A dark sky had fallen over Nantucket, Mass., on Saturday evening when President Biden left church alongside his family after his final Thanksgiving as president.
Inside a borrowed vacation compound earlier in the week, with its views of the Nantucket Harbor, Mr. Biden had met with his wife, Jill Biden, and his son Hunter Biden to discuss a decision that had tormented him for months. The issue: a pardon that would clear Hunter of years of legal trouble, something the president had repeatedly insisted he would not do.
Support for pardoning Hunter Biden had been building for months within the family, but external forces had more recently weighed on Mr. Biden, who watched warily as President-elect Donald J. Trump picked loyalists for his administration who promised to bring political and legal retribution to Mr. Trump’s enemies.
Mr. Biden had even invited Mr. Trump to the White House, listening without responding as the president-elect aired familiar grievances about the Justice Department — then surprised his host by sympathizing with the Biden family’s own troubles with the department, according to three people briefed on the conversation.
But it was Hunter Biden’s looming sentencings on federal gun and tax charges, scheduled for later this month, that gave Mr. Biden the final push. A pardon was one thing he could do for a troubled son, a recovering addict who he felt had been subjected to years of public pain.
When the president returned to Washington late Saturday evening, he convened a call with several senior aides to tell them about his decision.
“Time to end all of this,” Mr. Biden said, according to a person briefed on the call.
This account of how Mr. Biden came to pardon his son was described by a half dozen people close to the president and his family, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships.
Mr. Biden’s decision has tarnished a storied public legacy that began more than 50 years ago at the hospital bedside of two sons who survived a car crash that killed his first wife and young daughter. Several people close to Mr. Biden said the decision created a conflict between two core identities: the anguished father trying to protect his son, and the president who takes pride in standing on principle.
But those people said that it had long been clear to them which version would eventually win out.
Fears of a Relapse
Mr. Biden had been privately grappling with the decision to pardon his son since shortly after Hunter Biden was convicted on federal gun charges in June, according to several people familiar with his thinking, despite publicly vowing that he would not interfere with a judicial system that had found his son guilty.
As the months ticked by, the president’s mood grew ever darker.
By late July, Mr. Biden had dropped out of the presidential race, reluctantly. In September, Hunter Biden pleaded guilty on the eve of his tax trial in Los Angeles. In November, Vice President Kamala Harris lost the presidential election to Mr. Trump. And Mr. Biden, now an 82-year-old lame-duck, single-term president, had been following the news, watching as Mr. Trump vowed to stock his administration with a vengeful cast of characters who would use the judicial system to punish political opponents.
Hunter Biden’s decision to plead guilty on the tax charges — after a weeklong gun trial in Delaware in June that rehashed the family’s darkest days — had further embittered Mr. Biden and several of his family members, who believed that Hunter was targeted only because of his last name. At that time, the anger within the family pushed the idea of a pardon from the notional to the plausible, according to several people familiar with the president’s thinking.
It was at that point Mr. Biden, who was, among other things, deeply concerned that the pressure of the trials would push his son into a relapse after years of sobriety, began to realize there might not be any way out beyond issuing a pardon. It appears that there was never serious consideration of anything short of a full pardon, such as a commutation of his sentence, they said.
For his part, Hunter Biden was hardly shy about telling the people around him that he wanted — needed — a pardon, although it is unclear how often he had discussed the matter directly with his father before this past week. The president, even before he made the decision to issue a pardon, made it clear that he did not want to see his son serve a single day behind bars.
The Biden family was concerned about a political backlash, but felt that Hunter Biden had earned public good will by enduring two prosecutions.
While both father and son expressed anger over the yearslong effort by Republicans to link Hunter Biden’s questionable foreign business consulting to the president — the unproven “Biden crime family” narrative — they were almost equally contemptuous of the prosecutors who aggressively pursued both cases.
A Family Matter
The endgame was, for the most part, a family matter. The final discussions about pardons excluded senior White House staff, including only the Bidens and defense lawyers. After the decision was made, aides were told to execute their orders, according to a person familiar with the situation.
The statement that followed from Mr. Biden on Sunday offered a window into the mind-set of an aggrieved president who, in the end, could not separate his duty as a father from his half century of principled promises as a politician.
The statement was drafted with help from two aides who have been longtime defenders of the Biden family, including Mike Donilon, Mr. Biden’s chief strategist, who was by the president’s side when he decided to drop out of the race in July. Elizabeth Alexander, the first lady’s communications director, also helped, and the final wording was vetted by Edward N. Siskel, the White House counsel.
But it was Mr. Biden who wrote it, edited it and gave it the final sign-off.
“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong,” Mr. Biden said. “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”
The explosive decision caused an uproar, including from former White House officials and Democrats.
“He’s a tragic victim, in many ways, of playing by the old cautious rules of politics,” said Michael LaRosa, a former press secretary for the first lady, adding that the president and his advisers had “decided to disguise him in a veil of independence and neutrality, when a father can be anything but in this type of persecution of his son.”
Mr. LaRosa added, “The reaction today would be far less jarring, probably even supportive and proud, had Biden been a vocal critic of the partisan investigation into his son from the very beginning.”
Scrambling to Explain
The president’s decision also left current White House officials, some of whom had publicly said Mr. Biden would not issue a pardon for Hunter Biden, scrambling to explain the reversal.
“The president took an action because of how politically infected these cases were and what the political opponents, what his political opponents, were trying to do,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Angola, where Mr. Biden is making a diplomatic trip this week.
Ms. Jean-Pierre took several questions from reporters who challenged the idea that the system had worked unfairly for Hunter Biden, and who asked whether Mr. Biden was now in agreement with Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly claimed that the system has been weaponized against him.
“He said he believes in the Department of Justice,” she said. “He does. He says it in his statement. He believes, he also believes that raw politics infected the process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”
Mr. Biden and his White House have tried to draw a line between how the president was thinking in issuing the pardon and how Mr. Trump views the work of the Justice Department. Mr. Biden has said that he still believes in the integrity of the agency, and that Republican-led partisan politics tainted the process. Mr. Trump has accused the entire system of being weaponized against him.
Behind closed doors, Mr. Biden was said to be influenced by members of his family for months as his thinking on the matter changed, several people around him said. The first lady had been at Hunter Biden’s side as he stood trial in a Delaware court over the summer. She was supportive of the decision to pardon the man she had raised since childhood and whose addiction had challenged and then damaged their family.
“Of course I support the pardon of my son,” she told reporters on Monday as she unveiled holiday decorations at the White House.
John Morgan, a longtime Democratic donor who recently attended a reception for Biden supporters at the White House, said he believed that the president had felt enormous guilt over Hunter Biden’s legal problems, which the Bidens believe were so severe only because he is the president’s son.
“Joe Biden has a deep love for his son and has already lost two children and his first wife,” Mr. Morgan said. “It can’t be defended, only explained. A father’s love is so powerful that he is willing to take the heat that is coming down.”
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