President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump now agree on one thing: The Biden Justice Department has been politicized.

In pardoning his son Hunter Biden on Sunday night, the incumbent president sounded a lot like his successor by complaining about selective prosecution and political pressure, questioning the fairness of a system that Joe Biden had until now long defended.

“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 that is wrong,” Biden said in a statement announcing the pardon. “Here’s the truth,” he added. “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’s decision to use the extraordinary power of executive clemency to wipe out his son’s convictions on gun and tax charges came despite repeated statements by him and his aides that he would not do so. Just this past summer, after his son was convicted at trial, the president rejected the idea of a pardon and said that “I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process.” The statement he issued Sunday night made clear he did not accept the outcome or respect the process.

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Biden’s Pardon Follows Trump Threats

The pardon and Biden’s stated rationale for granting it will inevitably muddy the political waters as Trump prepares to take office with plans to use the Justice Department and FBI to pursue “retribution” against his political adversaries. Trump has long argued that the justice system has been “weaponized” against him and that he is the victim of selective prosecution, much the way Biden has now said his son was.

Their arguments are, of course, different in important respects. Trump contends that the two indictments against him by Biden’s Justice Department amounted to a partisan witch hunt targeting the sitting president’s main rival. Biden did not explicitly accuse the Justice Department of being biased against his family, but suggested that it was influenced by Republican politicians who have waged a long public campaign assailing Hunter Biden.

As it happens, the Justice Department has reject ed both accusations. The prosecutions of Trump and the younger Biden were each handled by separate special counsels appointed specifically to insulate the cases from politics and senior department officials have denied that politics entered the equation against either man. There is no evidence that Biden had any involvement in Trump’s cases.

But Biden’s pardon will make it harder for Democrats to defend the integrity of the Justice Department and stand against Trump’s unapologetic plans to use it for political purposes even as he seeks to install Kash Patel, an adviser who has vowed to “come after” the president-elect’s enemies, as the next director of the FBI. It will also be harder for Democrats to criticize Trump for his prolific use of the pardon power to absolve friends and allies, some of whom could have been witnesses against him in previous investigations.

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“While as a father I certainly understand President @JoeBiden’s natural desire to help his son by pardoning him, I am disappointed that he put his family ahead of the country,” Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, wrote on social media. “This is a bad precedent that could be abused by later presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation.”

Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Ariz., disputed the president’s argument that politics was behind his son’s prosecution. “I respect President Biden, but I think he got this one wrong,” he said online. “This wasn’t a politically-motivated prosecution. Hunter committed felonies, and was convicted by a jury of his peers.”

Other Democrats tried to draw a distinction between the Biden and Trump matters. Former Attorney General Eric Holder said that no prosecutor would have brought the charges against Hunter Biden and that therefore the pardon was warranted.

“Ask yourself a vastly more important question,” he wrote on social media. “Do you really think Kash Patel is qualified to lead the world’s preeminent law enforcement investigative organization? Obvious answer: hell no.”

To be sure, the cases against Trump and the younger Biden are hardly comparable. Trump was charged with illegally trying to overturn an election that he lost so that he could hold on to power and, in a separate indictment, with endangering national security and trying to obstruct justice by taking classified documents when he left office and refusing to return them. Those cases are now being dropped because of his election.

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Hunter Biden Convicted of Lying About Drug Addiction

Hunter Biden was convicted of lying on a firearms application form about his drug addiction and pleaded guilty to failing to pay taxes that he later did pay, with penalties. At least some legal experts have agreed with the president’s contention that such offenses would normally have been resolved without felony charges.

But the president broke his own commitment about intervening in the case. In his statement, he noted that he had said he would “not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.” He did not acknowledge that he did not keep his word about forgoing a pardon.

Trump wasted little time seizing on the pardon to make apples-and-oranges comparisons. “Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years?” he wrote on social media, referring to the rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to stop Congress from certifying Trump’s defeat. “Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!”

In his pardon statement, Biden sought to appeal to empathy for a father of a son who struggled with drug addiction, framing his decision in personal terms as Hunter faced possibly years in prison. “I hope Americans will understand why a father and a president would come to this decision,” he wrote.

If he had left it at that, that might have been one thing. But it was his attack on the prosecution that raised questions of a dual-track justice system. “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution,” the president said. “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.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Peter Baker
c. 2024 The New York Times Company