About a month before Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential election, he made a firm commitment not to pardon his son Hunter for his conviction on three felony gun charges. In September, Hunter pleaded guilty to three felony tax offenses and six misdemeanor tax offenses, and the White House reaffirmed the president’s intention not to pardon him. Even after Vice President Kamala Harris lost the election to Donald Trump, the White House press secretary insisted Biden would not pardon his son.

On Sunday, the president issued a sweeping pardon that absolved Hunter Biden of any possible federal crimes he might have committed between 2014 and 2024.

At bare minimum, this is an astonishing flip-flop. At worst, the president lied when it was politically expedient to draw a contrast with Trump, who routinely denounced the Justice Department’s criminal cases against him as politically motivated. (Tom Elliott, a conservative journalist, compiled a cringe-inducing video of political pundits and Democratic surrogates praising Biden for upholding the rule of law in refusing to pardon Biden.)

To prove a lie, one needs evidence that Biden intended to pardon his son even when he insisted otherwise. After NBC reported that Biden had been discussing a possible pardon with close aides since June, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre posted on X: “That is false. As the President said last night, he made the decision this weekend.” (Both could be true – he may have discussed a pardon with staff but only decided recently.)

Let’s parse the president’s Sunday statement as part of our assessment.

“Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter. From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.”

Biden slides past his reversal on issuing a pardon and says he “kept his word” on not getting involved in the probe of his son. At the urging of Republicans, the Biden Justice Department retained David Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney investigating Hunter. U.S. attorneys generally step down or are replaced when a different party wins the White House. There is no evidence Biden had any role in the prosecution. But he makes no acknowledgment that he changed his mind on a pardon – typical of a political flip-flop.

In the June exchange above, Biden ignored a question about whether politics had infected the prosecution. Now he says his son was selectively and unfairly prosecuted.

“Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form. Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given noncriminal resolutions. It is clear that Hunter was treated differently.”

Shortly before Biden issued the pardon, Hunter’s legal team issued a 50-page report titled “The Political Prosecutions of Hunter Biden.” The “white paper” included data that backed up the statements about how lying on a gun purchase form or failing to pay taxes in a timely manner usually do not result in felony charges.

But Biden slides past another uncomfortable fact: His son was not an ordinary American. As documented in news reports and court records, he traded on his father’s name to earn millions of dollars from foreign entities in ways that riled State Department officials and crossed ethical boundaries. He was not a target only because he was Biden’s son; he was a target also because he took advantage of being Biden’s son.

“The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election.”

Note that Biden says “oppose my election,” which means he is referring to 2020. He is referencing probes started in November 2019 by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), who dug into Hunter’s business practices, especially in Ukraine, and any possible links to Biden himself. The GOP effort paralleled a House Democratic effort to impeach Trump for his efforts to persuade the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden.

On Jan. 3, 2020, two weeks after Trump was impeached, Attorney General William P. Barr tasked Scott Brady, a U.S. attorney in western Pennsylvania, with vetting material regarding Biden and Ukraine – some of it supplied by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani – for possible distribution to prosecutors who could use a grand jury to investigate further.

But the two cases that resulted in criminal charges began independently of the Ukraine probes. The gun charges date to an incident in 2018 when Hunter’s then-girlfriend threw in a trash can a gun that Hunter had purchased. On the background check form, he checked a box that indicates he is not addicted to drugs. The tax charges started with an unrelated investigation into online payments for sex work. In 2018, a bank flagged Hunter’s payments to sex workers as suspicious, leading IRS investigators to examine other transactions, such as lavish spending on a corporate bank account.

“Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the courtroom – with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases.”

This is an artfully worded sentence, as “unraveled in the courtroom” acknowledges that the judge in the case in 2023 raised questions about the structure of the plea deal, dooming it. The Hunter Biden white paper suggests that a “Republican political backlash” to the plea deal, including scheduling a congressional hearing featuring IRS case agents who investigated Hunter, unnerved prosecutors to such an extent that they jettisoned the deal in the courtroom. Under the plea agreement, Hunter probably would have avoided a prison sentence.

Trump at the time posted on social media: “Weiss is a COWARD, a smaller version of Bill Barr, who never had the courage to do what everyone knows should have been done. He gave out a traffic ticket instead of a death sentence.” He expressed hope the judge would have “the courage and intellect to break up this cesspool of crime.”

Biden is correct that several Republican lawmakers took credit for scuttling the deal, among them Reps. James Comer (Kentucky), Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Jason T. Smith (Missouri).

“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

As noted above, Hunter might not have attracted such scrutiny from Republicans if his businesses did not trade on his father’s name. His late brother, Beau, active in politics, chose a different path.

In this passage, Biden makes a nod to possible additional prosecution under Trump.

The Weiss tax indictment, for instance, cleared Hunter of any malfeasance in 2014 and 2015, saying he “timely filed” his taxes after requesting an extension. Some of his payments from Burisma, a Ukrainian company where he was a board member, initially went to an entity controlled by a business partner. IRS case agents have questioned Weiss’s decision to not prosecute for the 2014 payments, saying Hunter owed nearly $125,000 in taxes. Weiss determined the business partner paid those taxes, but a new Justice Department might have revisited that decision and issued a new indictment.

Speaking to reporters after the pardon was announced, Jean-Pierre said: “He didn’t believe that they would let up. Right? He didn’t think that they would – they would continue to go after his son.”

Biden’s pardon covers Hunter’s full employment with Burisma, which began on May 14, 2014, while Biden was vice president.

“For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: Just tell the American people the truth. They’ll be fair-minded. Here’s the truth: I believe in the justice system, 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.”

The word “truth” is doing a lot of work here. Biden provides little explanation for what has changed since he assured the American public he would not pardon his son. The plea deal fell apart almost a year before Biden made his statement. The prosecutions had been ongoing for years.

The timing of the pardon has short-circuited the filing of sentencing recommendations in the cases, depriving Americans of knowing how much jail time Hunter might have faced.

The Pinocchio Test

If you take the White House’s word, Biden only came to this decision in recent days – even though the statements he marshals in defense of a pardon could have been made back when he firmly stated, twice, that he would not pardon his son.

It’s possible that Trump’s nominations of loyalists at the Justice Department and the FBI might have played a role in changing Biden’s mind, given the president-elect’s vows to take revenge on his political enemies. The White House has only hinted at that possibility.

We can certainly see a good case for a Four-Pinocchio rating. Many pundits have accused Biden of lying. But we have not yet seen evidence that Biden made his statements in June knowing he would eventually reverse course. Many readers might argue that is not necessary, and we can revisit this if more evidence emerges.

At the very least, this is one of the most high-profile flip-flops in recent history. Biden never addresses the fact that he once pledged not to pardon his son – easily meeting our definition of a clear but unacknowledged “flip-flop” from a previously held position.

Accordingly, this earns an upside-down Pinocchio.

Glenn Kessler has reported on domestic and foreign policy for more than four decades.