US President Joe Biden said he would not pardon his son, Hunter Biden, if he is convicted in his criminal trial in Delaware. The president sat down for an interview with ABC News in Normandy, France during a trip in commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the WWII D-Day landings. During the interview, the president was asked if he would accept the outcome of his son’s trial in Wilmington, Delaware, to which he said, “Yes.”
During the interview, Biden said that former President Donald Trump got a “fair trial” and said the “jury spoke”.
The president also said he would not pardon his son if he is convicted, which he has reportedly been saying for months. Biden issued a personal statement on Monday offering support for his son and said he was a father as well as the president.
“I’ve been very clear — the president is not going to pardon his son,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters in December.
Former Republican presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, said on social media that Hunter Biden’s trial is a “smoke screen”, and is “designed to make the prosecution of Trump appear nonpartisan, yet the outcome of the Hunter trial doesn’t matter” because the president “can and will pardon him.”
The trial is on felony charges related to the first son’s efforts to obtain a .38 revolver from a gun shop in 2018 while allegedly battling drug addiction. Prosecutors allege that in October 2018, the president’s son visited StarQuest Shooters & Survival Supply in Wilmington to purchase the gun but say he lied about his drug addiction.
The younger Biden is now facing charges of false statement in purchasing of a firearm, false statement related to information required to be kept by a federal firearms licensed dealer, and possession of a firearm by a person who is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance.
This is the first time that the son of a sitting president has faced a criminal trial.
On Thursday, the widow of Hunter Biden’s late brother, Hallie Biden, testified. Following Beau Biden's death in 2015, Hunter began an affair with Hallie Biden who said she “panicked” when she found a Colt Cobra revolver in Hunter’s vehicle on October 23, 2018. She said she threw it away in a trash can as a result.
Hallie claims that Hunter smoked crack on a “daily” basis or “frequently” during her testimony. However, she told the jury that she did not see Hunter Biden abusing drugs or alcohol for most of the month of October.
Prosecutors said that they will rest their case on Friday and that they have two more witnesses - a DEA drug specialist and an FBI chemist. Meanwhile, the defense counsel said they would call two or three witnesses and would likely rest their case by the end of the day on Monday.
The trial comes on the heels of Trump’s own criminal trial, the conclusion of which found the former president guilty of 34 felonies, making him the first president in US history to be criminally convicted.
Hours before leaving office, Trump himself pardoned 70 people and commuted the sentences of 73 others.
Of the 143 people he excused, his former chief strategist Steve Bannon and his former top fundraiser Elliott Broidy, were on the list. Others he pardoned included those committed of fraud schemes, the illegal use of a disadvantage business enterprise to receive government-funded construction contracts, a Google engineer sentenced for stealing a trade secret, bank fraud over the 2009 collapse of a mortgage company, and the ex-husband of a Fox News host.