All In The Family

As Joe pardons Hunter, a brief history of presidential nepotism.

Family Man: Joe Biden hugs his son Hunter and wife Jill during his 2021 inauguration. (Photo by the Defense Department)

America’s first president, George Washington, was not a fan of nepotism.

In fact, upon assuming the presidency, Washington viewed it as a selling point that he had no children — or, as he put it in a draft of his inaugural address, “the Divine Providence hath not seen fit, that my blood should be transmitted or my name perpetuated by the endearing, though sometimes seducing channel of immediate offspring.”

“I have no child for whom I could wish to make a provision,” Washington continued, “no family to build in greatness upon my Country’s ruins.”

That language ended up being scrubbed from his debut speech, but Washington largely practiced what he (planned to) preach. In July 1789, three months into his term, Bushrod Washington — the president’s favorite nephew — wrote to his uncle requesting a plum position as a U.S. Attorney.

Washington responded:

You cannot doubt my wishes to see you appointed to any office of honor or emolument in the new government, to the duties of which you are competent—but however deserving you may be of the one you have suggested, your standing at the bar would not justify my nomination of you as attorney to the Federal district Court in preference of some of the oldest, and most esteemed General Court Lawyers in your own State, who are desirous of this appointment[.]

My political conduct in nominations, even if I was uninfluenced by principle, must be exceedingly circumspect and proof against just criticism, for the eyes of Argus are upon me, and no slip will pass unnoticed that can be improved into a supposed partiality for friends or relations.

On the other hand, Washington’s successor, John Adams, was not childless — he was the father of six. Perhaps accordingly, the country’s second president had a different take on familial favoritism.

Most obviously, he appointed his eldest son as the U.S. ambassador to Prussia, although it should be noted that John Quincy had already built his reputation as a diplomat due to a string of appointments under Washington.

But that wasn’t the only example of Adams’ nepotism. According to the National Constitution Center, he also appointed his brother-in-law as a postmaster and John Quincy’s father-in-law as superintendent of stamps. He even practiced nepotism on Washington’s behalf, giving Bushrod his long-desired federal appointment and naming him to the Supreme Court. Empirically, Bushrod was the least qualified justice up to that point: all of the previous justices had either served as a governor, state judge, or signatory of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.

Beyond being a practicing attorney, Bushrod’s résumé consisted only of eight months as a Virginia state legislator. In a letter before his appointment, Adams lauded Bushrod’s “character,” “merit,” and “abilities” — but also his “name” and “connections,” making it clear how a relatively inexperienced lawyer ended up on the nation’s highest court.

It was as a lame-duck president that Adams made an even more unsavory appointment, giving his son-in-law, William Stephens Smith, a lucrative job at the Port of New York, despite the fact that Smith was known to have had several run-ins with the law due to his shady business practices. Just a year earlier, Adams had written that he had been “disgraced” by Smith’s conduct; still, before leaving office, he set his son-in-law up with an appointment as a final act of protection for his daughter’s family.

America’s earliest controversial experiment with nepotism didn’t end well — Smith was later charged with treason, for using the job Adams had given him to help an old friend carry out an attempted coup in Venezuela — but, from there, it was off to the races. Many successive presidents would fall victim to what Washington called the “sometimes seducing channel of immediate offspring,” bestowing special perks on their children and other relatives.

As the author Rich Rubino notes, Presidents Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, and Millard Fillmore all employed their sons at the White House. Ulysses S. Grant gave jobs to more than 40 of his family members, leading Charles Sumner to call him “the greatest nepotist among presidents.” FDR’s son served essentially as his chief of staff. JFK named his brother as attorney general and his brother-in-law as head of the Peace Corps.

Bill Clinton was the first to issue a nepotistic pardon, wiping away his half-brother Roger’s drug-trafficking conviction on his final day in office. Donald Trump gave both pardons and jobs to relatives, naming his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared as White House advisers and granting a lame-duck pardon to Charles Kushner, Jared’s father, who had previously been convicted of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. (He hired a prostitute to seduce his own brother-in-law, as retaliation for the brother-in-law testifying against him, and then sent the resulting sex tape to his sister.)

And that brings us to the present. This weekend, President-elect Trump announced plans to give jobs to two of his machatunim, naming Massad Boulos (father-in-law to his daughter Tiffany) as an advisor on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs and nominating Charles Kushner (yes, the same Charles Kushner) as U.S. ambassador to France.

And then, on Sunday night, outgoing President Biden pardoned his son Hunter, who was convicted of three felony gun charges in June and pleaded guilty to federal tax evasion charges in September.

“I believe in the justice system,” Biden said in a statement, “but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice — and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.”

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Even by the standards of presidential nepotism, laid out above, the Biden pardon is striking.

Biden was the first president whose child was convicted; now, he is the first president to pardon their own child — meaning presidential offspring are one-for-one in receiving immunity after being found guilty by a jury of their peers. Biden is also the first president to pardon a family member who had not yet served their time in prison: both Roger Clinton and Charles Kushner had already served out their sentences, making their pardons more of a symbolic gesture. Hunter was set to be sentenced on December 13 for the gun charges and on December 16 for the tax counts.

Going further, Biden is certainly the first president to pardon a family member after repeatedly pledging that he wouldn’t. “I am not going to do anything,” Biden said at a June press conference. “I will abide by the jury’s decision.” Asked that week by ABC’s David Muir if he would rule out pardoning his son, Biden replied: “Yes.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has told reporters at least six times that Biden would not pardon his son, including as recently as November. In his 356-word statement on Sunday, Biden did not address the reversal, declining to mention that the pardon was a violation of his repeated promise.

Biden’s pardon of his son was also one of the most sweeping — not just of a presidential family member, but of presidential history. Hunter was granted a “full and unconditional pardon” for any “offenses against the United States” he committed from January 1, 2014 to December 1, 2024 — including, “but not limited to,” the crimes he was charged with.

According to legal experts, the only pardon as comparably broad in U.S. history was given by Gerald Ford to Richard Nixon. Hunter was only charged with crimes dating back to 2016; the extension of the pardon to crimes committed starting in 2014 is revealing. That is the year that Hunter began serving (controversially) on the board of the Ukrainian gas giant Burisma, making the pardon a clear attempt to foreclose against any investigation by the Trump administration into Hunter’s questionable business choices.

Politics has always been a family business — and for Joe Biden, especially so. As his biographer Franklin Foer has written, “for Joe Biden, an Irish American politician who grew up in the age of the Kennedys, family is the atomic unit of politics.” His sister, Valerie Biden Owens, was the manager of every one of Biden’s campaigns — all seven Senate campaigns and two previous presidential bids — until his successful 2020 campaign for the presidency. His late son, Beau, was his heir apparent, groomed from a young age take his father’s place (and eventually to seek the White House).

And, for Biden, politics is also wrapped up in family tragedy: the car crash that killed his wife and daughter, and injured Beau and Hunter, right when he was about to join the Senate (which almost led him to quit politics); Beau’s death, which was the reason why he declined to run for president in 2016 (despite his son’s deathbed urging); Hunter’s mess of problems, which marred the 2020 campaign and haunted Biden throughout his presidency.

Put in that light, Biden’s pardon of his son can be seen as a clash between several of the values that he claimed to broadcast throughout his presidency, and his entire political career. On one side, his cherished love of family. On the other, his promises to be truthful and to remain a neutral steward of the justice system. “No one is above the law,” he has frequently proclaimed throughout his presidency. So much of Biden’s presidency — including his Justice Department’s prosecution of his predecessor — has been premised on this fact.

But his catchphrase about truthfulness makes clear that, even in questions of honesty, family ties run deep: “my word as a Biden,” the president often promises to give. In the end, the “sometimes seducing channel of immediate offspring” proved too much to overcome. In the twilight of his presidency, when his word and his family ran up against each other, it was fealty to the latter that won out.