Fewer than four days after a Manhattan jury shattered centuries of precedent in convicting a former president — and the opposition party’s current presidential nominee — on 34 felony counts, another criminal trial is rattling Donald Trump‘s competitor. In another first in the nation’s history, Hunter Biden has become the first son of a sitting president to undergo a criminal trial.
While both these trials have shaken up the 2024 campaign, with Trump quite literally still silenced by gag orders and Joe Biden reportedly distraught over his son’s legal woes, the trials on the merits could not be any more different, and the favorable proceedings leading to the first son’s criminal comeuppance only highlight the fundamental injustice of the nonsense show trial in New York.
Both Trump and the younger Biden face judges appointed by politicians of the opposite party, but the similarities end there. Hunter Biden’s judge, Maryellen Noreika, specialized in patent law and donated to both Democrats and Republicans in sparing amounts — $1,000 to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid and $2,500 to Mitt Romney’s in 2012 — before she was nominated by Trump as a judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware in 2017. Noreika was highly regarded enough across both sides of the aisle that the Senate confirmed her via a voice vote, a choice likely made by Trump because the Senate’s “blue slip” rule would have allowed the chamber’s Democratic home state delegates to have blocked the nomination unilaterally if they had opposed Noreika. Unlike Noreika, whose scant political activities ended upon her federal career, Juan Merchan directly violated New York law in continuing to make political donations even after joining the New York State Supreme Court. Merchan did not recuse himself from Trump’s trial despite donating to Biden’s 2020 election bid, as well as a group dedicated to “resisting … Donald Trump’s radical right-wing legacy.”
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And whereas the charges against Trump constitute a novel contortion and congealing of state and federal law, the case against Hunter Biden is straightforward to the point of being commonplace. In Trump’s trial, a state prosecutor upgraded records falsification misdemeanors to felonies, did so well outside the two-year statute of limitations, and charged federal election laws as predicate crimes. Compare that to the banal argument that Hunter Biden violated federal law when he knowingly lied on his Form 4473 when purchasing a firearm and purchased a firearm as an active cocaine addict. While lying on a Form 4473 — made a cornerstone of federal background checks thanks to a 1993 bill spearheaded by then-Sen. Joe Biden — isn’t always punished by the law, federal prosecutors did proceed with criminal cases against a majority of the 478 referrals made for alleged lies on Form 4473 in 2019.
Most stark is the difference between the pretrial posture toward Trump and Hunter Biden. Whereas the prosecutors trying to keep Trump out of a second term in the White House seem to have coordinated their refusal to negotiate a plea deal that would be appropriate for a defendant who has never been indicted, let alone found guilty of, committing a crime before last year, the federal Department of Justice bent over backward not just to insulate Hunter Biden from the crimes in this current case, but also any potential future crimes related to his overseas business dealings and arguable FARA violations. His father’s Justice Department almost got away with it too, even as Hunter Biden has repeatedly rubbed shoulders with Attorney General Merrick Garland and appeared in campaign merchandise with the president and at the White House. If anything, Noreika’s crackdown on such a favorable deal should provide the public the greatest reassurance that at least within this Delaware courtroom, if not the rest of the federal judiciary, Hunter Biden is receiving the sort of fair trial that all Americans — including presidents both loved and loathed — deserve.