In a CNN interview, President Biden ended months of stonewalling about potential criminal charges against his son, Hunter. His answer was that of a powerful father who believes his son deserves special privileges while the rest of us must follow the law.

Jacob Tapper dedicated just 77 seconds to the topic, which has been reported by too many news outlets to ignore. Federal prosecutors believe they have enough evidence to indict the first son for tax and gun crimes; Mr. Tapper had to address the elephant in the room.

Downplaying the scandal, he aired the conversation on a Tuesday night — ratings came in third behind rivals Fox News Channel and MSNBC — and left the question until the end of the exchange, which undermined its significance.

“Um, personally and politically,” he asked of the legal jeopardy, “um, how do you react to that?” This was an apologetic question not a pointed one, designed to set-up the president rather than interview him.

Mr. Biden stumbled through a canned statement, said he was proud of his son three times — as if that mattered — and cast him as a victim of drugs “like many families.” With that out of the way, Mr. Tapper moved on to the president’s plans for his 80th birthday.

The president was allowed to ignore the allegations of tax fraud — which he was happy to do, no doubt, because his personal finances are so intertwined with his son’s — and to wave away the possible felony charge that his son lied on an ATF document for the 2018 purchase of a handgun.

Form 4473 asks, “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic?” Mr. Biden said of his son abusing those illegal substances, “[H]e wrote about it in his book,” as if this rendered his response of “no” accurate.

Note that in June, Mr. Biden signed the Safer Communities Act, increasing the maximum penalty for this very lie to 15 years in prison. And at the signing ceremony, Mr. Biden touted penalties for those who did not “secure” their weapons “under lock and key.”

The legislation included no exception for individuals who had written about drugs in books or had a proud daddy, yet in 2018, the younger Biden’s unsecured handgun turned up near a high school, as documented by the police.

The Secret Service, according to Politico, seized all paperwork about the sale from the gun store in an apparent coverup. Then there’s a crack pipe the son left in a rental car on the eve of the 2020 election.

All this turmoil and the salacious details further exposes the president’s claim that his son kicked the habit now and, therefore, deserves a pass for lying on that federal firearms document.

Presidential children, when caught misbehaving, have tried to hide behind their fathers since the earliest days of the republic. Frustrated by the indiscretions of his alcoholic son Charles, President John Adams disowned him, hoping he’d reform.

Much like the younger Biden, Franklin Roosevelt Jr. negotiated shady deals with foreign governments. When he attempted to sell military jets to the Soviet Union, his father put a stop to it.

But time and again, this president has insulated his son with help from allies in government and the press. For example, according to the New York Post, the FBI pressured Facebook to censor the story of the younger Biden’s laptop and squash the blockbuster as “Russian disinformation.”

This behavior demonstrates a level of privilege unavailable to the “many other families” Mr. Biden mentioned on CNN. It’s hard to imagine, say, a young black man in Baltimore enjoying a Get Out of Jail Free Card where federal agents clean up his gun, tax, and drug offenses.

Mr. Biden has spent 50 years boasting about being a truth teller who’s tough on drugs, guns, and crime. If charges are brought against his son, he’ll be faced with a choice: Let him do the time at last or send the message that being a Biden means being above the law.