SAUNDERS: Hunter Biden pleads guilty. A pardon should come next.

President Joe Biden has said he will not pardon his son Hunter, who pleaded guilty to nine felony and misdemeanor tax charges Thursday in Los Angeles.

I hope Biden relents on his no-pardon pledge before the younger Biden spends a night behind bars. My guess is that’s the president’s plan — to flip and pardon his son after the Nov. 5 election.

I don’t think it would be good precedent to imprison a president’s son. In this age of perennial political payback, one punishment inflicted on one side ultimately spawns a reciprocal act of reprisal. And it only gets worse.

Look at impeachment. The I-word was nightmare for Bill Clinton in 1998. Trump was impeached twice as president — and still he won his party’s nomination this year.

If Hunter Biden goes to prison, know that family members of Republican politicians will be considered fair game. Democrats, too.

In June, a Delaware jury convicted the president’s son on three felony gun counts. Sentencing for those crimes is scheduled for Nov. 13.

It’s important to note that Hunter has been clean for five years. He no longer is the danger to society he was when he was driving intoxicated, sometimes armed, leaving trails of cocaine and unpaid bills in his wake. He was a menace to society — now he’s just an embarrassment.

I’m no fan of Hunter Biden.

I think he is a complete fraud who sold access to his then-vice president father rather than accept the sort of top 2-percent salary he could have made as a Georgetown and Yale law graduate.

Consider the statement Hunter Biden released Thursday:

“I will not subject my family to more pain, more invasions of privacy and needless embarrassment. For all I have put them through over the years, I can spare them this, and so I have decided to plead guilty,” the son wrote in a publicly released letter.

The president’s son also offered he was done with prosecutors who “were focused not on justice but on dehumanizing me for my actions during my addiction.”

For all his moaning, he’s pleading guilty because he is guilty on the tax charges — just as he was guilty on the gun charges for which he was convicted in June.

Problem: As Special Counsel David Weiss observed, in 2020 the president’s son had regained his sobriety and was paid more than $1.2 million — and he still did not pay off his tax liabilities. He was just greedy.

I should note that 2020 was the year his father was running for president, so you would have thought he’d be on his best behavior.

But then, as POTUS was fond of saying, “My son did nothing wrong.”

In the end, Hunter Biden faces a life sentence being Hunter Biden. And his father won’t be president much longer.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system, I return to the pardon idea. While the 46th president is at it, he might want to consider a pardon for Donald Trump’s criminal charges — election interference and willful retention of classified documents.

Republicans often gripe about “law-fare” — and rightly so. So maybe Trump should make the first move by promising to pardon Hunter Biden if his father fails to do so. Not that anyone expects that to happen.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.