The Memo: Democrats hit Biden for pardon that they see as gift to Trump

President Biden is facing blowback from his own party for his dramatic Sunday evening pardon of his son, Hunter Biden.

A growing chorus of Democrats have raised their voices to object to the president’s action — an action he and his spokespeople had repeatedly stated he would not take.

It’s easy to see why there is such Democratic consternation.

In the eyes of many, the Biden pardon cedes the moral high ground that the president and his party have spent years staking out. It also offers generous leeway to President-elect Trump for his own efforts to bend the justice system to his will.

President Biden’s now-abandoned pledge to not interfere in his son’s cases was couched as a principled stand to maintain the independence of the justice system from political influence.

What are voters to make of that idea, now that it turns out the separation is not so sacrosanct after all?

Biden sought to frame his decision as a corrective to political interference from Republican politicians who had pursued his son. 

“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,” he wrote in his statement announcing the pardon.

But it’s hard to make that argument stick beyond the ranks of the most committed Democratic voters. 

Hunter Biden was convicted in June of lying on a form used to obtain a gun back in 2018. The younger Biden had denied use of illicit drugs while filling out that form — a claim that was a lie, as some tawdry testimony at his trial made clear.

The president’s son also pleaded guilty to a total of nine tax charges — three felonies and six misdemeanors — just before a trial was due to open in Los Angeles in September.

The pardon expunges those convictions — and does so just before the younger Biden was to face sentencing in both cases later this month. It also preemptively absolves him for any other crimes committed between Jan. 1, 2014 and Dec. 1, 2024.

But Democrats are bothered by more than the specifics of Hunter Biden’s misdeeds.

Trump is seeking confirmation for several controversial nominees, including Pam Bondi to be attorney general and Kash Patel to lead the FBI. The Democratic opposition to those nominees has been rooted primarily in the idea that they would use the Justice Department to do Trump’s bidding, afflicting his enemies while coddling his friends.

Back in 2016, Bondi joined the crowd at the Republican National Convention in a chant of “Lock her up” aimed at that year’s Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. She went on to speak in support of Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

Patel, in an interview with Trump’s erstwhile strategist Steve Bannon last year, asserted that a second Trump administration would “go out and find the conspirators — not just in the government but in the media” who had wronged the 45th president. 

He added, “We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

Trump critics will contend that there is a world of difference between what President Biden did and Patel’s rhetoric — or indeed Trump’s own pledge to pardon people convicted of offenses related to the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021.

The problem, however, is that the argument now becomes a matter of degree. Democrats find themselves arguing over shades of gray rather than a black-and-white distinction.

Relatedly, a news agenda that would have been focused on the newly nominated Patel — and fresh allegations of inappropriate conduct around Trump’s nominee for Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth — has instead been taken over by the furor around the Biden pardon.

The number of Democrats criticizing Biden grew steadily Monday.

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) called it “wrong,” while Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) accused Biden of putting his “personal interest ahead of duty” in such a way as to whittle away “Americans’ faith that the justice system is fair and equal for all.”

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), in a CNN interview that was broadly defensive of Biden, nonetheless cited the president’s previous vows not to pardon his son, and said it was “discouraging that he has now gone back on his word on that.”

Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.) framed Biden’s actions as, in part, a gift to Trump, also in a CNN interview. 

“A pardon at this point will be used against, I think, Democrats who were pushing to defend the Department of Justice against politicizing it, which is certainly what President Trump plans to do,” Ivey said.

At a deeper level, such sentiments bespeak a Democratic Party that is ready to move past Biden — not least because some blame him for a series of decisions leading up to this year’s Trump victory.

Specifically, the 82-year-old Biden’s decision to seek a second term in the first place has come under even harsher scrutiny in retrospect. The folly of that choice was exposed in a brutal way by his disastrous performance in his one and only debate with Trump in June. Biden then clung to the nomination for almost a month before stepping aside.

The president also made a number of missteps even in the final stages of Vice President Harris’s campaign, the most memorable being a comment that appeared to call Trump supporters “garbage.” The remark came on the same day as the big speech by Harris at Washington’s Ellipse that was intended to frame her closing argument.

Democrats are looking to the future — not just in terms of the 2026 midterms or the next presidential election, but the pitched battle they expect to wage against the Trump administration.

Biden, in the minds of some, has complicated that fight for his family’s gain.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.

Additional reporting: Emily Brooks and Mychael Schnell.