[Editor’s note: Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s masterpiece contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
How do you tell Hunter Biden’s lawyers apart from his prosecutors?
That was the confusing question that Judge Maryellen Noreika had to grapple with while unpacking a plea deal in which prosecutors buried an agreement that gave Hunter immunity from prosecution that had been written to avoid judicial scrutiny. Why would prosecutors write a plea deal for Hunter that one of them admitted to Judge Noreika had no precedent?
The rejected plea deal was unprecedented because prosecutors and defense attorneys were unprecedentedly working for the same team. But that’s what happens when the Justice Department pretends to be investigating the president’s son with his dad’s reelection on the line.
The Hunter Biden plea deal was part of a package in which the DOJ and the FBI stonewalled Congress and are trying to send Devon Archer, Hunter’s closest pal, to prison ahead of his congressional testimony in which he was scheduled to accuse Joe Biden of taking part in conversations with Hunter’s business partners while serving as vice president.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer called this “obstruction of justice” and denounced “the lengths to which the Biden legal team has gone to try to intimidate our witnesses, to coordinate with the DOJ and certainly to coordinate with the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee to encourage people not to cooperate with our investigation.”
United States v. Biden is a farce because they’re one and the same. The United States of America is currently run by Biden’s dad. The relationship isn’t antagonistic. Beyond ideological allegiances, a whole echelon of Justice Department personnel have bet their careers on the ascension of Democrat political candidates who then appoint transition team members whose pals are their former bosses. When a Hillary or a Joe Biden enters the White House, they all move up a few steps closer to a lucrative position they can use as a springboard to partner in a prestigious D.C. law firm, score a top security consulting position or run for public office.
If Biden loses in 2024, a bunch of DOJ people will have to hold off on that lake house, the extended trip to Europe and the move to a D.C. bedroom community. That’s why the Hunter Biden investigation was never anything more than performative. Everyone wanted to be seen going through the motion, but no one wanted to risk actually winning. Performative bureaucracy is a pantomime in which everyone appears to have done their job but nothing has gotten done. This routine infuriates ordinary citizens who watch it happen when they spend two years waiting for a construction permit, an appointment at the DMV or the outcome of a federal investigation.
The IRS whistleblowers were sidelined because they almost ruined the show by trying to do things even after they were told repeatedly that their job was to run out the clock. The FBI, which was moving full speed ahead in going after Trump or non-violent pro-life protesters, ran out the clock on the Hunter Biden investigation. Armed with evidence of a host of crimes that would have sent any ordinary person away long enough to become a grandfather, the combined defense team and prosecution teamed up to write up an extensive blank check for Hunter.
Judge Noreika’s objection, much like Durham’s, is procedural, but the problem isn’t just that the DOJ violated proper protocol in going after Trump or that it violated the correct procedures in cover up for Hunter Biden, it’s that the Department of Justice has become a political entity.
The procedural violations are symptoms of systemic political corruption.
Critics suspect that figures like Devon Archer or Gal Luft are targeted because they have damaging information about Hunter Biden. And Hunter Biden is protected because he’s the president’s son and anything he says has the potential to bring down his father and his party.
Hunter Biden has become too big to fall because his father, a formerly small-time hack, now carries a party and an ideology on his shaking shoulders. Anyone who threatens Hunter also threatens the ideological project of the leftists who placed their bets on Biden for a second term. And beyond them lies a vast career bureaucracy that also depends on Hunter staying free.
Parties and regimes often crack up over such petty corruption, but what’s cracking up here is the DOJ. The Justice Department has become a corrupt institution in which it alternately ignores and pursues charges of mishandling classified documents based on the party of the presidential candidate, in which it subjects everything from obstruction of justice and FARA violations to gun charges and prostitution to the same political test. While enemies of the party can be tried for anything, members of their party and their kin can commit any crime in the world and walk away.
Hunter Biden is personally insignificant, yet he has become a powerful symbol of a corrupt system. What began with the DOJ acting to protect Hillary Clinton and her aides has now escalated to covering for the entire Biden family. How far is that going to go? Is the DOJ going to become a family law firm for Joe Biden’s brother or for every Biden family member receiving money from the complex web of shell companies surrounding the family’s foreign enterprises?
How many bananas are there in the Biden banana republic? How many plantations? How many acres? If Hunter Biden had run over someone while going 170 mph through a residential neighborhood in Arlington, as he photographed himself doing, would the local cops have busted him or carefully bagged up his crack pipe for the FBI to take away as material evidence in some unrelated case that never sees the light of day? What if he had hit someone important?
Questions like these would have once seemed absurd but are now highly relevant. In a corrupt justice system all we can do is explore the limits of the corruption. How much Hunter could get away with is a stress test of how much corruption his father and the whole clan can do. The Lewinsky case was insignificant but it was a test of whether the rules applied. (They did not.) It’s hard to think of a case where the rules, large or small, have since applied to Clinton associates, accomplices, successors and members of his party.
What began as selective neglect has escalated into affirmative cover-ups. The son of a president doesn’t just expect to get a pass, but for prosecutors to come out and lie to a judge.
At the end of George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ describing the descent into Communism, “the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” At Hunter Biden’s plea deal, the judge looked around but was unable to say which of the pigs covering for a presidential crackhead were his lawyers and which were the government prosecutors assigned to bring him to justice.