WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have tried to delegitimize the criminal investigation into his actions by declaring that Democrats have “weaponized” the justice system. That claim only grew stronger after a jury convicted Trump of 34 crimes in a hush-money case last month.
In advancing that narrative, they tend to ignore an inconvenient fact: the president Joe Biden has not halted the Justice Department’s investigation into his own son. The contradiction became even sharper on Tuesday when a jury convicted Hunter Biden of three felonies for lying about his drug use when he bought a gun in 2018.
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The verdict did not satisfy Republicans, who downplayed the outcome and continued to insist that Democrats have made the criminal justice system their partisan tool. But under enormous political pressure, 12 jurors in both cases appear to have taken their work seriously, weighed the evidence and delivered convictions. The system seemed to work more or less as it should.
To be fair, an argument can be made that both Trump’s hush money case and Hunter Biden’s gun case were influenced by politics. Both can be characterized as relatively marginal cases—despite the abundant evidence supporting the charges—cases that prosecutors might not have bothered to bring if the defendants had been nobodies. But it wasn’t in either party’s interest to make that point.
Instead, after Hunter Biden’s conviction, Democrats lined up to show how much they respect the criminal justice system, often explicitly pointing out that they weren’t criticizing the case because the prosecution went too far. Even though Republicans see the Trump trial as a corrupt sham, they argued, politically prominent people from both parties who commit crimes are being convicted.
“The divide here is staggering, and it’s a great reminder that one political party remains committed to the rule of law, while the other is not — it’s that simple,” Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said during a hearing. Tuesday.
McGovern added: “Republicans simply cannot embrace the idea that their presidential candidate, your presumptive candidate, is a convicted felon. That is not the result of a sham trial or a vast conspiracy by the Biden administration.”
Republicans, in turn, downplayed the significance of prosecutors’ persuasiveness to a jury that found the president’s son guilty of three felonies. The case was led by a Trump appointee, David C. Weiss, who appointed Attorney General Merrick Garland to handle the investigation and ultimately appointed a special counsel.
Rep. House Oversight Committee Chairman James R. Comer, R-Ky., offered brief and tepid praise for the verdict before repeating his baseless claims that Joe Biden had been involved in a bribery scheme.
“Today’s verdict is a step toward accountability, but until the Department of Justice investigates all those involved” in the alleged scheme, Comer said in a statement, “it will be clear that Department officials continue to protect the President.” .
After the ruling, Biden expressed personal support for his son but said in a statement that he accepted the outcome of the case. He also referenced an interview with ABC News last week in which he said he would not use his official powers to pardon his son if convicted.
“As I said last week, I will accept the outcome of this case and continue to respect the legal process as Hunter considers an appeal,” Biden said.
But Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, said in a statement that the trial of the president’s son has been “nothing more than a distraction” from what she claimed without evidence were the “real crimes” of the were the Biden family.
In downplaying the outcome, some Republicans also emphasized that Weiss almost struck a deal with Hunter Biden last year, which they characterized as a “sweetheart” plea deal. The agreement would have resolved both the gun issue and separate charges of failing to pay taxes for years during the depths of his drug addiction.
The deal collapsed after questions from a federal judge revealed the two sides disagreed over whether the agreement precludes further charges against Biden on other issues. Weiss subsequently received indictments on both counts; Hunter Biden will go on trial for tax crimes in September.
Other Republicans simply ignored Hunter Biden’s verdict. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who heads a federal government arming subcommittee, declined to comment on the verdict through a spokesman.
Shortly after Hunter Biden was convicted, however, Republican staffers of Jordan’s Judiciary Committee leaders announced they would hold hearings this summer on “the shortcomings” of New York’s case against Trump. Last month, a jury unanimously ruled that he falsified company records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn actor during the 2016 election endgame.
The committee also highlighted that it had reached agreements for “public testimony” by the Manhattan district attorney who brought the case against Trump, Alvin L. Bragg, and for Matthew Colangelo, a white-collar prosecutor who participated in the trial. Colangelo was a Biden administration official at the Justice Department before taking a job in Bragg’s office in December 2022.
However, Democrats took the opportunity to point out that Biden’s Justice Department has also filed 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 Rep. Henry. Cuellar, of Texas, indicted last month on charges of bribery and money laundering.
Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on Comer’s Oversight Committee, highlighted the differences in approach.
At the same hearing as McGovern, he noted that he had “not heard a single Democrat anywhere in the country shout ‘fraud,’ ‘fixed,’ ‘rigged,’ ‘kangaroo court’” in response to Hunter Biden’s federal conviction . , as Republicans had done after Trump’s conviction — even as they advanced a conspiracy theory that the president somehow controlled the state’s case.
“Compare and contrast the difference in response 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 one case came out, while the son of the president of the United States is being prosecuted and I don’t hear a single Democrat.” crying foul.”
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