Bill Clinton Speaks Out on Hunter Biden

Former President Clinton defended President Biden's pardon of his son Wednesday—but he rejected comparisons to his own pardon of his half brother. Clinton, speaking at the DealBook Summit, noted that Roger Clinton had already served his sentence when he pardoned him as he left office in 2001, the Hill reports.

• Roger Clinton was convicted on cocaine charges after he tried to sell the drug to an undercover officer in 1985. "My brother did 14 months in federal prison for something he did when he was 20," Clinton said Wednesday, per Politico. Clinton said questions on his mind were: Would his brother "ever be able to vote again? Will he ever be able to have normal citizenship responsibilities?"

• "I wish he hadn't said he wasn't going to do it," Clinton said of Biden's pardon, per the New York Times. "It does weaken his case." But, he added, Biden "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."
• Politico reports that Clinton "scoffed but didn't deny it" when asked if the pardon had damaged the Democratic Party's argument that it is the party of the rule of law. "We had a lot better record than Republicans did, didn't we? And what good did it do us?" he said. "I mean, nobody believes anybody anymore."
• The Washington Post notes that other presidents have pardoned family members, including Abraham Lincoln, who pardoned his wife's half sister in 1863. Donald Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, his daughter's father-in-law, in 2021. He was no relation, but Lincoln also pardoned Hunter Biden's great-great-great-grandfather in 1864.

(More Hunter Biden stories.)