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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PUEBLO, Colo. (AP) — President Joe Biden used a backdrop of the world’s largest facility for wind tower manufacturing to sharpen his criticism of Republicans Wednesday, saying the company’s expansion validates an environmental agenda his political opponents want to undo.

The company that Biden visited, CS Wind, is on the home turf of Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who has described the president’s climate policies as “a massive failure.”

“Did you all know that you’re part of a massive failure?” Biden said to the workers and local officials gathered for his speech as he touted hundreds of new jobs fueled by tax incentives for clean energy initiatives. “None of that sounds like a massive failure to me. How about you?”

Biden’s rebuttal to Boebert was fresh evidence of the Democratic president’s intention to more aggressively push back against what he calls “MAGA Republicans.” He has been struggling with low approval ratings, and Democrats are anxious for him to gain ground politically ahead of a likely rematch against Donald Trump next year.

Boebert, who has cultivated a national reputation as a right-flank insurgent, taunted Biden from Washington, where she said, “I hope there’s not a silver alert that goes out for him” during his trip. The alerts can be sent for missing elderly people with dementia.

Pueblo, a city of about 110,000 south of Denver, is one of the anchors of Colorado’s sprawling 3rd Congressional District, which covers more ground than Pennsylvania. Boebert won her seat in 2020 and barely held on to it during the 2022 midterms.

Democrats are eyeing it as one of their top pickup opportunities as they aim to retake control of the U.S. House of Representatives, which is narrowly controlled by Republicans. Boebert suggested, “Joe Biden coming to my district probably helps me win reelection.”

She recently suffered an embarrassing episode when she was kicked out of a musical production of “Beetlejuice,” where she was spotted vaping. She faces a likely rematch against Democratic candidate Adam Frisch.

During his speech in Pueblo, Biden rejected criticisms that his policies are a form of socialism.

“My plan is rooted in what has always worked best for this country: Investing in America. Investing in Americans,” Biden said, putting his hand on the shoulder of a worker wearing a bright yellow safety vest.

Biden was originally scheduled to visit Pueblo on Oct. 16, but the trip was postponed so he could remain in Washington to focus on the conflict in the Middle East. Two days later he went on a last-minute trip to Israel to show support for the country after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.

CS Wind is undergoing a $200 million expansion that is expected to create 850 jobs by 2026 with help from the tax benefits in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which included hundreds of billions of dollars of financial incentives.

In addition, a new analysis from the Treasury Department said clean energy investments have mostly flowed to communities with below-average wages and above-average child poverty. The White House said the data indicated that Biden’s policies are expanding economic opportunity.

Biden arrived in Colorado on Tuesday after attending a memorial service in Atlanta for Rosalynn Carter, the former first lady and wife of former President Jimmy Carter. He spoke at a Tuesday night fundraiser in Denver, where he said Trump and Republicans want to abandon his administration’s efforts.

“We’re now investing in America,” he said.

Biden in recent weeks has been taking an increasingly confrontational stance toward Republicans. For example, during a White House event focused on supply chains on Monday, he unleashed a broad critique.

“They want to go back to the bad old days, when corporations looked around the world to find the cheapest labor they could find, to send the jobs overseas, and then import the products back to the United States,” he said.

Biden also said Republicans want to cut Social Security and Medicare, benefits that are crucial for many elderly Americans.

“They just don’t give up,” he said. “But guess what: We won’t let these things happen.”

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