Former President Bill Clinton recalled the pardon of his brother, Roger Clinton, during an interview on Wednesday, while talking about President Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter Biden.
“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 said during an interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit, adding that people should look at all the facts.
Clinton then said he read that it was comparable to when he pardoned his half brother, Roger Clinton, when he was president. Roger Clinton went to prison in the 1980s for cocaine charges, according to the Washington Post, and had served his sentence before Clinton pardoned him.
Roger was arrested for drunk driving nearly a month after receiving a pardon.
According to the New York Times, “Mr. Clinton said that he did not believe the two situations were analogous, even as he stressed that presidential pardons are often complicated and politically fraught.”
The ex-president contrasted, “My brother did 14 months in federal prison for something he did when he was 20, and I supported it, and 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 they sentenced him, and then he served 14 months, and then he got out. The real question was, would he ever be able to vote again? Would he ever be able to have normal citizenship responsibilities?”