As President Joe Biden ran for a second term as president, he repeatedly ruled out pardoning his son Hunter, who pleaded guilty to tax fraud and lying on a gun purchase form. “He was very clear, very open, obviously very clear,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said of one of his many promises on the matter.

Biden expressed his fundamental willingness to abide by the results of the justice system. But by breaking his promise and granting his son a full pardon for any crimes he may have committed over an 11-year period, Biden has revealed that his promise was merely instrumental.

In a defiant statement issued this evening, Biden insisted that his son’s prosecution was selective and unfair. “No reasonable person looking at the facts of Hunter’s cases,” he wrote, “can come to any conclusion other than that Hunter was singled out simply because he is my son — and that is wrong.”

It’s probably true that one of the crimes Hunter Biden is accused of, lying on a firearm procurement form, is one of the things an average citizen probably wouldn’t be charged with. (Hunter confirmed on the form that he was sober, but later admitted that he was addicted.) The other charge, blatant failure to pay millions of dollars in taxes, is routinely brought against people who are not political targets. The fact that it is true that Hunter Biden was more likely to be caught than the average tax cheat is a disgrace to the tax system. (Ironically, it is also an aspect of the system that Joe Biden sought to change by strengthening the IRS’s enforcement capabilities.)

President Biden’s complaint about the higher standards held to his son reflects the perspective of myopic privilege. Crimes committed by family members of powerful officials are far more damaging to public trust than similar crimes committed by anonymous individuals. It is good and right to hold them accountable through strict enforcement of the law.

What the president fails to acknowledge in his self-pitying statement is that Hunter Biden engaged in years of legal but completely inappropriate behavior by running a business based on selling the perception of access to his father. The only asset Hunter had to offer the oligarchs in Ukraine, China and elsewhere was the belief or hope that he could put in a good word for them with his father.

In these cases, Joe Biden defended himself by saying that he didn’t actually give Hunter’s customers anything of value. There is no evidence to the contrary, and extensive Republican efforts to find evidence that Joe shared in the profits from Hunter’s access trading business have been unsuccessful.

But Joe Biden’s defense of Hunter’s influence by emphasizing narrow legality only serves to highlight the hypocrisy of his fatherly indulgence. The black letter of the law was a fence designed to protect Hunter from the consequences of his evil behavior. And when the law itself trapped him, he simply opened a door and walked through – a door that no average American could enter.

The most confusing passage in Biden’s pardon posits an amorphous conspiracy against him by Justice Department prosecutors: “There was an attempt to break Hunter – who has been sober for five and a half years, even in the face of relentless attacks and selective prosecution.” In an attempt to break Hunter , they tried to break me – and there’s no reason to think it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

Are you trying to break Hunter? And his father? For what purpose?

It would be tempting but unfair to draw a simple equation between Joe Biden’s situational ethics and those of his successor. The willingness to evade the rule of law is the basis of Donald Trump’s entire career in business and politics and is not a nepotistic exception. Still, it becomes much more difficult to defend principles when their most famous defenders have blatantly compromised them. With the pardon decision and his stubborn insistence on running for a second term that he failed to win, Biden chose to put his own feelings above defending his country.