A former top adviser to President Biden slammed Hunter Biden’s pardon earlier this month, arguing that it amounted to an “attack on our judicial system.”
Anita Dunn, a longtime Biden ally who served as his senior adviser for communications, indicated that she supported the decision to pardon the 54-year-old first son but not for the reasons the president used to justify it.
“I absolutely agree with the president’s decision here. I do not agree with the way it was done. I don’t agree with the timing and I don’t agree, frankly, with the attack on our judicial system,” Dunn said in remarks at the New York Times’ annual DealBook Summit posted on Wednesday.
Dunn argued that Hunter “deserves” the pardon but that “the argument and sort of the rationale” for it don’t pass muster.
“The argument is one that I think many observers are concerned about,” the former White House official added. “A president who ran to restore the rule of law, who has upheld the rule of law, who has really defended the rule of law kind of saying, ‘Well, maybe not right now.’”
In his announcement last week, Biden, 82, said he pardoned Hunter because he was being “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted” for federal gun and tax crimes.
A Delaware jury convicted Hunter Biden in June of three felony charges after he lied on a federal gun purchase form in 2018 about his addiction to crack cocaine.
In September, the first son also pleaded guilty to nine tax charges — including three felonies — for dodging $1.4 million in payments to the IRS while spending extravagantly on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing,” and other personal items.
The president’s sweeping pardon applies for any offenses committed — or possibly committed — by Hunter between Jan. 1, 2014, and Dec. 1, 2024.
It followed several vehement denials from White House officials and Biden himself that a pardon would be issued to Hunter.
Dunn suggested that White House officials were “not part of this process” and that the Biden family and defense lawyers came to the conclusion that a pardon for Hunter was necessary.
“Had this pardon been done at the end of the term, in the context of compassion, the way many pardons will be done, I am sure, and many commutations will be done, I think would have been a different story,” she said.
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