On the contrary, US justice hasn’t shed its tiers

“Hunter Biden’s conviction shows there is not a two-tier system of justice,” declared a headline in the Washington Post this week. It’s a claim that has been widely made by Democrats and their friends in the media since the president’s son was convicted on gun charges this week - and on the face of it, there’s a certain plausibility.

Following his conviction last month by a Manhattan jury, Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans fumed that the judicial system was politically rigged against him. A Democratic prosecutor got a jury in a heavily Democratic jurisdiction to convict the Republican candidate for president on highly dubious felony charges.

But now the Democratic president’s own son has been found guilty by a jury in a heavily Democratic state - Delaware, the president’s home state, no less - on felony charges. So the accusations of biased, politically motivated “lawfare” conducted by Democrats against Republicans must be baseless. Prosecutors prosecute without regard to politics; juries reach verdicts on the basis of the law and the facts; the American system works like Solon to deliver justice without fear or favour.

Don’t believe it for a second.

First, consider the vast difference in the legal basis on which each case was brought. As I have explained before, the case against Trump was a mountainous confection of wafer-thin legal theory built on a trivial breach of the law that rarely results in real punishment. The Democratic prosecutor turned what would normally have been at worst a misdemeanour over a bookkeeping deception - the hush-money Trump paid to a porn star in 2016, a charge that carries the penalty of a small fine at most - into an alleged felony (with potential jail time). All on a highly dubious legal claim that it was done with the intent of committing some other crime.

Even in the view of lawyers deeply unsympathetic to Trump, this was prosecutorial overreach of a high order. Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor and commentator for CNN, not exactly a Maga-friendly figure, wrote in the New Yorker that the prosecutor had “contorted” the case against Trump, saying the charges brought were “bespoke, seemingly crafted individually for the former president and no one else”.

Contrast that with the Hunter Biden charges - about as open and shut a case as you can bring in front of a jury. Biden was convicted on several counts of lying on documents in order to obtain a firearm while he was under the influence of drugs, a clear felony in breach of federal gun protection statutes. The evidence the prosecution produced was incontrovertible - troves of videos, emails, text messages, etc documenting Biden’s addiction to cocaine at the very time he signed the gun papers.

Ah, you might say, the evidence may have been persuasive but there was no obligation on the government to bring the case against him in the first place. Surely if these lawyers - justice department prosecutors - were politically driven, they would never have gone after the son of the man to whom their department ultimately answers?

But that’s not how it happened. The federal prosecutor in charge of the case, David Weiss, was appointed by Trump when he was president, but as is customary, principally on the recommendation of Democratic senators in his state of Delaware.

Hunter’s crimes were committed in October 2018 and known to law enforcement almost immediately, but for years the justice department sat on the investigation and, according to two internal whistleblowers who came forward last year, actively tried to avoid prosecuting Hunter on separate tax fraud charges for which he was being investigated.

After all this became public, those same prosecutors then struck a plea deal with Hunter on both the gun and the tax charges that would not only have let him off with the lightest of penalties but would have immunised him against potential charges relating to an entire five-year period in which he has been convincingly accused of lucrative influence-peddling while his father was vice president.

It was only when an inquisitive judge questioned the scope of the plea deal as it was about to be signed off last summer that it fell apart. Federal prosecutors then finally took the gun charges to court, along with the tax fraud charges, which will go to trial in September.

US President Joe Biden hugs his son Hunter Biden, after the 54-year-old was convicted on federal gun charges in a historic first criminal prosecution of the child of a sitting US president. Picture: AFP

As Andrew McCarthy, another former federal prosecutor and critic of the Bidens, wrote in National Review this week: “If Weiss and the Biden justice department had had their way, [the prosecution] wouldn’t have happened at all.”

That’s not all, of course. The trial that concluded this week showed that it’s not just justice that is politicised in America, with prosecutors under control of a particular party favouring one type of defendant over another. The trial also gave us definitive proof of the wider institutional bias - in the media, tech companies, government bureaucracy and elsewhere - that leans in the same direction.

Much of the evidence on which Hunter Biden was convicted - the proof of his drug addiction - came from a certain laptop. This laptop, you may recall, first came to public attention in the latter stages of the 2020 presidential election, when it was uncovered by the New York Post (a sister publication of The Times), along with more allegations about Hunter’s nefarious activities.

Days before a close election, nearly all mainstream media outlets not only ignored the story but actually discredited it. Twitter and Facebook actually blocked access to the entire content of the New York Post. Fifty former US intelligence officials came forward - with absolutely no evidence - to claim that the laptop was a piece of Russian disinformation designed to sway voters.

It was only long after the election when Biden Senior was safely in the White House that the laptop was acknowledged to be real - and formed the basis for the long-delayed justice for his son. So yes. It’s true. Let’s hear it: two tiers for truth, justice and the American way.

The Times