chateau Marmont to the corners of Skid Row, searching for his next fix.
Sager said he’s gratified Biden will remain present in his children’s lives and hoped that even critics would view Biden’s admitted debauchery as a blip in an upstanding life.
“This is a smart Yale Law School graduate who is a very caring and capable person,” Sager said. “He’s an artist, he wants to do his art, and he wants to be somebody that’s really contributing to the welfare of society.”
His art dealer, Georges Berges, suggested on Instagram on Monday that the pardon offered a bookend to the saga. He noted that his gallery had endured “political assaults and other attacks” along with a congressional subpoena.
“This had always been genuinely about the art and I always believe that only someone with his history could have created the art he did and I knew from experience that with focus and friendship his work could become consequential,” Berges said. “Something I said then, as I do now.”
Alluding to Biden’s journey from lawyer to lobbyist to crack addict to right-wing whipping boy, Berges concluded that “Hunter Biden’s story was the American story.”
“The story that said that your past doesn’t have to define your future,” he said, “that tomorrow is a new day.”