MSNBC analyst John Heilemann said on Wednesday’s episode of “Morning Joe” that Republicans “sound like morons” when they describe Hunter Biden’s plea bargain as a “sweetheart deal.”
Hunter was charged by Trump-appointed U.S. attorney David Weiss with illegally possessing a handgun while on drugs in 2018 and with failing to pay federal taxes in 2017 and 2018. The president’s son has agreed to plead guilty to the tax misdemeanors and entered a probation agreement for the gun charge. He is unlikely to serve any jail time.
Several prominent conservatives, including Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy have ripped the agreement as a “sweetheart deal,” arguing Hunter got off easy.
Host Joe Scarborough began by saying that legal experts he’s spoken to believe Hunter was only charged because he was a Biden but that his plea deal was generous for the same reason.
Heilemann responded by arguing that former President Donald Trump “would never have” kept a Biden-appointed prosecutor in office to investigate his child if the roles were reversed.
“Can you imagine? Can you imagine an Obama-appointed prosecutor looking into one of the Trump kids, when, if Trump won the presidency and Trump say, ‘You know what, on the matters of both substance and perception, I’m going to leave this Obama appointed prosecutor in to look at Don Jr. because I just want to make sure that everyone has full faith in the legal system and it not being politicized. It’s, it’s like a hallucinatory fantasy that that could ever happen,” Heilemann said. (RELATED: ‘Clearly His Son Did Something Wrong’: ABC Reporter Throws Cold Water On Biden’s Claim Hunter Was Innocent)
“And yet, that’s what Joe Biden did,” Heilemann continued. “And now all of these same Republicans who want to take this up, they want to figure out some way to pivot away from Donald Trump’s legal woes. They focus on this and say, ‘Oh my God! Two-tiered standard of justice. He got a sweetheart deal!’ And you’re like, guys, I mean, you’re just – you just sound like morons when you say these things. You could say a lot of things about this, but not that.”
Co-host Mika Brzezinski then argued that Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, worked in the White House, which was allegedly a conflict of interest.