President Joe Biden‘s trip to Angola will allow him to skirt answering questions about his decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden, for at least a few days.
The president issued a pardon for his son late Sunday night after departing Washington, D.C., and the White House‘s guidance doesn’t list any press interactions before his return to the White House on Thursday night.
For months, the president and senior White House officials have maintained that Hunter Biden, who was soon to be sentenced for tax and gun crimes, would receive no special treatment from his father.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre gaggled off-camera with reporters traveling aboard Air Force One on Monday morning, struggling to explain the president’s about-face on the subject.
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Jean-Pierre said that despite publicly committing not to pardon his son, the president has been struggling with the situation but finally came to a decision over the weekend. She repeated the president’s claim that Republicans weaponized the justice system against his son as a means of attacking him directly.
“Hunter was singled out because his last name was Biden because he was the president’s son, that’s what we saw,” she said. “And so the president believed enough is enough, and the president took action, and he also believes that they tried to break his son in order to break him.”
Still, Jean-Pierre refused to provide any details about the timing of the president’s decision or any conversations he might have had with his son.
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When pressed on whether the president’s apparent bald-faced lie regarding his son undercuts the administration’s credibility, Jean-Pierre urged reporters to read the president’s statement on the pardon.
“For my entire career, I have followed a simple principle: just tell the American people the truth,” the president wrote. “They’ll be fair-minded. Here’s the truth: 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 – and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.”
Jean-Pierre suggested that the president would issue a final slate of presidential pardons before leaving office in January.
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You can listen to Jean-Pierre’s comments below.
