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Hi, this is Catherine from Arlington, Virginia.

After over 200 hours of study, many late nights, and countless milligrams of caffeine,

I'm about to take my environmental PE exam as the last step in the years-long process

of getting licensed as a professional engineer.

This podcast was recorded at 108 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday, December 2nd, 2024.

Things may have changed by the time you listen, but hopefully I will have passed and will

never have to take another eight-hour exam again. Enjoy the show.

Congratulations. Eight hours is a long exam. Yeah. What a nice coda to the year.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover

the Justice Department. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent.

And today on the show, outgoing president Joe Biden has issued a pardon to his son, Hunter Biden.

Ryan, before we get into what happens next and what this all means, I wonder if you can just walk us through.

First of all, what is a pardon?

And why is it that presidents have the ability to do this? So the presidential pardon power is

rooted in the Constitution. It's a core presidential power. It only applies to federal

crimes, not crimes at the state level. And there are several forms of presidential clemency,

but two are the most

common. One of them is commutation. That's when a president reduces a sentence partially.

It could also wipe it out totally, but doesn't erase the criminal conviction from the books.

The other is the one that we're talking about here, and that's a pardon. It's basically presidential

...