How many presidents have pardoned their relatives? It turns out this is a tricky question to answer.
Following Hunter Biden’s pardon by his father, several commentators have looked to precedents — other pardons of relatives. Case in point: Ana Navarro-Cardenas, a commentator who appears on The View and CNN. On X, Navarro-Cardenas cited a pardon granted by President Woodrow Wilson of his brother-in-law Hunter deButts. That was news to me.
The official clemency records search only works for people who’ve applied since 1989, and a page of clemency recipients by president only stretches back to Richard Nixon. Such a pardon would have been controversial, yet it wasn’t mentioned on the bio page in Wilson’s presidential library. Find a Grave suggests Wilson didn’t even have a brother-in-law with that name — it shows nine brothers-in-law, but not our man Hunter deButts. I can’t prove Wilson didn’t pardon a Hunter deButts; I can only tell you that if he did, that person was not his brother-in-law.
Navarro-Cardenas wasn’t the only person posting perplexing pardons. An Esquire article called “A President Shouldn’t Pardon His Son? Hello, Anybody Remember Neil Bush?” was based on the premise that George H.W. Bush pardoned his son Neil; it has since been retracted “due to an error.” The day before its publication, Occupy Democrats’ executive editor Grant Stern tweeted a similar claim that Jimmy Carter pardoned his brother Billy and George H.W. Bush pardoned Neil. As far as I can tell, neither pardon actually occurred.
Where was all this coming from? Well, I don’t know what Stern or Esquire’s source was. But I know Navarro-Cardenas’, because she had a follow-up message for critics: “Take it up with Chat GPT.”
Hey Twitter sleuths, thanks for taking the time to provide context. Take it up with Chat GPT…😂😂😂 https://t.co/4OfMtb09xL pic.twitter.com/TiM2CNkPDw
— Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@ananavarro) December 3, 2024
I did. I asked ChatGPT, and it identified Hunter deButts as the husband of Wilson’s sister Anne. “Woodrow Wilson’s family was quite prominent, and his sister Anne married Hunter deButts, who was a wealthy and socially connected individual from a prominent family,” ChatGPT told me. “Hunter deButts was part of Wilson’s extended family, though he is not as well-remembered in historical accounts as other figures in Wilson’s life.” According to The New York Times, Anne Wilson married a man named George Howe. It is unclear where the name Hunter deButts even came from.
ChatGPT, it turns out, is a woefully bad way to explore the historical record. When I opened it up and asked, “How many US Presidents have pardoned their relatives?” I got one correct answer: Bill Clinton pardoned Roger Clinton, his half-brother. But alongside that, ChatGPT also told me that George H.W. Bush pardoned his son Neil.
I didn’t remember that, and I think about the savings and loan crisis a very normal amount, which is often. (I am well adjusted and pleasant at parties.) But I double-checked using the same process I did for deButts. I went to the official Justice Department page for presidential pardons. Neil Bush wasn’t there. I did a search in the clemency system. Not there, either. Then I went through some newspaper archives and couldn’t find evidence of a pardon. It’s very hard to prove a negative — I suppose it is possible that Neil Bush has a secret pardon somewhere in the White House that none of us have heard about — but I feel fairly convinced that no one pardoned him, least of all his father.
There’s similarly scant information that would point to Jimmy Carter pardoning his brother. Billy Carter’s New York Times obituary makes no mention of a pardon, and neither does The Washington Post’s obit. I asked Stern if his source was ChatGPT and he said “no,” and didn’t specify further where he’d gotten his information. Still, asking ChatGPT if Jimmy Carter pardoned Billy gets an unequivocal “yes.”
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/5/24313222/chatgpt-pardon-biden-bush-esquire
