Bill Clinton issued a response to comparisons of Hunter Biden’s pardon to Clinton’s half-brother’s pardon.
“This was not on my plan originally, but I thought — you know what? Everybody, we were out in that hallway, we’re all talking about that, and I said, ‘I’m going to ask the president first,” host of the New York Times DealBook Summit Andrew Ross Sorkin said.
Clinton responded, “Well, I think that the President did have reason to believe that the nature of the offenses involved were likely to produce far stronger adverse consequences for his son than they would for any normal person under the same circumstances.”
He called for “all of you to just look at the facts before you make a judgment and see what they’re talking about and what the context is. Which is because I’m still reading.”
“Somebody said, ‘Well, this is just like when Bill Clinton pardoned his brother.’ Well, it’s not,” the former president continued. “My brother did 14 months in the federal prison for something he did when he was 20. I supported it. He testified, told the truth about what he’d done when he had a drug problem, and helped to bring down a larger enterprise. They sentenced him, and then he served 14 months.”
Clinton pardoned his half-brother, Roger Clinton, during his presidency. His brother had already served time for 1985 drug charges. The former president emphasized that the pardon was meant to restore his brother’s voting rights.
The New York Times emphasized that Clinton “did not believe the two situations were analogous, even as he stressed that presidential pardons are often complicated and politically fraught.”
