Not a full fortnight after Donald Trump became the first former president to be convicted in criminal court, Hunter Biden became the first son of a sitting president to earn the same honor.
In just three hours, a Wilmington jury found President Joe Biden‘s eldest surviving child guilty on two counts of lying on his Form 4473 when buying a .38 caliber Colt Cobra at a Delaware gun store and of possessing the firearm as an active addict and user of a controlled substance.
Unlike the spurious legal framework of a state prosecutor contorting federal election laws into felony charges against Trump, the case against Hunter Biden, legally speaking, was cut and dry: Despite Hunter Biden’s attempt to appeal to pathos and trigger jury nullification, the evidence was clear across text messages, photos, and witnesses who confirmed that the first son was actively using crack cocaine before, after, and during the time he bought the gun, and Hunter Biden refused to mitigate the risk of hard time with a guilty plea. The trial was as straightforward and as fair as any justice system could have hoped for.
But the special counsel investigation that led to this trial and continues to oversee Hunter Biden’s legal fortune is anything but just, and partisans cheering on the righteous verdict cannot forget the bigger picture.
Without half a decade of relentless and accelerating public pressure from whistleblowers, journalists, and Republican interest groups, Hunter Biden would likely have never seen the inside of a criminal courtroom, let alone the prospect of a prison cell. Although U.S. Attorney David Weiss began clandestinely investigating Hunter Biden in 2018 for pathological failure to pay his tax bills, the Justice Department did everything it could to protect him from criminal comeuppance.
Most importantly, Weiss sat on the most serious evidence that Hunter Biden may have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act and other lobbying prohibitions during his international business dealings. By simply waiting out the clock until the five-year statute of limitations for FARA expired, exactly five years after Hunter Biden resigned from his plumb position on the board of Burisma Holdings and his father announced his third bid for the presidency, Weiss ensured Hunter Biden would never have to answer for the crimes most likely to implicate his father, who Burisma business partner Devon Archer confirmed would routinely call into his son’s professional meetings.
Whistleblower testimony has confirmed that Weiss very nearly succeeded with the same strategy to let the statute of limitations expire on the investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax evasion and illegal handgun purchase. Two IRS whistleblowers confirmed that Weiss’s quiet request to the Biden Justice Department to secure special counsel status to investigate the younger Biden was denied, and although federal prosecutors determined they had the evidence to charge Hunter Biden with tax and gun crimes as early as October 2022, the DOJ was still pushing a sweetheart deal that would have insulated him from all future criminal charges, including those pertaining to his corrupt business practices and international solicitation of sex workers possibly trafficked, as late as July 2023. It was only when Judge Maryellen Noreika pushed the DOJ to admit the deal would do as much that it imploded, with the district judge blasting it as “unconstitutional” and “not worth the paper it is printed on.”
As a nonviolent offender whose only previous proven crime was teenage drug possession, Hunter Biden could have still submitted a guilty plea and expressed contrition to mitigate the odds of ever seeing the inside of a prison cell, but instead, he stood firm, maintaining his innocence despite evidence from an entire laptop, multiple ex-mistresses, neglected daughters, and an emotionally abused ex-wife proving otherwise. And even if this trial followed the law as written, the system that very nearly succeeded in protecting Hunter Biden still has not done things by the book. Noreika admitted as such when Hunter Biden tried again to skirt justice with an eleventh-hour motion to dismiss.
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In a pretrial motion confirming the trial was going ahead, Noreika conceded that the DOJ’s choice of Weiss as special counsel violated DOJ guidance that a special counsel “shall be selected from outside the United States government” when such a conflict of interest arises. The conflict of interest here, of course, is expecting an employee of Joe Biden to conduct a fair investigation into Joe Biden’s son. As you may recall, when Trump triggered his own special counsel investigation by admitting he fired James Comey because Comey wouldn’t commit to not investigating him, Rod Rosenstein (then the most senior official at the Justice Department) recalled Robert Mueller from retirement to appoint him as special counsel.
Alas, even in a county that turned a councilman into the youngest member of the United States Senate and then voted for him as president by a 37-point margin, a jury could not avoid the inevitable, convicting Hunter Biden for the obvious. And the less salacious years of his tax evasion — crucially after the kickbacks from Kazakhstan and the Kremlin stopped coming, thanks again to Weiss waiting out those statutes of limitations — are up on trial come September. But even though the microcosm of Hunter Biden’s trial was just, it does not mean the prevailing system is such.