Joe Biden should ignore his critics — he did the right thing by granting a pardon to Hunter

Joe Biden did the right thing. For himself, if not for America.

With only weeks to go before a political career that has spanned more than a half-century ends and, at 82 years old, who knows how long before he breathes his last breath, Biden decided to put family before country. I’m not mad at him for doing that. It made sense.

Biden elicited dire predictions by a bevy of pontificating political pundits of a lasting impact on America’s very soul when, on Monday, he unexpectedly granted his son Hunter a pardon for both crimes he has been convicted of committing, or may have committed, between 2014 and 2024. For months during and after he aborted his reelection campaign, Biden said he would not issue his son a pardon. But he did.

That means Hunter Biden will never serve time for the three felony and six misdemeanor tax offenses he pleaded guilty to in September. Those crimes primarily involved failure to pay his taxes on time and using false business deductions to reduce the actual federal taxes he owed. Hunter also won’t serve time for lying on a gun purchase form that he was not illegally using or addicted to drugs.

Even some Democrats argued that Biden’s pardon of his son adds credence to the view of America’s criminal justice system as biased toward the rich and famous. But that is a truth that needs to be hammered into every American’s head until they stop accepting it and force their local, state, and national governments to change it.

In fact, the best example of the inequitable treatment afforded to Americans by the criminal justice system isn’t Hunter Biden, it’s President-elect Donald Trump, who just concluded a textbook lesson in how to hire slick attorneys to manipulate a vulnerable system juiced with sympathetic federal judges he has appointed at every level.

Prosecutors had more success in New York’s state courts, where a civil court jury last year found Trump guilty of sexually assaulting a woman and awarding her $5 million in damages. He also was convicted in New York last year of paying a woman to keep quiet about a sexual encounter to prevent damage to his presidential campaign. His lawyers have asked that the conviction be voided since he is now the president-elect. If they succeed, the credibility of America’s system of jurisprudence will be harmed much more than by Biden’s pardon.

I don’t like what Biden did, but pardoning his son hasn’t lessened my opinion of him. I’ve seen too many politicians I admired do worse to lose my respect during my nearly 50 years as a journalist, including my time offering occasional commentaries such as this one as a retiree. None of those politicians disappointed me more than Chris McNair.

I first met McNair as a child when he was the milkman who left bottles on the doorsteps of apartments in the public housing projects where I grew up in Birmingham, Ala. His wife taught second grade at my elementary school, where his daughter Denise was a student a grade or two ahead of me. Denise was one of the four little girls killed in the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church.

The subsequent public attention that our milkman, who had a college degree, received eventually led to a political career in the Alabama legislature, and then the Jefferson County Commission. McNair also opened a photography studio, and he was publishing a magazine oriented toward Black readers called Down Home, for which I occasionally contributed articles as a freelancer.

I had left Birmingham years before McNair was convicted by a federal jury in 2006 of bribery and conspiracy involving a $3.2 billion construction project to repair the county’s sewer system. After exhausting his appeals, at age 85, he began serving a five-year sentence in 2011. I wrote a column for The Inquirer agreeing with others who urged President Barack Obama to pardon McNair, but he didn’t.

McNair was finally released from prison in 2013 as part of a “compassionate release” program for sick and older inmates. He died in 2019 at age 93. McNair disappointed me because I never thought he would get caught up in the type of corruption that traps too many politicians. His conviction erased all the stature he had gained as someone who climbed from the depths of an unspeakable tragedy wrought by racism to represent both Black and white Alabamians.

Biden’s pardon doesn’t come close to that. He did what many fathers might do to protect an adult child not accused of more heinous crimes. He had already lost two children to premature deaths and almost lost Hunter to drug abuse, so it’s hard to blame him for intervening to keep Hunter out of prison. Sixty-five percent of the U.S. prison population has an active substance abuse problem, and advocates say that treatment options for the incarcerated are scarce.

As for America being jaded by Biden’s pardon, I don’t think so. If Trump’s bad behavior didn’t mean enough for millions to think he’s too shady to be president, they’re not going to be bothered by Hunter not going to prison. Will the pardon tarnish President Biden’s legacy? I see it as more of a footnote. His accomplishments as a senator, vice president, and president should mean much more to history than his succumbing to being a worried parent.

Harold Jackson, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is a former editorial page editor at The Inquirer.