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Bill Clinton said on Wednesday that you “can’t take the politics out of” presidential pardoning decisions as he weighed in on Joe Biden’s recent pardon of his son Hunter Biden.
“I wish he hadn’t said he wasn’t going to do it. I think it does weaken his case,” Clinton said of Joe Biden, who had vowed he wouldn’t pardon his son, who was found guilty in June of illegally owning a gun in 2018 and pleaded guilty in a tax case in September.
Clinton, in remarks to Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit, said the president had “reason to believe” his son would likely face “far stronger, adverse consequences” than the average person.
On Sunday, Biden said in a statement that his son was “unfairly” and selectively prosecuted, adding that he was “singled out” due to his ties to his father. The move by the president has led to bipartisan condemnation in the days since.
Clinton dismissed comparisons of Biden’s pardon to his own 2001 pardon of his half-brother Roger Clinton Jr, who was convicted of cocaine possession and drug trafficking in 1985.
“The real question was, would he ever be able to vote again? Would he ever be able to have normal citizenship responsibilities?” said the former president, who noted that his half-brother had already served a 14-month sentence in federal prison at the time.
He continued, “And I’ve been sort of upset that there’s been almost no discussion about the larger problem, which is, does the pardon system we have work?”
Bill Clinton, who urged Americans to see Biden’s move in a “larger context,” then turned to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ (Democrat, New York) call for the president to also pardon those “in the federal prison system whose lives have been ruined by unjustly aggressive prosecutions for nonviolent offences.”
He said that Biden is “almost certainly right” that his son received “completely different treatments” than he would have otherwise.
But the issue over the pardon, he said, isn’t “way high” on his “hierarchy of things” he’s supposed to be upset about.
Sorkin later asked Clinton if Biden should pardon President-elect Donald Trump in what could be seen as a “balanced” move prior to the change in administrations.
“Well, I do think we should stop trying to criminalise politics,” Clinton said.
He later continued, “Both of them. … And the people like it when they are not going along with it from right to left. On the other hand, you have to ask yourself, if you do this as a blanket thing, is there anything a president could do that he or she someday would get in trouble for?”
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