Hunter Biden Says His Pardon Was 'Not Fair' to the Country

So Hunter Biden sat down with BBC Newsnight, and he basically admitted something a lot of people have been saying since December 2024: the pardon his dad gave him wasn't a good look for the country. In a wide-ranging BBC interview, Hunter Biden acknowledged that the pardon he received from his father was 'not fair' or good for the country. When Paddy O'Connell pressed him on whether it was good for the Constitution, the American people, or his dad's legacy, Hunter didn't dodge — he called himself "the most privileged person there is" and admitted the pardon was "not good" for the American people, the Constitution, or his father's legacy.

Here's the backstory if you need a refresher: Joe Biden spent months, even years, publicly promising he would never use his presidential powers to help his son escape prosecution. Then, weeks before leaving office in December 2024, he did exactly that — granting Hunter a full, unconditional pardon covering his federal gun conviction, a tax case he'd pled guilty to, and any federal offense committed between 2014 and 2024. At the time, Biden defended it by saying his son had been "selectively and unfairly prosecuted."

So why is Hunter admitting this now? He's not exactly apologizing — he's explaining. He argued that his father acted out of fear that he'd become a target for retaliation once Trump took office, and pointed out he was "the only one in the world that could have gotten what I got from the only person in the world who could give it, my father." In other words: yeah, it was special treatment, but wouldn't you take it too if your dad could give it to you? He also shot down the idea that he and his father secretly plotted the pardon beforehand, saying those kinds of conversations "would not become public."

The interview wasn't just about the pardon, though. Hunter got emotional talking about his father's health, revealing that Joe Biden's prostate cancer has spread and metastasized into his bones, calling it "very painful" and "very debilitating." He also opened up about the depths of his past addiction — at his worst, he said he was drinking almost a gallon of vodka a day and smoking crack roughly every 15 minutes, calling it "hell on earth."

Why should you care? This matters because it's a rare moment of a political insider publicly conceding that a controversial use of presidential power — one that arguably eroded trust in how justice gets applied to the powerful versus everyone else — really was as bad as critics said. It's also a window into how families at the very top of politics wrestle with the same messy stuff regular families do: addiction, illness, and hard choices made out of love that come with real consequences.