Liberals coping hard over Hunter Biden’s conviction think they’ve found a silver lining. At least (they argue) this proves we don’t have a two-tiered justice system. All those MAGAts fuming about the Trump verdict will have drop the persecution complex. It doesn’t matter if you’re a former president or the son of a sitting president. Justice is blind.
To which I would respond: give me a break. Any suggestion that these cases are at all comparable should be laughed out of court.
“The last month in our country has been a conversation about application of justice. How high does it go?” @MajorCBS explains how two American juries have now delivered unprecedented verdicts: one for a former president and one for a president’s son. pic.twitter.com/C0TzjLZXGg
— CBS News (@CBSNews) June 11, 2024
Hunter Biden’s conviction is a fluke. At every stage in the process, Hunter’s daddy has done everything he could to make the problem go away. He got his cronies in the intelligence community to dupe Facebook and Twitter into suppressing the evidence of his son’s misconduct. Whistleblowers testified that his Department of Justice pressured investigators to make his tax evasion case go away. Prosecutors put together an absurdly lenient plea deal that would have let Hunter off for his gun crimes without even a wrist slap while giving him a plenary indulgence for any other crimes he may have (read: totally had) committed. (RELATED: Delaware Jury Convicts Hunter Biden On Felony Gun Charges)
Hunter made it almost impossible *not* to send him to jail. One suspects he harbors a self-destructive impulse, as though daring God to impose limits on his charmed life and prove the existence of some moral order in the universe. He obsessively took photos and videos of his sex-guns-and-crack romps. He accepted a lucrative board seat in Ukraine despite transparently having nothing to offer but access to his powerful father. He used his “art career” to run what couldn’t possibly be anything other than a massive influence-peddling operation right out in the open. He even admitted in his memoir to being addicted to crack at the time he bought a gun.
And yet, despite Hunter’s best attempts to go to jail, Scranton Joe almost got him out of it. His sweetheart plea deal fell apart at the very last second only after eagle-eyed Trump appointee Judge Maryellen Noreika realized how insane it was. Hunter walked into court that morning in July 2023 fully believing that he’d won. He was *this* close to getting away with it.
The powers that be did everything they could to make sure this conviction never happened. It’s only thanks to the courage and fortuitous placement of figures like Noreika, prosecutor David Weiss (himself a Republican) and whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler that justice was done. (RELATED: Hunter Biden Allegedly Lied To Congress Multiple Times While Under Oath, New House Committee Docs Show)
Compare that to Trump’s New York “hush money” trial.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg invented a new kind of felony out of thin air. The prosecutors in the Hunter case tried to ignore glaring evidence of an obvious felony.
Bragg campaigned for his job by promising to get Trump. Weiss made no such promise about Hunter.
.@realDonaldTrump was wrongfully convicted by a weaponized justice system.
Trump’s only crime? Daring to protect our future against Joe Biden. @DailyCaller https://t.co/2GoHYCiJBK
— Marsha Blackburn (@VoteMarsha) June 3, 2024
One of the Biden DOJ’s top prosecutors left his job to help Bragg go after Trump. That same federal law enforcement apparatus held up the Hunter Biden investigations at every turn, according to whistleblowers, and also crafted the infamous plea deal that Noreika rejected.
The Trump jury was told they could convict without even agreeing on what the ex-president’s crime was. To let Hunter off, the Delaware jury would have had to believe that, because the first son was not inhaling a lungful of crack smoke at the exact moment he signed the firearm form, he was not “an unlawful user of drugs” at the time. (RELATED: Alan Dershowitz Says ‘Best Thing’ That Could Happen For Trump Is Hunter Biden Acquittal)
In the Trump case, the entire Democratic political and legal machine cooperated across multiple jurisdictions to ram through a conviction against the president’s political rival. And if they hadn’t gotten it in NYC, they’ve given themselves plenty of other chances.
In the Hunter Biden case, that same machine did everything in its power to make sure that the president’s scofflaw son would face zero consequences for his flagrantly felonious behavior. Thanks to a combination of bad luck and bad optics, they failed.
Democrats cheated twice. One time it worked; the other time it didn’t. This, the smug talking heads insist, is evidence of a fair and impartial justice system.
Spare me.
Grayson Quay is an editor at the Daily Caller.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.
