WASHINGTON — Democrats spent much of the presidential campaign warning that Donald Trump is a threat to the rule of law, to faith in public institutions — even to the truth itself.
In pardoning his son, President Joe Biden undercut each of those arguments while giving Trump political cover to pursue the far-right ambitions that Democrats fear will damage the country, some party lawmakers and strategists said Monday.
The sweeping pardon means Hunter Biden won’t face any punishment for criminal convictions in two separate cases, one involving gun charges, the other tax evasion.
Beyond that, the pardon that Biden had repeatedly vowed he would never give insulates his son from any federal offenses he may have committed for the last 10 years.
A father’s natural wish to protect a son who has struggled with drug and alcohol addiction is something people may appreciate.
“Do you know of any fathers that wouldn’t have done the same?” retiring Sen. Joe Manchin, I-W-Va., asked NBC News on Monday.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., told reporters, “I’ll put it this way — if it was my son, I’d pardon him, too.”
Yet, in justifying the pardon, Biden went further than a father’s love, impugning federal prosecutors in much the same way Trump has in claiming he’s a victim of partisan persecution.
Hunter Biden, the president said in a statement Sunday, was “selectively and unfairly prosecuted.” The legal saga was “infected” with “raw politics” that created a “miscarriage of justice,” he added.
Nowhere does he use Trump’s favorite phrase — “Witch hunt!” — but the meaning is the same.
A senior law enforcement official called the White House’s approach “ridiculous” and noted that it was Biden who decided shortly after he took office in 2021 to keep David Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware, in place to continue an investigation into Hunter Biden.
“They took a gamble that didn’t play out as they hoped,” former Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley said.
Having spared his son any punishment, Biden and, by extension, fellow Democratic leaders may lose some of the moral authority needed to object to future pardons that Trump grants.
Trump has already said he’d “absolutely” consider pardoning each of the rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. If he follows through, Trump may try to blunt the fallout by invoking the Biden pardon.
“Whatever Trump plans for pardons of the Jan. 6 felons, he’ll use it as a justification,” said Ty Cobb, a former special counsel in the Trump White House who has become a critic of the ex-president. “And certainly, his supporters will accept it as a justification. That’s a tragedy for the country.”
The rationale Biden used in pardoning his son provides grist for Trump’s argument that there’s rot in the judicial system that needs to be removed. It helps Trump make his case and potentially fire some of the career attorneys trying to enforce the law, critics of the pardon said.
Indeed, Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt used Biden’s pardon in an interview with Fox News on Monday night to buttress Trump’s arguments.
“Joe Biden’s pardon of Hunter Biden proves President Trump’s signature campaign promise to end the weaponization of our justice system needs to happen,” she said, adding: “President Trump has made that promise. He’s going to deliver on it. He’s going to root out the corruption.”
Chris Kofinis, a Democratic strategist, said in an interview: “The unfortunate thing here is he [Biden] basically has legitimized these accusations against the Justice Department, and that is going to reverberate for the next four years. That’s the problem.”
The incoming Trump team already views the Justice Department with plenty of suspicion. An aim of the MAGA movement is to dismantle what adherents call the “deep state” consisting of career government employees, and the Justice Department is clearly in Trump’s crosshairs.
Trump’s pick to head the department, Pam Bondi, has said in the past that prosecutors who filed charges against Trump were members of a “deep state” bent on undermining Trump. She said last year that the “prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones.”
The Justice Department is among the most powerful and important institutions in the U.S. Prosecutors can upend people’s lives and sap their savings through investigations, trials and subpoenas. Robert H. Jackson, a former U.S. attorney general, cautioned in a speech in 1940 that “while the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.”
If Americans lose faith in the Justice Department’s impartiality, it can breed cynicism toward the rule of law. Democrats have argued that Trump has fed a collective distrust of institutions like the Justice Department with his repeated claims that he’s a continuing target of rogue prosecutors.
Now, it’s Biden who is straining the rule of law, justifying the pardon on what prosecutors see as the false claim that Hunter Biden is being singled out for political reasons.
A judge has already ruled there is no merit to the idea that Hunter Biden is a victim of selective prosecution. In a ruling filed in April, U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi, who is overseeing the tax case, said Hunter Biden “fails to present a reasonable inference, let alone clear evidence, of discriminatory effect and discriminatory purpose,” according to an order rejecting his attorneys’ assertions that he had been targeted.
Whether it’s Trump or Biden maligning federal prosecutors, trust in government suffers. Indeed, faith in public institutions has been drifting downward in the U.S. since the 1960s, according to the Pew Research Center. As of April, only 22% of Americans said they trusted government to do the right thing most of the time. Sixty years ago, the figure was 77%.
Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Ariz., said Monday on NBC News’ “Meet the Press Now”: “We need the American people to have confident in important institutions like the Department of Justice. … And I think what happened in the last 24 hours has hurt that.”
Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., a typically solid Biden ally, condemned the pardon.
“I just think it was wrong what he did. It’s just going to further erode folks’ confidence in the Department of Justice and in our judicial system at large,” said Peters, who faces re-election in 2026.
Another casualty of the pardon is a piece of Biden’s legacy. He has always prided himself of being a truth-teller, giving what he calls “my word as a Biden.”
But Biden had promised he wouldn’t pardon his son, and he did. That now-false vow was also repeated by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who tried to defend it Monday and insisted that Biden hadn’t lied.
“He said he came to this decision this weekend, and he said he wrestled with this and because he believes in the justice system, but he also believes that the raw politics infected the process and led to a miscarriage of justice,” she told reporters aboard Air Force One.
Douglas Brinkley, a Rice University presidential historian, said: “The perception that Biden was selling — ‘I give you my word as a Biden’ — doesn’t hold up. So, in that case, there’s a further erosion of his legacy.”
