Hunter Biden's looming sentencing over felony convictions on federal firearms and tax charges is a thing of the past as his father on Sunday broke repeated promises and signed a pardon on his behalf.
President Biden, set to leave office next month, announced the pardon via the White House press office late Sunday.
Hunter, 54, was convicted in a federal court in June on charges of unlawfully possessing a gun as a drug user, lying on the ATF 4473 form when he bought the gun, and then later making a false statement about the information required to be collected by a federally licensed gun dealer. This set him up for up to 25 years in prison and marked him in history as the first child of a sitting U.S. president to be convicted in a criminal trial.
Hunter later pleaded guilty to nine tax charges in September and was facing as many as 17 years in prison at his sentencing, set for Dec. 17.
President Biden soft-shoed the reason why he felt Hunter was due a pardon on the gun charges by saying, "Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form."
Of note, Biden's administration has been "tough on guns" for the past four years, going as far as to start a taxpayer-funded White House-based office of gun control while directing the ATF to drop the hammer on licensed firearms dealers for often minor errors on paperwork. FFLs have been run out of business at an ever-increasing rate, with the agency shifting to a Biden-directed "zero tolerance" mantra.
As detailed by the National Shooting Sports Foundation earlier this year.
ATF revoked 157 federal firearms licenses in 2023, following an inspection. That’s up from 88 licenses revoked in 2022 and five in the last six months of 2021. Reports show that 165 FFLs were able to maintain their licenses following a revocation hearing in 2023. That was up from 83 in 2022 and just one in the last six months of 2021.
“Anyone who is surprised by this decision by President Joe Biden to grant clemency to his son, who was clearly in violation of federal law when he lied on the Form 4473, is either lying or delusional," Mark Oliva, NSSF's public affairs director, told Guns.com on Sunday. "The Biden-Harris administration twisted the authority of the federal government to target the firearm industry for political reasons. President Biden used the levers of government to punish a lawful industry to satisfy the demands of special-interest gun control donors, and now he has unsurprisingly exercised his authority to allow his son to avoid justice. These are among the many reasons voters demanded a change that we in the firearm industry eagerly await on Jan. 20."
Gun rights advocates were dismayed.
"This pardon is an affront to all the people who have been convicted and or served prison time for falsely filling out the same federal form that Hunter Biden did. Especially those who committed a non-violent crime as a young adult and were never told that they lost the right to own a gun and had no intention of lying," Alan Gottlieb told Guns.com in an email Sunday. Gottlieb is chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, a grassroots Second Amendment advocacy organization with some 650,000 members and supporters across the country.
Taxes, Sh-maxes
Likewise, Biden waived away his son's tax issues, saying, "Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given non-criminal resolutions."
This, despite the fact his administration pushed a sweeping $80 billion in additional funding to the IRS, with the end goal of collecting more taxes, especially from "high-income individuals."
Hunter was charged with evading $1.4 million in tax payments and earned as much as $6 million between 2014 and 2016 alone.
President Biden in June promised he would not use his presidential powers to pardon or lessen the sentence that his son Hunter would receive.
“President Biden lied when he said he would not pardon his son Hunter," said Gottlieb. "To use a famous quote from Biden himself, the President is ‘a lying dog face pony soldier’ and sums it all up."
Last month, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre further shot down the possibility of a pardon or clemency for Hunter, saying, "We’ve been asked that question multiple times. Our answer stands, which is no."
And the KJP supercut:
