The Democratic president had previously said he would not pardon his son or commute his sentence after convictions in the two cases in Delaware and California. The move on Sunday night comes weeks before Hunter Biden was set to receive his punishment after his trial conviction in the gun case and guilty plea on tax charges, and less than two months before President-elect Donald Trump is set to return to the White House.

It caps a long-running legal saga for the younger Biden, who publicly disclosed he was under federal investigation in December 2020 — a month after his father’s 2020 victory — and casts a pall over the elder Biden’s legacy.

Biden, who time and again pledged to Americans that he would restore norms and respect for the rule of law after Trump’s first term in office, ultimately used his position to help his son, breaking his public pledge to Americans that he would do no such thing.

In a statement released Sunday evening, Biden said, “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.”

The president’s sweeping pardon covers not just the gun and tax offenses against the younger Biden, but also any other “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”

In June, Biden categorically ruled out a pardon or commutation for his son, telling reporters as his son faced trial in the Delaware gun case, “I abide by the jury decision. I will do that and I will not pardon him.”

As recently as Nov. 8, days after Trump’s victory, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre ruled out a pardon or clemency for the younger Biden, saying, “We’ve been asked that question multiple times. Our answer stands, which is no.”

The elder Biden has publicly stood by his only living son as Hunter descended into serious drug addiction and threw his family life into turmoil before getting back on track in recent years. The president’s political rivals have long used Hunter Biden’s myriad mistakes as a political cudgel against his father: In one hearing, lawmakers displayed photos of the drug-addled president’s son half-naked in a seedy hotel.

House Republicans also sought to use the younger Biden’s years of questionable overseas business ventures in a since-abandoned attempt to impeach his father, who has long denied involvement in his son’s dealings or benefiting from them in any way.

“The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” Biden said in his statement. “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.”

“I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision,” Biden added, claiming he made the decision this weekend.

The president had spent the Thanksgiving holiday in Nantucket, Massachusetts, with Hunter and his family, and departed for Angola later Sunday on what may be his last foreign trip as president before leaving office on Jan. 20, 2025.

Hunter Biden was convicted in June in Delaware federal court of three felonies for purchasing a gun in 2018 when, prosecutors said, he lied on a federal form by claiming he was not illegally using or addicted to drugs.

He had been set to stand trial in September in the California case accusing him of failing to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes. But he agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor and felony charges in a surprise move hours after jury selection was set to begin.

David Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Delaware who negotiated the plea deal, was subsequently named a special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland to have more autonomy over the prosecution of the president’s son.

Hunter Biden said he was pleading guilty in that case to spare his family more pain and embarrassment after the gun trial aired salacious details about his struggles with a crack cocaine addiction.

The tax charges carry up to 17 years behind bars and the gun charges are punishable by up to 25 years in prison, though federal sentencing guidelines were expected to call for far less time and it was possible he would have avoided prison time entirely.

Hunter Biden was supposed to be sentenced this month in the two federal cases, which the special counsel brought after a plea deal with prosecutors that likely would have spared him prison time fell apart under scrutiny by a judge. Under the original deal, Hunter was supposed to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax offenses and and would have avoided prosecution in the gun case as long as he stayed out of trouble for two years.

But the plea hearing quickly unraveled last year when the judge raised concerns about unusual aspects of the deal. The younger Biden was subsequently indicted in the two cases.

Hunter Biden’s legal team this weekend released a 52-page white paper titled “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden,” describing the president’s son as a “surrogate to attack and injure his father, both as a candidate in 2020 and later as president.”

The younger Biden’s lawyers have long argued that prosecutors bowed to political pressure to indict the president’s son amid heavy criticism by Trump and other Republicans of what they called the “sweetheart” plea deal.

Rep. James Comer, one of the Republican chairmen leading congressional investigations into Biden’s family, blasted the president’s pardon, saying that the evidence against Hunter was “just the tip of the iceberg.”

“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,” Comer said on X, the website formerly known as Twitter.

Biden is hardly the first president to deploy his pardon powers to benefit those close to him.

In his final weeks in office, Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in law, Jared Kushner, as well as multiple allies convicted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Trump over the weekend announced plans to nominate the elder Kushner to be the U.S. envoy to France in his next administration.

Trump, who has pledged to dramatically overhaul and install loyalists across the Justice Department after he was prosecuted for his role in trying to subvert the 2020 presidential election, said in a social media post on Sunday that Hunter Biden’s pardon was “such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice.”

“Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years?” Trump asked, referring to those convicted in the violent Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.

Hunter Biden said in an emailed statement that he will never take for granted the relief granted to him and vowed to devote the life he has rebuilt “to helping those who are still sick and suffering.”

“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,” the younger Biden said.

Hunter Biden’s legal team filed Sunday night in both Los Angeles and Delaware asking the judges handling his gun and tax cases to immediately dismiss them, citing the pardon.

A spokesperson for Weiss did not respond to messages seeking comment Sunday night.

NBC News was first to report Biden was expected to pardon his son Sunday.

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The announcement that federal prosecutors have reached a plea deal with President Joe Biden’s son Hunter over tax and gun charges marks the likely end of a five-year Justice Department investigation that has dogged the Biden family.

It doesn’t, however, mean that congressional Republicans are done with their own wide-ranging probe into nearly every facet of Hunter Biden’s business dealings, including examining foreign payments and other aspects of his finances.

Some of the Republican candidates hoping to face off against President Biden in the 2024 election are decrying the deal as evidence of an unfair justice system, particularly in light of the recent federal indictment of GOP front-runner Donald Trump, though there are obvious differences between the two cases.

Here’s what to know about the charges, plea agreement, other probes involving the president’s son and the politics:

WHAT ARE THE CHARGES?

According to a letter filed in U.S. District Court in Delaware, Hunter Biden has been charged with misdemeanor charges of failing to pay federal income tax. Court documents allege that he failed to pay more than $200,000 in federal income taxes for 2017 and 2018.

The federal probe into Hunter Biden began in 2018, bursting into public view in December 2020 — one month after the presidential election — when he revealed that he had received a subpoena as part of the Justice Department’s scrutiny of his taxes.

That subpoena sought information on the younger Biden’s business dealings with a number of entities, including Burisma, a Ukraine gas company whose board he joined in 2014. That move sparked concerns about the perceptions of a conflict of interest, given the elder Biden was deeply involved in U.S. policy toward Ukraine.

An investigation by the then-Republican-controlled Senate did not identify any policies that were directly affected by Hunter Biden’s work.

At the time of that subpoena, Hunter Biden said that he was “confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately, including with the benefit of professional tax advisors.”

The younger Biden has also reached an agreement with the Justice Department on a charge that he illegally possessed a firearm while being a drug user.

Federal law prohibits people who use drugs from possessing firearms or ammunition, although a federal judge challenged the legality earlier this year. According to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, between 1998 and 2014, nearly 100,000 prospective gun purchasers went home empty-handed because they were flagged as using illegal drugs.

WHAT DOES THE PLEA AGREEMENT MEAN?

By entering a plea, Hunter Biden avoids a trial, and it’s unlikely that he will spend time in jail, although penalties are ultimately up to a judge.

Biden was charged under an information, a formal document that lays out the charges against him but doesn’t require a vote by a grand jury, which would be an indictment.

A person familiar with the investigation said the Justice Department would recommend probation for the tax charges. But the decision to go along with any deal is up to a judge. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

The charge of willful failure to file a tax return is rarely used as a primary charge by federal prosecutors, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. There were just 48 prosecutions in the last six fiscal years, according to TRAC.

The gun charge carries a maximum sentence of up to 10 years in prison, but the Justice Department says Hunter Biden has reached a pretrial agreement on that charge, too.

It is somewhat unusual to resolve a federal criminal case at the same time the charges are filed in court, though it is not totally unheard of.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

The agreement essentially means the case is over, unless Hunter Biden fails to abide by it.

A deferred prosecution is an agreement offered by prosecutors in which a defendant must adhere to strict conditions, which will be known after he appears in court. A date for that appearance hasn’t been set.

Usually a judge sets regular check-ins for the defendant to appear to ensure they are playing by the rules. If they don’t, their deal is revoked and the criminal charges reinstated, which in Hunter Biden’s case carry a maximum of a decade in prison. But if he does adhere to the rules, the case will be wiped from his record.

ISN’T THERE ANOTHER PROBE?

Yes. Congressional Republicans have been pursuing their own investigations into nearly every facet of Hunter Biden’s business dealings, including examining foreign payments and other aspects of his finances.

The misdemeanor tax crimes that the younger Biden is set to plead guilty to are far more limited in scope than the allegations that have been pursued for years by congressional Republicans. On Tuesday, Rep. James Comer, the Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, said that the “charges against Hunter Biden and sweetheart plea deal have no impact on” his panel’s probe.

Even before he ran for president in 2020, Joe Biden has faced questions about his son’s business dealings and drug addiction.

And there have been other controversies. While his father was vice president, Hunter joined the Naval Reserve and was discharged after testing positive for cocaine in his system, later revealing a yearslong struggle with addiction.

In the weeks before the 2020 election, Trump supporters used the existence of a laptop they said was connected to Hunter Biden — and the emergence of someone who maintains he had business discussions with him — to raise questions about Joe Biden’s knowledge of his son’s activities in Ukraine and China. President Biden has said he did not discuss his son’s international business dealings with him and has denied having ever taken money from a foreign country.

WHAT ARE THE POLITICS?

News of the plea agreement comes days after Trump appeared in federal court on charges related to his retention of classified documents. In the wake of those 37 charges, Republicans across the country have levied criticism against the Biden administration, accusing the Justice Department of “politicization” and assailing Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

The Trump charges came from a special counsel, appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to conduct an independent investigation to avoid any potential conflict of interest in the Justice Department. The Hunter Biden charges, meanwhile, were filed by the U.S. attorney for Delaware, Trump appointee David Weiss.

Some of the Republicans competing to potentially face off with Biden in the 2024 general election wasted no time taking their critique of the plea agreement public.

On his Truth Social platform, Trump on Tuesday said “the corrupt Biden DOJ just cleared up hundreds of years of criminal liability by giving Hunter Biden a mere ‘traffic ticket.’

Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy tweeted Tuesday that “it’s no accident that the farcical Hunter Biden ‘plea deal’ comes right after the Trump indictment,” calling it “the perfect fig leaf to pretend that ‘no one is above the law,’ while absolutely putting certain people above the law.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in a tweet, also decried the “sweetheart deal” and said that, were Biden “not connected to the elite DC class he would have been put in jail a long time ago.”

Asked about the plea deal during a Tuesday night Fox News town hall, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina called perceptions of inequality in the justice system “dangerous” and implored voters “to thank God” for congressional Republicans’ ongoing inquiry into the president’s son.

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Associated Press writers Lindsey Whitehurst, Colleen Long and Nomaan Merchant in Washington contributed to this report.

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