This represents the most grotesquely open a perversion and politicization of the federal justice system in memory.
The word “enormity” is oft misused in modern conversation. The term properly refers not to something large – that is modern English usage confusing it with the word “enormous” – but rather to a truly shocking act of moral irregularity or turpitude. Even a minor act can potentially be an enormity, depending on what it represents.
But then a major act can also be an enormity as well, uniting both size and singular moral rot together so well that not even grammarians have to worry about confusing the two. That is what the Department of Justice, headed by Merrick Garland under the presidency of Joe Biden, gave us at the end of the week when it was revealed in a Delaware court just how blatantly it had been cooperating with Hunter Biden in his plea deal – as opposed to prosecuting him – in order to protect the Biden family politically from investigation.
A claim like that is fated to read to skeptical eyes as hyperbole, as partisan exaggeration. Revoltingly, it is not so in this case. What this represents is as grotesquely open a perversion and politicization of the federal justice system as I have seen in my lifetime – and I lived through the Clinton era. National Review’s editorial lays out the facts of what happened on Thursday clearly enough, but allow me to recount them with what I believe to be the proper emphasis.
Hunter Biden was set to plead guilty on Wednesday to two minor tax-evasion charges. He had never even been formally indicted for those charges (which, given other areas of investigation mentioned later, likely arose from hide-and-seek games he was playing with money earned from foreign lobbying). The plea was instead made preemptively during the “investigation” phase of the government’s inquiry into his affairs. The other issue Biden was facing, involving illegal gun possession, was to be dealt with by what is known as a “diversion agreement” instead of a criminal plea – essentially a probationary period of good behavior after which the charges and all information contained therein are affirmatively dropped by the government as a further basis for prosecution.
But Hunter’s lawyers smuggled something far more ambitious into that document: an agreement by the government that, after completion of probation (for a gun charge, mind you), he would gain immunity from investigation or prosecution from all of his other potential lobbying crimes, as mentioned in an information summary so wide-ranging as to formally inoculate him permanently from being looked into on Burisma, much less anything else.
And the Department of Justice was prepared to go through with it. The DOJ, which I must bluntly remind the world is controlled by Joe Biden via Merrick Garland and a host of ideologically simpatico staff attorneys, showed up to court this week prepared to assent to these terms, smuggled into a typically less-explored part of the deal, without properly explaining why. Only Judge Maryellen Noreika’s disbelief at the government’s inability to properly own the terms of the settlement deal hidden in the diversion agreement in public court prevented it from going into force right now. Hunter has temporarily pled “not guilty” – not guilty to charges upon which, again to remind you, the federal government has as yet not even formally indicted him.
And why not? Because it isn’t just that the fix was in; the enduring outrage here is that the fix is still in. While we sit here in our helpless outrage and Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice intentionally dithers around without an indictment to freeze the statute of limitations, Hunter Biden’s escape from either serious investigation or justice has merely been postponed.
The original intent of the plea deal, as arranged between Hunter Biden and the Biden DOJ, was this: plead out on these small beer charges and acquire, by legal stealth, a formal claim of future immunity to use not only against the current administration (no worries, there!) but also any potential future Republican administration as well. While that has fallen apart, the Biden family still holds the winning hand, merely because it has successfully pressured the DOJ thus far to not formally indict Hunter. This means that all-important statutes of limitation remain ticking; many of them will expire soon, around the time of Biden’s potential reelection.
This, to thrice emphasize, is why it is so significant that the DOJ has not formally charged Hunter Biden, only accepted a plea. To go the proper, formal route first and only then enter into the plea-bargaining phase would not only have prevented these crimes from escaping the statute of limitations, but also (far, far more importantly for everyone’s considerations here) prevented it from tolling on any associated crimes . . . most especially those related to foreign lobbying and tax evasion. Even if nothing else happens after this, all Hunter Biden really need do, absent an indictment, is wait out the clock with the tacit cooperation of the DOJ.
I cannot recall anything like this level of cooperation between the government and one of its purported “targets” of investigation – one with direct family connections to the president, no less – before in my life. (To be fair, I was born after the time when John F. Kennedy appointed his brother Bobby to be the family gangster as attorney general and everyone seemingly nodded along and sang songs of Camelot.) Not once throughout the entire Donald Trump administration – an administration characterized by venality, idiocy, incompetence, and the permanent lowering of America’s national standards of political and media discourse – did his DOJ conduct itself in anything resembling this shamelessly corrupt self-dealing. Trump is a man whose farewell gift to the presidency was a pardon for Roger Stone he wrote more or less in longhand out of the Oval Office, a riot in the Capitol, and several boxes of purloined classified material – and yet you will scour the annals of his DOJ top to bottom and find nothing even remotely comparable to this.
It is more than just galling. What pains me most of all is that far too many people will fail to realize just how wild a deviation this is from every norm that has ever been supposed to exist with the professional dispensation of justice by the federal government. If ever you wished to believe that there are two tiers of justice in America — one for loser schlubs like you, and one for the Biden family — then here is your undeniable evidence, your slam-dunk proof. These people are ripping away our belief in the most fundamental of institutions — the equal rule of law — all to protect a shabby drug-addict influence-peddler and his senile president father. Trump was never remotely worth that, and yet we are being asked tacitly by the media’s complete lack of interest in this matter to accept that Joe Biden is.
There are a few things Republicans can do. First, the House Republicans need to immediately drop cheap hysterics and pornographic stunts and get sober about pushing forward on their investigation into the Biden family’s well-concealed financial doings. It has to be the House Republicans, too, because from the evidence of both the IRS whistleblowers and this week’s appalling revelations, it is transparently clear that the federal government is doing the opposite. It’s up to the House GOP to try and move the ball with investigative powers. Second, pressure must be brought to bear upon one specific thing that can at least freeze the field: Hunter Biden must formally be charged with whatever it is he is attempting to plead out of.
On Thursday, the federal government announced, in theoretically unrelated news, that it had charged Donald Trump with three additional criminal counts in the Mar-a-Lago documents case. The charges look serious. The case against him looks airtight evidentiarily. Now try to persuade a single Republican voter looking at the treatment of Hunter Biden, with mouth agape, to accept the argument that these people are receiving equal treatment under the law. Good luck.