Hunter Biden now calls Merrick Garland's appointment as attorney general his father's "greatest mistake," a striking claim from the man who received the broadest presidential pardon in modern memory before Joe Biden left office.
Appearing Sunday on the "I've Had It" podcast hosted by Jennifer Welch, Hunter Biden directed sustained fire at the former attorney general, accusing Garland of failing to prosecute Donald Trump over the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot while simultaneously pursuing a years-long investigation into Hunter Biden himself. The younger Biden framed Garland's tenure as a catastrophic error in judgment that, in his telling, paved the way for the political landscape Democrats now face.
The podcast appearance is the latest in a growing string of public outings for Hunter Biden, who has spent recent months building a media profile that looks less like a man lying low after a pardon and more like a political figure workshopping a grievance tour. The remarks raise an obvious question: How does a man pardoned for any offense he "committed or may have committed" over a full decade get to cast himself as the victim of an overzealous Justice Department?
Hunter Biden laid out what he described as the reasoning behind his father's selection of Garland. President Obama had nominated Garland to the Supreme Court during his second term, but Senate Republicans refused to hold hearings. Joe Biden, according to his son, felt an obligation to make Garland whole by offering him the attorney general post, a decision Hunter Biden now frames as sentimental and politically naive.
Welch put it more bluntly on the podcast. She told her guest that Obama had picked "this milquetoast candidate," and that Joe Biden, as "a decent man," had "played integrity politics" by elevating Garland. In her telling, Garland arrived at the Justice Department and immediately began worrying about offending Republicans rather than enforcing the law aggressively.
"Obama picks this milquetoast candidate. Your dad is a decent man, felt bad about what happened to Merrick Garland. And he played integrity politics. Like, well, 'I'm going to make him whole and make him attorney general.' And then Merrick Garland gets there, and he's like, 'Well, we can't upset these crusty White Republicans.'"
Hunter Biden did not push back on that characterization. He agreed.
His own assessment was only slightly more measured. He told Welch he was trying to remove his "personal feelings" from the equation, then delivered a verdict that was entirely personal.
"My take is this, and removing myself from it as much as I can, my personal feelings, is the single greatest mistake of my father's administration was the leadership of Merrick Garland."
He called it a "massive mistake", twice, by the end of the exchange.
The core of Hunter Biden's complaint is that Garland moved too cautiously, or not at all, on prosecuting Trump for the January 6 Capitol breach. He described the riot in vivid terms, asking rhetorically whether Garland had watched the same events the rest of the country saw.
"[I]f Merrick Garland had started a completely 100% [legitimate investigation] rather than thinking like let's not fan the flames... did you not watch what I watched? Did you not see the people storming the Capitol of the United States of America, beating cops and running congressmen and senators literally out of the building?"
He went further, claiming that the Capitol breach was "a concerted and planned effort" that began "all the way back from the day before the election when they knew they were going." That is Hunter Biden's characterization, not a finding of any court or investigative body cited in the Fox News report.
Hunter Biden has been making the rounds on podcasts and media platforms with increasing frequency. He recently launched a Substack to tell his story on his own terms, and he sat for a widely discussed interview with Candace Owens that covered ground far removed from his legal troubles.
What Hunter Biden did not dwell on during the podcast is the extraordinary legal shelter his father provided him before leaving office. The Department of Justice under Garland had investigated Hunter Biden since 2018, a probe that began during Trump's first term, over tax charges and the unlawful purchase of a firearm.
During the final weeks of his presidency, Joe Biden pardoned his son for any offense "he has committed or may have committed" from January 1, 2014, through December 1, 2024. That is not a pardon for a specific crime after a conviction. It is a blanket grant of immunity covering a full decade, written broadly enough to foreclose any future federal prosecution for conduct within that window.
Hunter Biden acknowledged on the podcast that "the buck has to stop with my dad" regarding the Garland appointment, since Joe Biden was the president who chose him. But he quickly pivoted to praise his father for maintaining a strict separation between the White House and the Justice Department, a separation he framed as noble and constitutional.
"He played by the Constitution and the tradition that the president will never, you know, particularly since Nixon, involve himself in any decision-making as relates to anything at the Department of Justice. So, I guarantee you there was a division between church and state there."
That claim sits uneasily beside the pardon itself. Joe Biden may not have intervened in DOJ decision-making during Garland's tenure, but he used the most powerful tool available to a president, the pardon power, to erase the consequences of whatever those decisions produced. Hunter Biden's recent legal victories, including a $1.7 million defamation judgment, suggest he is not exactly a man the system has mistreated.
The podcast host did not pretend to be neutral. Welch opened the Garland discussion by telling Hunter Biden directly what angered her about the former attorney general's tenure.
"One of the things that pisses me off is the Merrick Garland DOJ and the not prosecuting of Trump. And that they prosecuted you."
She described Garland as a "moderate" and framed the broader question as one of "capitulation by Democrats", a party, in her view, that kept choosing restraint when the moment demanded force. Hunter Biden agreed with the premise and built on it.
The exchange reveals something about where a slice of the Democratic base has landed. The complaint is not that the Justice Department was too aggressive or too political. The complaint is that it was not political enough, that Garland should have treated the prosecution of a political opponent as a first-order priority and that his failure to do so fast enough constitutes the Biden administration's defining error.
Hunter Biden's own experience with the justice system has taken several turns since the pardon. He recently confirmed that a social media post triggered the end of his Secret Service protection, and a California court ordered his former lawyer to pay $50,000 after a harassment case against a former Trump aide collapsed.
Hunter Biden spent the interview arguing that Merrick Garland was too timid to hold powerful people accountable. He argued that Garland's caution enabled the political conditions Democrats now face. And he argued that his father's only real mistake was trusting the wrong man to run the Justice Department.
But the same Justice Department he now condemns as weak is the one that investigated him for eight years. The same attorney general he calls a catastrophic failure is the one who oversaw that probe. And the man who ended it all, with a pardon so broad it covered offenses that may not even be publicly known, was his own father.
Hunter Biden wants to be both the victim of an unjust prosecution and the critic of a prosecutor who was too soft. He wants the DOJ to have been tougher on Trump and gentler on him. He wants credit for his father's constitutional restraint and a pass on the pardon that made restraint irrelevant.
That is not a serious argument about justice. It is a complaint that the system did not pick the right targets.
