Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter Biden on Sunday night, a reversal for the president who repeatedly said he would not use his executive authority to pardon his son or commute his sentence.

"I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice — and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision," Biden said in his statement.

Hunter Biden was scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 12 for his conviction on federal gun charges. He also was set to be sentenced Dec. 16 in a separate criminal case in which he pleaded guilty to federal tax evasion charges in September.

The president issued a "full and unconditional pardon" for any offenses Hunter Biden has “committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024," according to the White House statement. 

A senior White House official told NBC News, which was the first to report on the pardon decision, that the president decided over the weekend to grant his son a pardon and began to inform his senior aides Sunday. 

The president also spoke about his son's struggles with addiction in his statement Sunday night, saying that his political opponents were trying to "break" him by going after Hunter Biden.

"No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong," Biden said in his statement. "There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough."

In a separate statement, Hunter Biden said he had "admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction — mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport."

Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race in July, but a pardon before last month's election also could have generated political blowback on the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris after she took his place on the Democratic ticket.

Together, the 12 counts Hunter Biden is convicted of or has pleaded guilty to carry a maximum prison sentence of 42 years. But the maximum sentences typically are not given out for convictions of these crimes. The Justice Department has said, for instance, that while the tax charges carry a maximum sentence of 17 years, sentences are typically less than that.

Asked in an interview in June whether he would rule out a pardon for his son, Biden answered, “Yes.”