It’s worth dwelling on how convoluted the new MAGA claim truly is. First, recall that the special counsel who secured Hunter Biden’s conviction, David Weiss, was originally appointed as a U.S. attorney by Trump. Did he deliberately handle his prosecutorial task skillfully in order to serve this sinister end of making the justice system appear balanced, thus secretly doing Biden’s 11-dimensional-chess bidding?
What’s more, remember that the right exploded with fury last spring when prosecutors originally reached a plea deal with Hunter Biden (which subsequently fell apart), seeing the impulse to spare him a trial as another sign of a pro-Biden conspiracy. On top of that, during Hunter Biden’s trial, right-wing media figures relentlessly charged that Biden family members, including the president, were secretly trying to influence the jury and tamper with witnesses—more evidence of dark and dastardly Biden family machinations, this time geared toward getting Hunter Biden off. Now that the thing the MAGA right warned against (Hunter skating free) did not happen, it too has magically been repurposed into the same Biden-orchestrated conspiracy.
Finally, recall that the MAGA right’s primary purpose in focusing so relentlessly on Hunter Biden has been to gin up a case for impeaching and prosecuting his father, mostly around a tortured series of claims about the Bidens’ foreign dealings. Why haven’t either of these things happened? Well, House Republicans failed to find any basis for impeachment after months of trying. Despite all that effort, they still haven’t found any grounds for criminal referrals about President Biden to the Justice Department (they have referred their claims about Hunter Biden). Meanwhile, another special counsel, Robert Hur, did not recommend charging the president with criminal mishandling of classified documents because he couldn’t find evidence of it. Hur, too, was originally appointed U.S. attorney by…President Trump.
