How the elites closed ranks around Hunter Biden

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On the surface, the saga of Hunter Biden, the ne’er-do-well son of US president Joe Biden, sounds like a sorry tale of how drug addiction can afflict even the rich and powerful. To hear some media figures tell it, you’d think that’s all there is to the story – a personal tale of tragedy and dysfunction that all Americans can relate to. But it is also a tale of the corruption, privilege and glaring double standards of the Democratic elite.

Hunter Biden was convicted this week of three felony charges relating to his 2018 purchase of a firearm in his home state of Delaware. Biden, the jury found, lied on a federal form required to obtain a gun. He stated that he was not an active user of drugs, despite being in the throes of an addiction to crack cocaine. His conviction comes despite the best efforts of various members of the DC elite to get him off the hook.

In fact, the trial almost never happened at all. The inquiry that eventually led to his conviction has been going on for six years, although this only became public knowledge in 2020. This investigation almost resulted in an outrageous plea deal last year that would have allowed him to walk away not only from the gun charges, but also from charges that he failed to pay $1.4million in taxes, for which he faces another trial later this year in California. Last year, prosecutor David Weiss ‘appeared willing to forgo any prosecution of Mr Biden at all’, the New York Times reported at the time.

That plan was scuppered by the ‘no nonsense’ judge, Maryellen Noreika, who it is safe to say will not be invited to any DC cocktail parties any time soon. ‘In a stunning hearing last July, judge Noreika uncovered a proposed plea deal between the Justice Department and Mr Biden that offered him broad immunity’, the New York Times wrote this week. Correspondence unearthed last year between Hunter Biden’s lawyers and Joe Biden’s Justice Department revealed that Weiss’s office ‘came close to agreeing to end the investigation without requiring a guilty plea on any charges’.

It’s important to keep in mind the timeline of these events. This investigation was ongoing throughout the 2020 presidential-election campaign, when the scandal over Hunter Biden’s laptop broke. I’m old enough to remember when the ‘laptop from hell’ story was falsely portrayed by the media and the national-security establishment as being a product of Russian disinformation. The New York Post – the only mainstream outlet to honestly report the scandal at the time – had its Twitter account locked in an attempt to suppress the story in the closing weeks of Joe Biden’s presidential run. National Public Radio had the gall to tell the public this wasn’t ‘really a story’. Yet the court has now officially ‘corroborate[d] the authenticity of Biden’s laptop’. Its contents were critical to the prosecution’s case. Texts found on the computer show Hunter talking to Hallie Biden, his lover and sister-in-law (yep), about meeting dealers to buy crack.

The American justice system was once a shining example to the world. Today, it’s a complex web of rules that can be bent to suit political purposes. Just look at the legal witch-hunting of Donald Trump, who was convicted last month of 34 essentially made-up felonies, involving how his office filed its paperwork. When Trump filed payments made to a lawyer as ‘legal expenses’, this somehow ended up as a felony. Yet Hunter Biden’s ‘failure to pay more than $100,000 in taxes from over $1.5million in income’? Well, that would have been treated as just two misdemeanors, if the Justice Department had got its way.

Back in 2023, the New York Times reported – with a straight face – that Hunter’s former lawyer, Christopher J Clark, tried to persuade prosecutors to go easy on the president’s son by reading a quote from Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, who was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials: ‘Prosecutors could always find “a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone”, but should never succumb to pressure from the powerful.’ Of course, Hunter had the weight of the federal government pushing for him not to be prosecuted. Talk about pressure from the powerful.

The double standards of the media have been equally extraordinary. ABC News now bleats on about poor old President Biden, ‘who already is concerned about the well-being and sobriety of his only living son and who must now watch as that son’s darkest moments are relived in public’. Where was the same concern for the teenage son of Donald Trump, Barron? Presumably, he was equally horrified by the recent court testimony that his father enjoyed being spanked, before having ‘brief, unimaginative and regrettable sex’ with a porn star?

Whatever happens next to Hunter Biden, let us not forget how the political and media elite did everything they could to shield him from scrutiny and from the law.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.