First lady Jill Biden and Hunter Biden, son of U.S. President Joe Biden, leave a Delaware federal court building after a jury convicted Hunter on all three federal felony gun charges he faced.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
And now: A Biden bookend to the Trump travail?
With Hunter Biden’s conviction on three felony counts in a Delaware courtroom Tuesday, both presidential campaigns have suffered mortifying legal defeats in trials that are peripheral to the political issues that scream for attention, from immigration to the role of the United States in the world’s affairs. But, given the peculiarities of the period, the two cases inevitably are central to today’s electoral politics.
Joe Biden’s supporters have the guilty verdict in a felony trial against Donald Trump that they have long desired. Mr. Trump’s loyalists have the satisfaction that the President’s wayward son – beset with addiction problems, broken relationships, perhaps unsavoury business deals – finally is in the spotlight that they have desperately wanted shined on him.
There may be surface similarity in the two cases, but these verdicts are not a matched set. There is no equivalence there. The Trump conviction, on charges stemming from hush payments to a porn star, involve the putative Republican presidential nominee himself, while the Biden conviction, on charges that he misrepresented his drug use on an application for a .38-caliber Colt Cobra revolver, involves merely the son of the likely Democratic nominee.
But the twin convictions, both in cases related to tawdry matters, have given the two campaigns what they sought – even though in both cases, if the defendants had been ordinary citizens without ties to the White House, they might not have been convicted or even charged. Some gun-rights advocates, ordinarily critics of Joe Biden for his advocacy of controls on the purchase and possession of firearms, believe Hunter Biden should have been exonerated.
Even so, Joe Biden can now say he is running against a convicted criminal. Mr. Trump can continue to speak of the “Biden crime family.” The more significant cases are in the future: Mr. Trump’s trial on possession of classified documents and, even more momentous, his trial on charges he sought to overturn the 2020 election. And also Hunter Biden’s looming trial on tax evasion.
Those are the surface elements. The whispery overtones are far more damaging. One is that Mr. Trump is, as former mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York once put it, “a con” – and that he has engaged in shadowy practices his entire business and political career. The other is that Hunter Biden has been accused of exploiting his father’s position for personal profit – and perhaps the father, subliminally or even subtly, aided the son in those endeavours, in Ukraine and China.
Meanwhile, the historical firsts accumulate: The first former president to be convicted of a felony. The first child of a sitting president to face criminal prosecution. And thus: The first election in American history where voters must weigh not only political convictions but also legal convictions.
“We seem totally separated into two different ecosystems of what matters,” said Jon Michaels, who teaches at the UCLA School of Law. “This whole year feels very much like a Greek tragedy.”
Mr. Trump cannot pardon himself in the New York case; the presidential power of the pardon does not reach into state judicial matters. President Biden said this week that he would not pardon his son; that would be an act of nepotism for the ages.
The Trump conviction appears to have done him scant harm politically, and it has apparently accounted for millions in fresh campaign contributions, like so many other episodes in Mr. Trump’s career that would have sunk other political figures. The Biden conviction likely will have little political effect as well. The sins of the son are not ordinarily visited upon the father, as the Bible (Chapter 18 of the Book of Ezekiel) and the example of Neil Bush (pilloried for his involvement with the Silverado Banking Savings and Loan Association in Denver while his father George H.W. Bush was vice-president) demonstrate.
At worst, the Biden trial shattered the portrait of the Bidens as a typical middle-class family dedicated to hard work and prudent comportment. The image of Hunter Biden holding a crack pipe, and the testimony of his ex-wife that she searched his car for remnants of illegal substances pierced the image that Joe Biden spent five decades building. The family stood with Hunter Biden even as his father’s Justice Department pressed on with its case, but prosecutor Leo Wise told the jurors Monday that the presence of Jill Biden and other family members in the courtroom was “not evidence” that should exculpate the younger Mr. Biden.
So the 2024 campaign moves ahead, another precedent established, the two wounded campaigns hoping the other’s lesions will undercut their efforts. With less than three weeks from the first presidential debate, the two candidates are facing legal as well as political challenges. Two sentencing sessions are in the near future. What follows is a choice the American people don’t want but can’t evade.