by Jon Jeter, published on Black Agenda Report, December 4, 2024
As a Senator, Joe Biden pioneered federal laws mandating extreme sentences for possession of crack cocaine and far lesser sentences for possession of cocaine. President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, is viewed as hypocritical to people of color, yet given their experiences is unsurprising.
A Chicano activist in Oakland, California, Al Osorio, said he was appalled but not surprised to hear that President Joe Biden had pardoned his son Hunter Biden on federal tax and gun charges stemming from a period when he was addicted to crack cocaine .
“My first thought regarding Biden was: ‘what about Marcellus Williams?’” Osorio told Black Agenda Report in an interview, recalling the African American man executed by the state of Missouri in September despite the absence of forensic evidence linking him to the murder of a St. Louis woman. “What about Leonard Peltier?” he said of the 80-year-old Native American activist who has been imprisoned since 1976 for allegedly murdering two FBI agents. Osorio added:
“Then I thought ‘wait, these men are (or) were innocent. Hunter is guilty as f*ck. In the words of Brother Fred Hampton, he needs to free ‘em all!. If he’s gonna free the guilty he’s got to open up the gates and pardon ‘em all!”
Biden’s decision to renege on a pledge to let stand his son’s criminal conviction has sparked a nationwide conversation about white privilege and the rank hypocrisy of a criminal justice system that is rigged against ordinary defendants, African Americans and people of color most of all.
In September, the younger Biden pleaded guilty in Los Angeles federal court to a nine-count indictment that alleged he evaded the payment of $1.4 million in taxes by falsifying records between 2016 and 2019 and failing to file a return in 2018. In June, jurors in Delaware found Hunter Biden guilty of three felony counts for lying on a federal firearms application. He was scheduled for sentencing in Los Angeles later this month and faced up to 17 years in federal prison although sentencing experts said he was unlikely to serve more than three years.
By extending clemency, President Biden spared his son any prison time for the crimes for which he was convicted, as well as any other federal offenses he may have committed between 2014 through 2024 in an apparent attempt to preempt prosecutions by the incoming Trump administration.
Legal experts say the scope of Biden’s pardon is unprecedented, “with the closest being Gerald Ford’s 1974 pardon of Richard M. Nixon after Nixon resigned post-Watergate,” wrote the Washington Post.
Ford pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed from 1969 to 1974.
Said Osorio: “How can you pardon him for things he hasn’t been charged with?”
Biden defended the pardon, saying that the charges against his son were motivated by partisan politics. But in the days since the administration announced the clemency, there has been an eruption of withering broadsides from a wide-range of critics, from conservatives demanding pardons for the January 6 Capitol Hill assailants to borrowers demanding that their student debts be forgiven, and perhaps most vocally, African Americans and Latinos.
As a U.S. senator, Biden authored the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act which mandated a five-year minimum sentence for trafficking in 500g of powder cocaine or 5g of crack cocaine which is more associated with African Americans. Research has shown that there is no chemical difference between crack and powder cocaine yet the disparity has only been lowered, from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1, rather than abolished. Hours after Biden announced the pardon, one African American man posted online a song by the slain rapper Tupac Shakur–who denied the sexual assault charges that he was convicted of–White Man’z World , while an African American woman posted on social media:
“MEMO TO BLACK DEMOCRAT SUPPORTERS: Biden just pardoned his crackhead, gun toting, tax evading, junkie ass son for doing THE SAME DAMNED THING THAT HE LOCKED BLACK YOUTH UP FOR DOING!
Wrote another African American in response:
“I think about my Grandson who has done his base sentence. He’s still, locked up(over 8 years). . . . He locked up off under Biden’s strikes. Everything you said about this Peck a Wood Is true…
And yet another wrote:
The only question is WHEN WILL BLACK PP TIRE OF PLAYING BUFFOONS for the demoncRatic party?
The White House can only pardon defendants convicted of federal crimes but many posts on social media have questioned why neither he nor his Vice-President Kamala Harris used their bully pulpit to appeal for clemency–or at the very least a new trial–for African Americans such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted in 1981 for the murder of a white Philadelphia police officer; Jamil al-Amin–formerly H. Rap Brown–who was convicted of killing a white, Atlanta-area police officer in 2000; and Marcellus Williams, who was executed in September for the 1998 stabbing murder of Felicia Gayle in her St. Louis home.
In each of those cases, there exists exculpatory evidence. Despite a mountain of forensic evidence left at Gayle’s home, for instance, none of it implicated Williams. He was executed solely on the word of two witnesses: a jailhouse snitch who had recently been diagnosed with HIV and expressed a keen interest in the reward money offered by Gayle’s husband, and Williams’ former girlfriend, who may herself have been involved in Gayle’s murder.
Moreover, many trial lawyers have noted that Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to tax evasion on the day that his trial was scheduled to begin. That is highly unusual, they said–guilty pleas typically are part of an agreement brokered before the trial–and suggests that Biden knew that his father planned to pardon him, despite repeated assurances that he would not.
Compounding matters even more is that Hunter Biden’s drug addiction is linked to a broader narrative of influence peddling while the elder Biden was Obama’s Vice-President. Despite no experience in the energy sector, Hunter Biden was appointed to the board of a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma. While Democrats have complained that Trump and his fellow Republicans have invented claims that Hunter used his political connections to benefit a foreign company, he did write at least one letter to the U.S. Ambassador in Italy seeking assistance in landing a lucrative contract, according to the New York Times which wrote:
“This is a Ukrainian company and, purely to protect ourselves, U.S.G. should not be actively advocating with the government of Italy without the company going through the D.O.C. Advocacy Center,” the official wrote. Those acronyms refer to the United States government and a Department of Commerce program that supports American companies that seek business with foreign governments.”
Osorio and others say that while Biden’s pardon of his son represents white hypocrisy at its worst, African Americans and Latinos have largely made a mental note of it and simply kept it moving. So precarious is daily life in America’s cities today that most people of color are simply too preoccupied with getting through the day to pay much attention to the latest political scandal in the nation’s capital.
*Featured Image: U.S. President Joe Biden hugs son Hunter Biden after addressing the nation from the Oval Office of the White House on July 24, 2024 in Washington, DC. The president addressed reasons for abruptly ending his run for a second term after initially rejecting calls from some top Democrats to do so, and outlined what he hopes to accomplish in his remaining months in office. (Photo by Evan Vucci-Pool/Getty Images)
Jon Jeter is a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, Jon Jeter is the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Dark Days and Bright Nights in Obama’s Postracial America. His work can be found on Patreon as well as Black Republic Media .