Noah Rothman with you again today in Jim Geraghty’s stead. Dominic Pino takes over on Friday, and Jim is back in the driver’s seat next week.
On the menu today: When the adult son of a sitting president pleads guilty to criminal charges, it’s reasonable to assume that is not great news for the president. This intuitive conclusion has apparently eluded the press amid its coverage of Hunter Biden’s plea agreement with the Department of Justice.
The Media’s Selective Blindness
On Tuesday, the president’s son acknowledged his guilt in charges relating to his failure to pay income taxes, while also accepting a pretrial diversion agreement in connection with a felony gun-possession charge. When the news of the deal broke, a familiar dynamic emerged in political media. Republican lawmakers, many of whom have long maintained that the Biden family’s “troubles” are not only fair political game but are reflective of more disturbing patterns of misconduct within the House of Biden, made their objections to the nature of this plea deal known. In response, press outlets feigned distaste for the GOP’s opportunism.
From Speaker Kevin McCarthy to Oversight Committee chair James Comer, from Representatives Elise Stefanik to Darrell Issa to Marjorie Taylor Greene on down, Republican lawmakers described the terms of Hunter Biden’s plea deal as absurdly lenient. From Ron DeSantis to Tim Scott to Donald Trump, the GOP’s presidential aspirants were similarly disinclined to let Joe Biden off the hook for whatever role he played in his son’s good fortune. The appearance of corruption in this dispensation from an executive agency controlled by the defendant’s father is just too glaring to ignore, they either said outright or strongly implied.
For its part, the press covered the waterfront of Republican remarks, but mostly to contextualize them as somehow out of bounds. The New York Times emphasized the mania of the congressional GOP’s commitment to keep investigating Hunter Biden — a commitment that is apparently shared by the prosecutor overseeing the younger Biden’s case, who assured the public that “the investigation is ongoing.” Another Times dispatch detailed the ways in which “Trump has tried to use Hunter Biden as a way to attack the president” — an enterprise in which the whole GOP is involved, given the extent to which it has become “a top political priority for Republicans to tie the Hunter Biden investigation to President Biden.” It’s all quite nefarious.
ABC News, too, dwelled on the GOP’s dissatisfaction with the plea agreement, as did the Washington Post. At least Politico managed to find one Democratic lawmaker willing to discuss Tuesday’s developments, but only in the context of yet-unproven Republican claims from the GOP-led Oversight Committee surrounding what Comer has alleged are claims of “influence peddling and possibly bribery” involving Hunter Biden and possibly even President Joe Biden himself.
This response from the press is little more than muscle memory. It is a vestige of a time when Democrats could plausibly claim that Hunter Biden was a civilian, and efforts to drag him into the partisan political fray were, if not entirely unethical, at least a little gauche. That approach to coverage of the Biden family’s travails was always a contrivance, but it certainly doesn’t pertain now that Joe Biden’s administration has literally made a federal case out of his son’s misconduct. Media coverage of Tuesday’s developments reveals how difficult the adjustment to this new reality has been.
In his assessment of the state of play for Democrats following Hunter Biden’s plea agreement, Time magazine analyst Philip Elliot detailed, perhaps inadvertently, the degree to which the president had convinced himself that he could keep his son close while remaining unblemished by the association:
Throughout his presidency, Biden has been intentional in including Hunter Biden in official events, introducing him as a proud father when the family made a return to their homeland of Ireland, and Hunter Biden is often seen at White House events. Even in the face of a sentencing, there are no doubts about the Biden family’s durable embrace of even its most flawed members—nor are there doubts that that clan’s critics will use that love to cast the President as blind to possible shadiness in his own camp.
Still, Elliot observed, with “zero tangible legal downside for the president,” the shuttering of this investigation transforms the “Hunter Problem” from a political mess into a mere “messaging” challenge. Sure, “innuendo can carry a lot of water in politics,” he concludes, and implication might carry a lot of weight among “voters who are looking for any reason to block Biden from winning a second term.” But, when it comes to Hunter, that’s all Republicans have left.
The Wall Street Journal’s Annie Linskey related the Biden White House’s satisfaction with the circumstances engineered into existence by one of the president’s own agencies. Hunter’s deal “avoids a messy public trial” and “front-loads some of the political impact: better to rip the Band-Aid off now than have the case linger into 2024,” she wrote. And although the public airing of Hunter Biden’s criminal misconduct puts the president “in a difficult personal position,” “potentially undermining his own credibility,” most of the Democratic strategists with whom Linskey spoke said this development closed the book on the issue. As one-time Obama pollster Cornell Belcher assured her, the “average voter in the middle of the electorate who will decide this race will not be thinking about Hunter when they walk in the voting booth.”
Although this is a determination that does nothing to dispel lingering concerns about the potential political considerations that may have influenced the Justice Department’s handling of this case, Politico saw almost nothing but upside for Joe Biden in the plea deal. The president did not disguise his relief on Tuesday, according to the three-byline dispatch. Joe Biden had spent the last several months agonizing over the “legal limbo” in which his son languished, and he “repeatedly barked to confidants” in frustration over the existence of the long-running investigation. And while there are some political obstacles yet to overcome, the White House is confident that the handling of the case reflects well on the Biden administration.
This sounds to me like a lot of whistling past a political graveyard — one in which many once-promising careers are interred.
Joe Biden ran for the White House in 2020 on a promise to restore normalcy. That condition was understood to mean not just taming the coronavirus outbreak and restoring respect for all the “norms” Donald Trump regarded with contempt, but reviving the image of the president as an exemplary public servant. Previously, the Biden family’s problems, while sordid, were of a private nature. They’re quite public now.
Democrats will object to the notion that, having paid his dues (such as they are) to society, there should be any cloud around the president’s son under which Joe Biden himself risks getting a little wet. But some congressional Republicans not known for being bombastic or intemperate continue to allege that there is credible information suggesting Hunter Biden is implicated in a bribery scheme that also directly involves Joe Biden. The evidence in support of that charge is so far scant — indeed, the FBI’s failure to produce the evidence they seek features prominently in Republicans’ claims about the nature of that scandal.
It’s going to be easier for inquisitive voters to imagine the truth of these claims now that one of the scheme’s alleged participants is a convict. Moreover, as former attorney general William Barr observed, the plea deal will light a fire under Republicans’ efforts to uncover the information they say the FBI continues to withhold. Indeed, it could make the Bureau’s noncompliance untenable.
The personal and ethical contrasts Joe Biden struck against Donald Trump in 2020 are going to be that much harder to make in 2024. If the Republican Party sees fit to nominate anyone other than Trump, the implicit contrast between a scandal-free candidate and a president dogged by a cloud of suspicion will benefit the GOP.
The White House can no longer have its cake and eat it, too. Biden can keep his beloved son as close as he likes, but he cannot avoid association with his progeny’s misdeeds — having now presided over their resolution. Hunter Biden’s conviction and his father’s presumed but ill-defined influence over the conclusion of the case muddy the contrast with the “corrupt” GOP that Democrats have spent the better part of a decade trying to establish. For an unpopular president with shallow levels of support even among his own party’s partisans, that’s not good. No matter what Politico says.
ADDENDUM: Part two of Fox News Channel anchor Bret Baier’s interview with Donald Trump aired last night, and although the former president didn’t confess to any more allegations of criminal malfeasance, he didn’t do himself many favors either.
In one particularly illuminating exchange regarding Trump’s implementation of the First Step Act, which provided clemency to mostly non-violent federal inmates, the former president struggled to maintain a coherent defense of the initiative. He spent an inordinate amount of time defending the Communist Chinese state’s policy of meting out the death penalty to drug dealers, adding that he thinks that would be a worthwhile initiative to import to the United States. When confronted with the sympathetic convicts in American jails whose release he helped secure, however, Trump performed a 180-degree pivot and talked only about the raw deal those convicts had received from the U.S. justice system.
Trump dwelled on one case in particular — that of drug offender Alice Johnson, whom the former president said was “treated terribly.” But when Baier noted that, under Trump’s proposed plan, she would be put to death, Trump became visibly flustered.
“No, no, no. Under my. . . . Oh, under that?” Trump asked. Yes, the whole capital-punishment thing we’ve been discussing for the last several minutes. “Uh, it would depend on the severity,” he added.
“So, even Alice Johnson,” Baier asked? A woman whose story was featured in a Trump campaign-reelection advertisement broadcast during the Super Bowl? “No, she wouldn’t be killed,” Trump explained. “It would start as of now.”
Yikes.