Shall we play a game of pick the real criminal? Come on, it will be fun. On the one hand, we have a seventy-seven-year-old man, a former president and a billionaire, whose Gollum-like greed caused him to hoard various boxes of classified documents which he should have returned to the proper authorities. He, or his associates, also fudged various business records possibly to cover up “hush money” payments he made to a porn star. Oh, and he had a massive tantrum about losing an election, tried to overturn the result and his shenanigans caused some of his supporters to breach the Capitol building in Washington on January 6, 2021.
On the other, we have a fifty-three-year-old man, the multi-millionaire son of a president, a recovering crack addict with a fondness for prostitutes, waving guns around, sleeping with his late brother’s widow and making amateur pornography. He used his father’s name and political influence to launch an investment fund that cut deals with shady foreign actors — possibly enriching his father, the then vice-president, in the process. He also got absurdly well-paid for sitting on the board of a Ukrainian energy company at a time when daddy was supposed to be conducting American diplomacy in the country. After falling from grace, he reinvented himself as a painter and now flogs his godawful paintings to unknown buyers for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So — who do you chose? Who would you throw in jail? Donald J. Trump, the prez, or Robert “Hunter” Biden, the princeling?
How you answer will probably depend on your political leanings. A lot of Democrats and independents believe that Trump is a direct threat to democracy and therefore locking him up is in the national interest. At the same time, plenty of Republicans and independents think it highly suspicious that Hunter Biden seems to have just escaped with the judicial equivalent of a slap on the wrist — despite the fact he appears to be guilty of quite serious criminality.
Hunter has reached a “tentative agreement” with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two minor tax charges and a gun misdemeanor. And that’s it. Hunter’s legal team declared the case against their client “resolved.” The Republican House Oversight Committee, which has been looking into Hunter’s murky dealings, takes a very different view.
Committee chairman James Comer vowed that Biden Junior’s “sweetheart plea deal” will not stop his investigation into what he regards as the First Family’s “pattern of corruption, influence peddling and possibly bribery.”
Trump supporters are crying “double standards” and it’s easy to see their point. Last week, the Department of Justice issued thirty-seven federal charges against Donald Trump for his having held on to state secrets. The majority of the charges relate to the Espionage Act, any one of which could mean Trump spends the rest of his life in jail. Hunter will almost certainly escape incarceration.
Of course, Hunter isn’t running for re-election and Donald Trump is, so right-wing “whataboutery” only goes so far. A lot of voters will look at Joe Biden and his errant son and feel only compassion. “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father,” says the Old Testament. “Neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.” Moreover, the New Testament parable of the prodigal son and the redemptive power of a father’s love still holds sway over American hearts and minds.
The Bidens have suffered a lot, too, which generates more sympathy. Biden, who lost his wife and daughter to a car crash and his other son Beau to brain cancer, has for decades spoken movingly about his familial ordeals. Parents, in particular, feel his pain — and resent the glee with which many conservatives comment on Hunter’s ill behavior.
But justice is meant to be blind — not empathetic. And it stinks that Hunter appears to be getting off so lightly, probably because his father happens to be in charge of the Department of Justice. Any other American found guilty of similar crimes could expect a stint behind bars. The excessive clemency for Hunter, and his mysterious new career rebirth as an extremely successful artist, bring to mind the nepotism of the Chinese Communist Party, where the progeny of senior apparatchiks can do whatever they want, consequence free. That runs directly counter to the spirit of the US constitution, which grants all citizens equal protection under the law.
Americans may be surprisingly indulgent of presidential family dynasties — but Hunter Biden, with his embarrassing laptop and the oh-so-many pictures of him naked and high of drugs, is too much. He comes across as a grotty twenty-first century knock-off of Ted Kennedy, the troubled brother of JFK.
Happily for the Bidens, however, much of the media seem unusually uninterested in the sordid details of the president’s son. Journalists justify their prurient obsessions with Trump’s extramarital dalliances by pointing out again that, unlike Hunter, Donald is running for the Oval Office. But that doesn’t quite explain the high-minded gushing that accompanied the publication of the younger Biden’s self-serving memoir, Beautiful Things. Reviewers called it “brave,” “harrowing” and representative of a “new generation of hope.”
Even in our sentimental age, Democratic mawkishness about the perils of addiction can’t quite cover over the dark reality of Hunter’s past — and the possible co-operation between Biden père et fils when it came to get-rich quick schemes with sinister foreign entities.
Republicans in Congress will continue digging into claims that various members of the Biden family, including even dear old Joe, received substantial kickbacks for selling out America’s interests abroad. President Biden likes to brush off such accusations as “malarkey” — one of his favorite words. But it’s more than that. Bank wire records, published by the House Oversight Committee, show a $3 million payment made to a Biden family associate from a Chinese entity just three months after Joe Biden stood down as vice president in 2017.
If Biden Senior dared to hope that Hunter’s plea arrangement might make this highly intriguing story simply go away, he is mistaken. The more telling question is: will most journalists continue to treat the Biden corruption allegations as a Republican tactic to distract from the many charges against Donald Trump? Or, as Republicans “follow the money,” will the evidence become too strong for the majority to ignore? The answer to that could decide whether Joe Biden is still president by the start of the 2025.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK site.
