How Washington reacted to the Hunter Biden pardon: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.

In today’s edition, our reporters go through President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son — and the part that’s particularly rankling fellow Democrats. Plus, senior politics editor Mark Murray looks at three big polling trends that defined 2024.

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Some Democrats bristle at Biden’s pardon justification

By Carol E. Lee, Sarah Fitzpatrick, Gary Grumbach and Dareh Gregorian

It’s not just that President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter. It’s how he did it that’s upsetting some fellow Democrats.

The president issued a “full and unconditional pardon” for any offenses Hunter Biden has “committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024,” according to a White House statement issued Sunday night.

The pardon comes after Biden repeatedly said he would not use his executive authority to pardon his son or commute his son’s sentence. And in his statement, Biden said he was granting the pardon because his son had been “selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.”

That, as Democratic Rep. Greg Stanton of Arizona told NBC News’ “Meet the Press Now” on Monday, plays against years of core Democratic Party policy positioning — and into the way President-elect Donald Trump and his allies have described his investigations and prosecutions.

“I’m pretty angry because it’s going to be incredibly important that political leaders of both parties stand up for the independence of the Department of Justice, stand up to these attacks suggesting that the Department of Justice has become politicized and needs to be dismantled or the FBI needs to be dismantled,” Stanton said. (See more from Stanton below.)

Trump, in response to Biden’s action, raised the issue of the defendants and people convicted of violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when he was pushing to overturn the 2020 election results. 

“Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Special counsel David Weiss’s office on Monday appeared to push back on Biden’s claim that its prosecutions of Hunter Biden were politically motivated, calling such allegations “baseless.” In a court filing challenging Hunter Biden’s request to have his California tax and fraud indictment dismissed in light of his father’s pardon, Weiss noted that a number of judges had already rejected the younger Biden’s claims of vindictive prosecution.

While a handful of members of Congress have spoken out about the pardon so far, one notable group has been silent — those Democrats seen as early possibilities to run for president in 2028. Watch this space going forward.

Three big takeaways from the 2024 polls

By Mark Murray

Beyond signaling that the 2024 presidential election was competitive and uncertain, the polls nailed the political atmospherics that shaped the contest — and could continue to shape politics going forward. Here are some of the biggest lessons we learned.

Most broadly, the polls accurately described an electorate that mostly saw the nation headed in the wrong direction, with an incumbent president, Joe Biden, whose approval rating was stuck in the low 40s — a historical danger zone for the party controlling the White House.

As it turns out, the NBC News Exit Poll found 73% of voters saying they were angry or dissatisfied with the country’s direction, and only 40% approved of Biden’s job performance.

Additionally, the polls foretold many of the key demographic trends that ended up defining the 2024 election, including Trump’s gains with Latino voters.

The NBC News/Telemundo/CNBC Latino poll was among the surveys showing those Trump gains well before the election. Many polls also caught on early to Biden’s and Democrats’ relative struggles with young voters, particularly some men, compared with other recent elections.

But the polls, including the NBC News survey, erred in overstating the size of the gender gap when it came to Harris’ support among female voters and Trump’s backing among men.

According to the exit poll, Harris won female voters by 8 points, and Trump won men by 13 points — a 21-point gender gap that was consistent with recent presidential elections. That was smaller than the 30-point-plus gender gap that the NBC News poll had been showing.

The big thing to keep in mind with the gender gap: For a look at how and where it’s widening, combine it with education and race instead. Harris won white women with college degrees by 16 points, and Trump won white men without college degrees by 40 points — a whopping 56-point gap in the margin between those two different groups.

Read more here →

That’s all from the Politics Desk for now. If you have feedback — likes or dislikes — email us at politicsnewsletter@nbcuni.com

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