Hunter Biden Pardon Shocks Experts: What’s Behind the Controversial Decision?

President Biden granted blanket clemency to stop his son from being prosecuted by the Trump administration for his foreign business. Experts reached for historical parallels.

President Biden’s pardon for his son not only allowed him to escape consequences from his current convictions, but likely for any crimes he might have committed in the past 11 years.

That sweeping amnesty is raising awkward historical comparisons and sharp questions about the use of presidential clemency.

It also has inflamed a debate about who deserves mercy and for what, while underscoring the Biden family’s concerns about Hunter Biden’s vulnerability to prosecution related to his foreign business activities. Experts searched for an apt comparison, finding some similarities to the pardons granted by Gerald R. Ford to Richard M. Nixon; Andrew Johnson to former Confederate soldiers; George H.W. Bush to Iran-contra figures; and to those issued to more distant family members by President Bill Clinton and by Donald J. Trump during his first term.

Yet, none of those pardons seemed to hit as close to home for the presidents who issued them, nor did they cover as broad a range of activity over as long a period of time, experts said.

“It is extraordinarily hazardous to use the pardon power in a case where the person is an intimate of the president,” said Aziz Z. Huq, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

Mr. Huq, who warned against Mr. Trump pardoning himself at the end of his first term, said President Biden’s pardon of his son “really does strike at the rule of law.”

Presidents have unchecked authority to issue pardons, which wipe out convictions, and commutations, which reduce prison sentences. The Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney is tasked with identifying, vetting and recommending worthy clemency recipients for the president. The office’s regulations specify that it considers pardon applications only from people who have waited at least five years after their conviction or release from prison.

Hunter Biden had yet to be sentenced, let alone to serve any time, so he would not have qualified for a recommendation from the office, and it does not appear as if he applied for one.

President Biden’s pardon granted immunity for gun crimes for which his son had been convicted in June and tax crimes to which he had pleaded guilty in September. He could have faced more than 40 years in prison. The pardon also immunized him for any other crimes he “may have committed or taken part in” starting from Jan. 1, 2014, through Sunday.

The beginning of that date range is significant. It is a few months before he joined the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings — a position in which Republicans have accused him of violating foreign lobbying laws. They have also used it as a political cudgel against his father.

Prosecutors did not bring charges of violating foreign lobbying laws, but they hinted that they had evidence that might have supported doing so, citing his arrangement with a Romanian real estate magnate, which appears to have started in 2015.

The pardon, which represents a reversal of President Biden’s promise not to grant clemency to his son, is designed to pre-empt the incoming Justice Department from acting on Mr. Trump’s pledge to prosecute the Bidens.

“One of the reasons the president did the pardon is because it didn’t seem like his political opponents would let go of it, it didn’t seem like they would move on,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said on Monday.

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