In 2016, U.S. Congressman Duncan Hunter was criticized for spending over $1,300 of his campaign funds on Steam. Hunter claimed that one charge was the responsibility of his teenage son and that the other was a fraudulent charge stemming from efforts to block access to Steam.

In the end, the Steam fraud was only the tip of the iceberg: despite their own denials, Hunter and his wife were indicted two years later for allegedly misusing $250,000 worth of campaign funds for personal expenses and filing false campaign finance reports to cover it up As noted by the military media outlet Task & Purpose, the expenditures ranged from everyday items like groceries to more than $14,000 for a family trip to Italy.

(It also turns out that the hunters spent more on Steam than originally thought: according to the indictment, the hunters "spent a total of $1,528.68 in campaign funds on Steam Games to pay for video games.")

His wife Margaret, who served as Hunter's campaign manager, pleaded guilty in June 2019 and was sentenced in March 2020 to three years probation and eight months of house arrest. (Earlier this month she filed for divorce.) Hunter himself fought the charges until December 2019, when he reached an agreement to plead guilty to one count of misusing campaign funds; in October 2020, he was sentenced to 11 months' imprisonment beginning January 4, 2021 - the sentence was originally scheduled to begin in May 2020, but COVID -19 was postponed due to the outbreak.

However, he will not ultimately serve time; as reported by NPR, Hunter received a full pardon from outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump. The pardon disclosure document has not yet been posted on the U.S. Department of Justice website, but the White House issued a statement saying the pardon was granted "at the request of many members of Congress." It also suggested that the case against Hunter was mishandled, arguing that the crimes to which Hunter pleaded guilty "could have been handled as a civil case through the Federal Election Commission."

Hunter's pardon was one of 15 pardons and commutations that President Trump issued on December 22. The other "full pardons" were for two former Border Patrol agents convicted of illegally killing Mexican drug smugglers in 2005 and attempting to cover it up (their sentences were commuted by former President George W. Bush in 2009), a former Trump campaign official who lied during an FBI investigation into his campaign's ties to Russia a former foreign policy adviser who admitted to lying during an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia; and four former Blackwater mercenaries who massacred 17 Iraqi civilians and wounded more than 20 others in 2007. However, no pardon was granted to Margaret Hunter.