The Scene
On Sunday night, John Dean got the news from a friend: President Biden would pardon his wayward son, Hunter, sparing him from prison and any further prosecutions.
Republicans were condemning the decision. Democrats were wringing their hands about the optics, and how Donald Trump might react. Dean had another reaction.
“I was not surprised — and delighted that he had done it,” Dean told Semafor. Biden believed that “raw politics” had infected the prosecution, enough to recant his promise that he would not use presidential clemency power to help his son.
Dean agreed. “I don’t think he lied to the public about what he was going to do,” he said. “I think he changed his mind about what he was going to do.”
In the 51 years since he was fired as Richard Nixon’s White House counsel, and cooperated with the Watergate probe, Dean had become a prominent critic of Republican presidents. He’d condemned Supreme Court decisions that expanded the executive’s powers while shrinking his liabilities. And the Biden-Harris coalition that lost last month included not just Democrats, but scores of frustrated ex-Republicans who believed that Trump threatened the entire American system.
They drifted apart on Sunday night. The pardon divided both Democrats and anti-Trump non-Democrats — some thrilled that Biden had abandoned his party’s commitment to “norms” in the face of a returning president that flouts them, some outraged that he had abandoned the moral high ground that they’ll need for the fights to come.
“Framing it as a selective unfair prosecution against Hunter just totally undercuts any narrative about the rule of law,” said Robert Schwartz, who led super PACs in 2024 that encouraged anti-Trump voters to support Nikki Haley in the GOP primary, than Kamala Harris in the general election. “They do know these are the same arguments Trump used about his legal cases, right?”
The View From Democrats
Biden’s decision rattled his own party, drawing condemnation from some allies in safely blue states.
Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, who briefly ran for the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nomination, wrote on Monday that Biden “put personal interest ahead of duty and further erodes Americans’ faith that the justice system is fair and equal for all.” Vermont Sen. Peter Welch called it “understandable” but “unwise.” Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, the two-time chair of the Senate Democrats’ campaign committee, accused Biden of an “improper” use of power: “It erodes trust in our government, and it emboldens others to bend justice to suit their interests.”
That wasn’t the universal take. Some Democrats, like outgoing DNC chairman Jaime Harrison, praised Biden’s decision without conditions. Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett was on MSNBC within an hour of the announcement, defending Biden on the grounds that Republicans didn’t really care about the facts of Hunter Biden’s case.
“At the end of the day, we know that we have a 34-count convicted felon that is about to walk into the White House,” Crockett said on MSNBC. “For anyone that wants to clutch their pearls now, because he decided he was going to pardon his son, I would say: Take a look in the mirror.”
Few Democrats went on the record to agree with Crockett, and none defended Biden’s decision to issue the pardon after repeatedly saying that he wouldn’t. But she wasn’t alone. Multiple Democrats told Semafor that Trump’s victory had already smashed the norms he was protecting when he said he would respect the legal system and let his son go to prison. One Democratic member of Congress put it this way: At what point are you just a sucker?
The View From Frustrated Conservatives
Biden’s pardon was devastating to some of the ex-Republicans who had supported him to beat Trump. The Bulwark, the most prominent of the conservative exile publications, published a range of opinions on Monday, from a defense of the pardon — “Biden made the correct choice to protect his son against the powerful unfettered vindictiveness that is to come in a few short weeks,” wrote Kim Wehle — to columns and podcasts condemning it.
Former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton, who became a critic after leaving his administration, had refused to vote for either Trump or Harris last month. Biden’s mistake, he told Sky News, was “fortifying” the idea that there were multiple tiers of the justice system; on X, he added that “when Trump pardons the January 6th defendants, he’s going to say I did it because Joe Biden pardoned Hunter.”
But Trump had said during the election that he was likely to pardon Jan. 6 defendants — and briefly mused about pardoning Hunter Biden. Dean said that a second Trump administration, staffed by people like FBI director-designate Kash Patel, was already planning to wage political prosecutions. It would make sense, in that context, for Biden to go beyond Sunday’s action and issue blanket pardons for the people on Trump enemy lists.
“Let Biden give a safe harbor for some of his people who’ve done nothing but follow the process,” Dean said. “He could do it with specific people like Jack Smith and company. He could do it with [Robert] Mueller and company. He could do it with blanket pardons, where you would have a class of people who are just engaging in political behavior, and if Trump went after them, they could say: Hey, this isn’t subject to criminal investigation.”
David’s view
Democrats are in disarray, as usual, but the stakes for most of them are pretty low. As Semafor’s Burgess Everrett put it, “free shots at unpopular outgoing president of your own party don’t come around too often.” Democrats who want their anger at Trump’s next moves to sound credible are starting by denouncing the Biden pardon.
But not every Trump critic needs to run for office. The pardon broke the seal on a discussion liberals have been having for a month: What was the point of being the party of norms?
Biden and Attorney Gen. Merrick Garland had allowed a Trump-ordered probe of the Trump-Russia inquiry to continue; had appointed a special counsel to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents after leaving the vice presidency; had kept on David Weiss, a Trump appointee, and made him a special counsel, to avoid any appearance that the Democrats were trying to impede the Hunter Biden investigations.
None of this was very compelling to voters who heard Trump accuse the Biden DOJ of trying to destroy him. According to exit polling last month, a majority of voters who believed that American democracy was “very threatened” voted for Trump.
That was enormously depressing for Democrats and anti-Trump conservatives. Some of them hoped that Biden would leave office on the high ground, making an Abrahamic sacrifice of his son, making any Trump revenge moves or mass pardons look cheap by comparison. Well, he didn’t.
Room for Disagreement
“The American voting public has told us—over and over—that they DO NOT CARE about our precious norms,” wrote Bulwark editor Jonathan V. Last. “This does not mean that we should not care about norms. We can care for them as a matter of taste, or morality. Or because we believe they are good, right, and true. But practically speaking there is no political incentive structure to enforce them. They will continue to erode irrespective of what you, I, or John Dillinger do.”
Notable
- In Politico, Alex Burns accused Biden of delivering a “parting insult” to voters, “exiting a presidency that he insisted was about saving democracy by delivering an ostentatious vote of no confidence in the institutions that his successor most obviously intends to attack.”