Politico reports:

Hunter Biden’s pardon looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s.

President Joe Biden’s grant of clemency on Sunday night — an extraordinary political act with extraordinary legal breadth — insulates his son from ever facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade.

Experts on pardons said they could think of only one other person who has received a presidential pardon so sweeping in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.

“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.

“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.

Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly pledged to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in parlor-game speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes stemming from his foreign business activities and drug addiction.

So rather than merely pardoning his son for the gun crimes for which he was convicted and the tax crimes for which he pleaded guilty, the president’s pardon covers all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024. That language mirrors the language in Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which did not merely cover the Watergate scandal but extended to “all offenses against the United States” that Nixon “has committed or may have committed” between Jan. 20, 1969, and Aug. 9, 1974 — the exact span of Nixon’s presidency.

The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board. [Continue reading…]

Peter Baker writes:

President Biden and President-elect Donald J. 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 Mr. 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,” Mr. 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.”

Mr. 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 on Sunday night made clear he did not accept the outcome or respect the process.

The pardon and Mr. Biden’s stated rationale for granting it will inevitably muddy the political waters as Mr. Trump prepares to take office with plans to use the Justice Department and F.B.I. to pursue “retribution” against his political adversaries. Mr. 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 Mr. Biden has now said his son was.

Their arguments are, of course, different in important respects. Mr. Trump contends that the two indictments against him by Mr. Biden’s Justice Department amounted to a partisan witch hunt targeting the sitting president’s main rival. Mr. 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 rejected both accusations. The prosecutions of Mr. Trump and the younger Mr. 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 Mr. Biden had any involvement in Mr. Trump’s cases. [Continue reading…]