Internal Justice Department emails obtained through a public-records request show that Joe Biden's end-of-term clemency grants bypassed the government's own pardon office, forcing career officials to correct errors and answer questions they had never been asked in advance.
The emails, spanning December 2024 through late January 2025, document a pardon process that cut out the Office of the Pardon Attorney, the DOJ division that has vetted presidential clemency decisions for more than 130 years. Officials inside the office scrambled after each round of grants to figure out what the president had done, whom it covered, and how to fix mistakes that had already gone public.
The records were obtained via the Freedom of Information Act by Protect the Public's Trust, a government-accountability organization, and shared with Fox News Digital. They paint a picture of a White House that treated executive clemency less like a solemn constitutional power and more like a last-minute paperwork dump, leaving prosecutors, judges, and victims in the dark.
Biden pardoned his son Hunter on December 1, a full and unconditional pardon issued without any application through the Office of the Pardon Attorney. OPA formally told prosecutors that the pardon "was not processed via application through our Office." Hunter Biden had not yet been sentenced and never would be.
The confusion started immediately. The next day, Senior Deputy Pardon Attorney Rosalind Sargent-Burns contacted prosecutors to correct an earlier notice that had incorrectly described Hunter Biden as receiving the pardon "after completion of sentence." Sargent-Burns said the phrase "was included in error" and apologized.
The California federal court handling Hunter Biden's case added another layer of disorder. The court stated that the defense-submitted copy of the pardon lacked authentication and had not been received from the appropriate executive agency. It took until December 6 for then-Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer to write in an internal email that the authentication matter appeared settled: "I think this is now resolved."
When a DOJ public affairs official flagged a planned Politico report characterizing OPA as having been "taken by surprise" by the Hunter Biden pardon, Oyer did not push back. She confirmed the characterization was accurate: "I'm curious about the sourcing on #1, but it's accurate."
A representative for Oyer told Fox News Digital that she reiterated her public comments about not being consulted over "certain clemency grants at the end of the Biden administration, including the pardon of Hunter Biden, which she believes was a misuse of the pardon power."
Eleven days after the Hunter Biden pardon, Biden commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 people. DOJ told Fox News Digital that clemency officials did not conduct individualized review of most of these recipients' offenses or case histories. The department said the Bureau of Prisons had previously assessed the recipients before placing them on home confinement under the CARES Act, the pandemic-era law that allowed early release, and that this prior assessment substituted for the traditional pardon-office vetting.
The distinction matters. The pardon office exists to investigate each case, weigh the facts, consult prosecutors and victims, and give the president a recommendation. Skipping that process meant no one at DOJ independently evaluated whether these individuals deserved clemency on the merits.
U.S. District Judge Daniel Hovland of North Dakota reviewed more than a dozen commutations in cases from his court and found the process deeply troubling. On December 18, Hovland sent an email, copied to numerous North Dakota news organizations, demanding an explanation from the Office of the Pardon Attorney.
Hovland stated plainly what had happened in his courtroom:
"None of the federal prosecutors, victims, or myself as the sentencing judge were ever contacted about these commutations beforehand, not even a telephone call."
He asked how the cases had been investigated, why the sentences were commuted, and why nobody with direct knowledge of the cases had been consulted. Hovland also questioned the validity of several pardons and highlighted two recipients who had defrauded more than 60 farmers and agricultural businesses of $11.4 million and a bank of $28.5 million. None of the drug-trafficking commutations he reviewed, Hovland said, involved low-level, nonviolent drug offenders.
The next morning, Senior Deputy Pardon Attorney Sargent-Burns forwarded Hovland's email to Oyer and asked whether further action should be taken. Oyer's response was two words and a sigh: "SIGH. Thanks for letting me know."
DOJ could find no record of ever responding to Judge Hovland's request for an explanation.
Biden's December 23 commutations covered federal death-row inmates. Internal emails show that even the notification process was compressed to the last possible moment. On the morning of December 22, Bradley Weinsheimer, an official in the Deputy Attorney General's Office, emailed Oyer that he was "awaiting clearance to start making capital case USA notifications." Minutes later, he wrote: "Starting notifications now."
Within hours, Weinsheimer reported back: "All USAs now have been notified. Pushback by a couple, but all were appreciative of the call." The U.S. attorneys who had prosecuted these capital cases learned about the commutations roughly a day before the public announcement.
Biden's final and largest clemency action came on January 17, three days before leaving office, covering roughly 2,490 recipients. Deputy Pardon Attorney Kira Gillespie acknowledged the scope of the problem in an internal email:
"Many of the cases that were granted commutation on January 17 were not vetted through our office, and so the data we had available was not reviewed as carefully as we would ordinarily hope it to be."
The Wall Street Journal had previously reported that only 258 of the roughly 2,490 recipients had been recommended by DOJ. The White House included some individuals DOJ had specifically rejected while leaving out hundreds the department had recommended.
The consequences of skipping normal vetting surfaced almost immediately. On January 28, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Maya Song of the Eastern District of Virginia contacted OPA after a court raised a question about the commutation of Christopher Damon Spencer, described as a career offender convicted in a series of crack-cocaine trafficking cases. Spencer appeared on Biden's clemency list alongside the docket number for a 2003 case, but he also had a separate 2011 case carrying a 235-month sentence. Song needed to know whether the commutation applied to both.
Gillespie replied that applying the commutation to both docket numbers was the "most sensible reading" and apologized for the confusion. The pardon office was interpreting the president's own clemency grants after the fact, because no one had worked through the details beforehand.
Margaret Love, a former Pardon Attorney, told Fox News Digital that the emails confirmed a fundamental break from how clemency has traditionally worked:
"The OPA email indicates that the names of the final clemency recipients did not come through the regular pardon process where they would have been vetted by Justice Department professionals. That would be unprecedented in my experience, at least for any president other than President Trump, who also does not use the regular process."
Love went further, pointing to the secrecy that surrounded the selection of recipients:
"While the clemency process is always somewhat opaque as far as the public is concerned, this process seems to have been secret even from the responsible staff at the Justice Department. Where did the cases come from, and how were they selected? I don't know that and evidently neither did the staff in the pardon office."
The Biden White House had publicly assured Americans the president took clemency "very, very seriously," in the words of then-press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and that cases were presented to the president by his team for a final decision. The internal emails tell a different story, one in which the president's own Justice Department was left to clean up after announcements it had no hand in shaping.
A DOJ official attributed the post-grant errors to "the Biden White House failing to provide the department complete and timely information about the commutations," which forced DOJ personnel to "identify affected individuals and provide notice on extremely short timelines." DOJ also indicated that presidents of both parties have exercised clemency authority without consulting the department, a point that, while legally accurate, does not explain the scale of the breakdown these emails document.
Former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares put it bluntly: "The process didn't match the public sales pitch." He added: "There is a Grand Canyon gap between the public description and the internal reality."
Alexa Moutevelis, communications director for Protect the Public's Trust, said the emails revealed a pattern across every round of Biden's clemency grants:
"This paints a troubling picture of a pardon process driven by politics and haste rather than the careful deliberation such extraordinary acts of executive clemency demand. The Justice Department pardon office's own emails show the final Biden auto-pen blitz was so clumsy and rushed that the chaos extended even to the most high-profile and controversial of all: his own son, Hunter."
The disorder documented in these emails arrives at a moment when the Justice Department is already under intense institutional strain. Breitbart reported that more than 230 lawyers, agents, and other employees have been fired in the past year under Attorney General Pam Bondi, with over 6,400 total departures from a department of roughly 108,000 employees. Peter Keisler, a senior official in the George W. Bush Justice Department, called the scale of departures "completely unprecedented." The combination of Biden-era procedural breakdown and ongoing personnel upheaval leaves a department that has been battered from both directions, first by a White House that ignored its own experts, then by a transition that has cost it thousands of experienced staff.
Oyer herself, in an email to a DOJ public affairs official, noted that presidents have relied on the Office of the Pardon Attorney for more than 130 years for "neutral advice and expertise." Biden chose not to. The emails show what happens when a president treats clemency as a political errand instead of a constitutional responsibility, prosecutors left uninformed, judges left unanswered, victims left unconsidered, and a pardon office left to guess what the president meant.
A government that cannot explain its own decisions to the judges who issued the original sentences is not exercising mercy. It is exercising carelessness, and expecting everyone else to sort out the mess.
