President Biden has issued a sweeping pardon to his only surviving son, Hunter, despite having previously promised not to. The president attributed his decision to issue the pardon — which absolves the younger Mr. Biden of responsibility for both firearm and tax crimes, in addition to any other federal crimes he may have committed between January 1,  2014 and December 1, 2024 — to his conviction that his son, and by extension himself, were victims of a weaponized justice system. 

The president announced his decision  late Sunday, just after the Biden family left Nantucket, which is where the whole clan spends their Thanksgiving holiday together. The first son was seen there with his father at a bookstore, where the president bought an anti-Israel book.

“It is clear that Hunter was treated differently,” Mr. Biden said of his son. “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.”

The president endorsed his son’s long-running claim that the congressional inquiry into his foreign business dealings, and the pressure placed on prosecutors by his Republican enemies, were an attempt to get the younger Mr. Biden to relapse, and thus the father as well as the son

“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,” Mr. Biden says. “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.”

In a statement issued Sunday evening, the younger Mr. Biden said that he will devote his life to “helping those who are still sick and suffering” from addiction. 

“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.”

Mr. Biden was convicted early this year, after a sensational trial, of felony weapons charges for lying about his drug addiction to buy a gun. He later pled guilty, on the eve of a trial, to failing to pay taxes on millions of dollars of income he accrued from trading off his father’s name with foreign entities. 

The special counsel investigating Mr. Biden, David Weiss, had not concluded his probe and some legal observers had expected him to charge him with violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act.

The various investigations of Mr. Biden — by prosecutors, journalists, opposition researchers and congressional Republicans — laid bare a sordid saga of acute and active drug and alcohol addiction, a doomed romance with Hallie Biden — the widow of Beau Biden — that was fueled by mutual crack cocaine abuse, and long drug binges with prostitutes in high end hotel rooms. His lifestyle, as well as his business dealings with foreign entities who showered him with money, were thoroughly documented in the hard drive of a now notorious laptop that he abandoned at a computer repair shop, and that ended up in the hands of his father’s enemies.

The president and his staff had insisted multiple times over the course of the last year that he would not pardon his son and he would not commute his sentence should he face any penalties for his crimes. The president first stated he would not commute his son’s sentence while the gun trial was ongoing in Delaware and he was visiting France for the D-Day anniversary. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has also said from the podium and from Air Force One on multiple occasions — most recently on November 8 — that the president would grant no relief to his son. 

“We’ve been asked that question multiple times. Our answer stands, which is no,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said less than one month ago. 

But with the presidential election over, and the federal criminal charges against President Trump evaporating, Mr. Biden had little to lose from pardoning his son, with whom he is said to be extremely close. 

Congressman James Comer, who led the House investigation into allegations of corruption involving the Biden family, said in a statement Sunday evening that “Joe Biden has lied from start to finish about his family’s corrupt influence peddling activities. Not only has he falsely claimed that he never met with his son’s foreign business associates and that his son did nothing wrong but he also lied when he said he would not pardon Hunter Biden. The charges Hunter faced were just the tip of the iceberg in the blatant corruption that President Biden and the Biden Crime Family have lied about to the American people. 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.”

Two Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, claimed in 2023 that the tax investigation into the first son was being stymied for political reasons. The two men have said they are facing retaliation from within their agency. 

On Sunday, Messrs. Shapley and Ziegler called Sunday “a sad day for law abiding taxpayers to witness.”

“No amount of lies or spin can hide the simple truth that the Justice Department nearly let the President’s son off the hook for multiple felonies. We did our duty, told the truth, and followed the law. Anyone reading the President’s excuses now should remember that Hunter Biden admitted to his tax crimes in federal court, that Hunter Biden’s attorneys have targeted us for our lawful whistleblower disclosures, and that we are suing one of those attorneys for smearing us with false accusations,” the two men said in a statement.