WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies sought to delegitimize criminal investigations into his actions, declaring that Democrats “weaponized” the judicial system. That claim only intensified after a jury convicted Trump last month of 34 felonies in a hush money case.
In promoting this narrative, they tended to ignore a strange fact: the President Joe Biden did not stop the Justice Department’s investigation into his own son. On Tuesday, the contradiction worsened when a jury convicted Biden Hunter of three felony charges for lying about his drug use when he purchased a gun in 2018.
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The verdict did not satisfy Republicans, who downplayed the result and continued to insist that Democrats had turned the criminal justice system into their partisan tool. But under enormous political pressure, 12 jurors in both cases appear to have taken their work seriously, evaluating the evidence and handing down convictions. The system seemed to work more or less as it should.
In fact, it can be argued that both Trump’s hush money case and Hunter Biden’s gun case were affected by politics. Both could be characterized as relatively marginal – despite the abundant evidence supporting the accusations – cases that prosecutors might not have bothered to present if the defendants were nobody. But it was not in either side’s interest to defend this point.
Instead, Democrats lined up after Hunter Biden’s conviction to show how much they respect the criminal justice system, often explicitly pointing out that they were not criticizing the case as prosecutorial overreach. Despite Republican complaints that Trump’s trial is a corrupt sham, they argued, politically prominent people from both parties who commit crimes are convicted.
“The divide here is stunning and is a great reminder that one political party remains committed to the rule of law and the other does not — it’s that simple,” Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said during a hearing. Tuesday.
McGovern added: “Republicans simply cannot wrap their heads around the idea that their presidential candidate, their presumptive nominee, is a convicted felon. This is not the result of a sham lawsuit or some grand conspiracy by the Biden administration.”
Republicans, in turn, downplayed the importance of the prosecutors’ persuasive effort in a jury that found the president’s son guilty of three crimes. The case was led by a Trump appointee, David C. Weiss, whom Attorney General Merrick Garland retained to lead the investigation and eventually appointed a special counsel.
Rep. James R. Comer, R-Ky., chairman of the House Oversight Committee, briefly praised the verdict before reiterating his baseless claims that Joe Biden was involved in a bribery scheme.
“Today’s verdict is a step toward accountability, but until the Department of Justice investigates everyone involved” in the alleged scheme, Comer said in a statement, “it will be clear that department officials will continue to cover for” the president.
After the verdict, Biden expressed personal support for his son, but said in a statement that he accepted the outcome of the case. He also referred to an interview with ABC News last week in which he said he would not use his official powers to pardon his son if he were convicted.
“As I also said last week, I will accept the outcome of this case and continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal,” Biden said.
But Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for the Trump campaign, said in a statement that the trial of the president’s son was “nothing more than a distraction” from what she alleged without evidence were the Biden family’s “true crimes.”
In downplaying the outcome, some Republicans also emphasized that Weiss nearly reached what they characterized as a “sweetheart” plea deal last year with Hunter Biden. The deal would have resolved both the gun issue and separate allegations about his failure to pay taxes for several years during the height of his drug addiction.
The deal fell apart after questions from a federal judge brought to light that the two sides disagreed over whether the deal precluded new charges against Biden on other topics. Weiss then obtained criminal charges in both matters; Hunter Biden is scheduled to stand trial for tax offenses in September.
Other Republicans simply ignored Hunter Biden’s verdict. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who heads the federal government’s subcommittee on arms, declined through a spokesman to comment on the ruling.
Moments after Hunter Biden was convicted, members of the Jordan-led Republican Judiciary Committee team nevertheless announced that they would hold hearings this summer into “the flaws” in New York’s case against Trump. Last month, a jury unanimously concluded that he had falsified business records to cover up a secret payoff to a porn star during the late 2016 election.
The commission also highlighted that it had secured agreements for “public testimony” from the Manhattan district attorney who brought the case against Trump, Alvin L. Bragg, and from Matthew Colangelo, a white-collar prosecutor who participated in the trial. Colangelo was a Biden administration official at the Justice Department before taking a position in Bragg’s office in December 2022.
Democrats, however, took the opportunity to point out that Biden’s Justice Department has also brought criminal charges against members of the president’s party, including Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, who is on trial on corruption-related charges, and the Deputy Henry. Cuellar, of Texas, indicted last month on bribery and money laundering charges.
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the Eating Oversight Committee, emphasized the differences in approach.
At the same hearing as McGovern, he noted that he had “not heard a single Democrat anywhere in the country cry ‘fraud,’ cry ‘fixed,’ cry ‘fraud,’ cry ‘kangaroo court’” in response to Hunter Biden’s federal conviction. , as Republicans did after Trump’s conviction — while pushing a conspiracy theory that the president somehow controlled the state’s case.
“Compare and contrast the difference in reaction between Republicans and Democrats,” Raskin said. “Republicans are attacking our entire justice system and the rule of law because they don’t like the way that case turned out, while the son of the president of the United States is being prosecuted and I don’t hear a single Democrat crying a lot.
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