Can President Trump revoke Hunter Biden’s pardon?

In the final weeks of his term, President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter in the years-long federal criminal case against him for tax evasion and lying on a gun application.

The decision — a stark reversal of Biden’s repeated promises not to intervene on his son’s behalf — prevents Hunter Biden from serving any sentence for the crimes to which he pleaded guilty.

With President-elect Donald Trump scheduled to take office in January, some VERIFY readers texted us asking whether Trump can revoke the pardon.

Can presidential pardons be revoked?

No, presidential pardons cannot be revoked once they are complete.

The Constitution gives the president broad authority to pardon people for federal crimes, and there is no provision in the Constitution or federal law for anyone to revoke a presidential pardon once it has been issued.

There is a gray area: revoking a pardon that has not been officially delivered.

In 1869, outgoing President Andrew Johnson issued a pardon, which new President Ulysses S. Grant soon attempted to revoke.

A federal judge who ruled on the case wrote: “The law undoubtedly states that when a pardon is completed, there is no power to revoke it, just as there is no power to revoke any other completed act.”

But the judge added: “And yet the question remains: When is a pardon complete?”

He concluded that the pardon is not complete until the pardon is actually delivered to the person receiving it or to a person authorized to receive the pardon on his or her behalf.

In this case, the judge ruled, the pardon only came through a series of messengers and was stopped before it could reach the recipient. Therefore it could be revoked.

This precedent was cited as recently as 2008 by President George W. Bush.

In the final weeks of his presidency, Bush pardoned a real estate developer who had pleaded guilty to fraud. When it was revealed that the man’s father had donated thousands of dollars to Republican campaigns, Bush quickly changed his mind to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

According to news reports at the time, Bush’s Justice Department argued that the president should be allowed to revoke the pardon because the recipient “did not receive formal notice of the president’s action” and therefore the pardon was not yet complete.

This means that under current law, President Biden cannot revoke the pardon as long as he ensures it was officially delivered to his son.

VERIFY reached out to the Department of Justice to ask about the modern process for formally serving pardons, but received no response.