The Parent Trap
5 min read
Hunter Biden has lived a troubled life, and faced years in prison—until Sunday, when his father rescued him, issuing a full executive pardon clearing him of all charges. Show me a parent who wouldn’t have done the same. If saving Hunter was politically improper or reputationally risky, it was also done in accordance with the higher and fiercer laws of familial love.
Politicians, like all people in positions of power, are meant to deal impartially with conflicts of interest pertaining to their families. What the president did arguably fell short of that standard, but not for malicious reasons. That the right wing ridicules liberals for fawning over the president’s parenting is complicated by the fact that Biden does actually seem to be a compassionate father. Pardoning Hunter was something only he could do, and something he may have felt especially inclined to do given that Hunter is his only surviving son. A parent affected by the loss of a child can be forgiven for fighting ferociously for the well-being of their remaining children, and any parent can likely sympathize with the feelings of regret and remorse that might accompany a failure to do so.
Since Hunter’s legal troubles began, Biden had promised that he would not interfere with the judicial process. Just this summer, the president stated unequivocally that he would “abide by the jury’s decision” and refuse to pardon Hunter. “Joe Biden’s character as a public servant is what drove him to make clear that the law applies to everyone,” Jen Psaki, the former White House press secretary, said on MSNBC this June, adding that the justice system that convicted Hunter was “the same one [President Biden] vowed to protect.” For some time, it appeared that the president was a person of uncompromising principle on this matter. But in the statement issued upon granting Hunter’s pardon, he argued that his decision was fair and principled: “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 … 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.”
Both supporters and opponents of the president were understandably outraged by the pardon, especially considering his past assurances that he would not intervene in Hunter’s cases. “President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter deepened an entanglement of politics and the rule of law that has tarnished faith in American justice and is almost certain to worsen in Donald Trump’s second term,” one analyst wrote for CNN, echoing widespread complaints that the president’s decision only supports Trump’s rationale for claiming that his own criminal cases were political rather than the execution of blind justice. Even some commentators more generally sympathetic to the president decried the move as naked hypocrisy; my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote in The Atlantic that “when the law itself trapped [Hunter], he simply opened a door and walked through it—a door no average American could access.” Others endeavored to draw a distinction between the prosecution of Trump and the prosecution of Hunter—former Attorney General Eric Holder argued, for instance, that because no reasonable prosecutor would have brought these charges against Hunter, the pardon was appropriate. Trump himself called the pardon “an abuse and miscarriage of justice!” and threatened to provide similar pardons to the rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Biden is probably correct that Hunter’s prosecution was political to some degree; despite arguments defending the supposed impartiality of the justice system, criminal prosecution across the board is often precipitated by factors other than the simple facts of a case. Prosecutors have broad discretion as to who winds up in a courtroom and who is let off or passed over, and the identities of the accused can easily affect their judgment. As former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson said in 1940, “If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants … With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone.”
Nevertheless, Biden did break his repeated promises with respect to Hunter’s cases, and the pardon will likely further damage what remaining faith there is in the judicial system. The president undoubtedly realizes each of these facts. But those are the concerns of a president, and at the end of his tenure, Biden is demonstrating that he was always also animated by his responsibilities as a father. Anger over Hunter’s pardon calls to mind an effort to undermine Biden’s 2020 campaign by releasing a barrage of information taken from the younger Biden’s laptop, including an emotional and revealing text exchange between father and son. “Good morning my beautiful son. I miss you and love you. Dad,” Biden wrote in February of 2019, when Hunter was still recovering from his long-term drug addiction. Hunter responded with a lengthy rant about a series of personal problems, concluding in the end that he was a “fucked up addict who can’t be trusted.” His dad comforted him: “I’ll run but I need you,” he said of his campaign plans. For Hunter, he said, the “only focus is recovery. Nothing else.”
What parent could say anything less? And who, faced with the opportunity to rescue their child from purportedly unfair criminal charges and potential prison time, wouldn’t take it? In the president’s eyes, his only living son was the victim of unfair and politically motivated judicial manipulation based on his parentage, the sort of situation most any mother or father abhors: one’s child being hurt not because of who they are but because of who you are. “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 his official statement. His decision seemed calculated to free Hunter as well as to protect his recovery and sobriety, a function of genuine love.
Parental love is elemental, almost animal. It can collapse principles, crush ethical standards, even dispel morality. I’m reminded of what E. M. Forster wrote in his 1938 essay “What I Believe”: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” There are things I can imagine doing for the sake of my children that I would otherwise never dream of, and I believe that’s the reality of parental love. Even supposing that the president has done wrong by the United States of America, he has done right by his son, and it isn’t immediately obvious which obligation deserves higher priority. What is obvious is that once one clears away all political and social concerns, all the promises we make to others and ourselves under normal conditions, all expectations and manners, only love remains.
