Bill Clinton Says Hunter Pardon Is Not Like That Time He Pardoned His Own Brother

Former President Bill Clinton gave a rambling assessment of President Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden — and argued that it was not at all the same as the pardon he’d issued to his brother, Roger Clinton.

The former president joined host Andrew Ross Sorkin on the stage at the 2024 Dealbook Summit, where the first question focused on the Hunter Biden pardon and whether or not it was going to do any lasting damage to the Democratic Party.

WATCH:

Bill Clinton takes umbrage with the comparison between his pardon of his brother and Joe Biden's pardon of Hunter, because Bill's brother served his full sentence in prison:
"My brother did 14 months in a federal prison."

Sounds like Bill is saying 'Lock him up' pic.twitter.com/Xye8lXRtFG

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) December 5, 2024

“I want to know what you actually think of the pardon, of Biden’s pardon for his son,” Sorkin began. “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.'”

“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,” Clinton began, saying that people needed to look at all the facts and the context before they compared Biden to him and the pardon he issued to his younger brother.

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“Someone said, ‘Well, this is just like when Bill Clinton pardoned his brother,'” Clinton continued. “Well, it’s not. My brother did 14 months in federal prison for something he did when he was 20. And 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. And then they sentenced him and he served 14 months and then he got out.”

Clinton went on to say that his concern was obviously not in protecting his brother from the consequences of his actions, but in assuring him a more normal life going forward. The questions on his mind at the time were: “Will he ever be able to vote again? Will he ever be able to have normal citizenship responsibilities?”

When asked whether Hunter’s pardon — which Biden said repeatedly would never happen — would damage the party when Democrats claimed to be the ones supporting and following the rule of law, Clinton did not seem bothered.

“We had a lot better record than Republicans did, didn’t we?” he asked. “And what good did it do us? I mean, nobody believes anybody anymore.”