Hunter Biden’s pardon is very similar to Richard Nixon’s.

President Joe Biden’s grant of clemency on Sunday night — an extraordinary political act with extraordinary legal implications — protects his son from ever facing federal charges for any crimes he may have committed over the last decade.

Pardon experts said they could think of only one other person who had received such a comprehensive presidential pardon in generations: Nixon, who was given a blanket pardon by Gerald Ford in 1974.

“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon crimes that apparently have not even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served as a U.S. pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997 was active. a Justice Department office dedicated to assisting the president in clemency matters.

“Even Trump’s most sweeping pardons were specific in terms of what was pardoned,” Love added.

Joe Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son is deliberately vague. Donald Trump and his allies have long been fixated on the president’s son, and Trump has repeatedly promised to use his second term to investigate and prosecute members of the Biden family. Conservative commentators have engaged in social speculation that Hunter Biden could be charged with bribery, illegal lobbying or other crimes related to his foreign business dealings and drug addiction.

So rather than merely pardoning his son for the gun crimes for which he was convicted and the tax crimes for which he pleaded guilty, the presidential pardon includes all “crimes against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or.” in which he was involved.” from January 1, 2014 to December 1, 2024. This language mirrors the language in Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which referred not only to the Watergate scandal but extended to “all offenses against the United States” that Nixon “committed or may have committed” between January 20, 1969 and August 9, 1974 – exactly during the period of Nixon’s presidency.

The start of the Biden pardon on January 1, 2014 was certainly not chosen by chance: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting from his position on that body.

The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, to be FBI director. When it emerged last year that Hunter Biden was close to a settlement to resolve his legal problems, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later fell through.)

“As a former federal defender and national security prosecutor, this case has done more damage to the justice system than I have ever seen in my life,” Patel said at the time.

Trump will not be able to reverse the pardon when he takes office. And its broad nature means the Trump Justice Department cannot reopen the long-running criminal investigation into the president’s son, said Samuel Morison, a lawyer who focuses on clemency issues and worked for 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney .

Like Love, Morison said the only comparably far-reaching pardon he could think of was the one that went to Nixon.

“It’s an extraordinarily comprehensive grant,” he said.

While the sweeping nature of Hunter Biden’s pardon is nearly unparalleled in modern American history, in another respect it mimics a precedent recently set by Trump himself.

During Trump’s first term, he sometimes justified the pardons of his political allies by saying they were victims of unfair prosecution, a stance that violated norms. Previous presidents, Morison said, have not generally suggested that pardon recipients are victims of miscarriages of justice; Instead, they tended to emphasize that those pardoned had taken responsibility for their actions.

“It’s about maintaining trust in the criminal justice system,” Morison added.

But Trump deviated from that norm – and Joe Biden followed suit on Sunday. He justified the pardon by saying that his son had been unfairly “singled out.”

“I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with it, I also believe that raw politics has infected this process and led to a miscarriage of justice,” the president said in a statement accompanying the pardon.

Trump, for his part, is expected to use the pardon power aggressively when he returns to office. Most notably, he has promised to pardon many of the people convicted for their roles in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. As he criticized Hunter Biden’s pardon Sunday night, Trump again invoked the Jan. 6 defendants, calling them “hostages.”

Morison said Trump will likely invoke Hunter Biden’s pardon when defending his own pardon decisions.

“It justifies what Trump wants to do,” he said. “Well, he wanted to do it anyway. But it gives him some political cover. I think there will probably be some pardons coming on January 6th – at least some, maybe all of them.”