What a breathtaking and damaging act of misdirection. After five years of investigation into a host of criminal acts by Hunter Biden, the Department of Justice (DOJ) finally brought charges against the president’s wayward son. But while the DOJ hopes the public focuses on words like “charges” and “guilty” to form an image of accountability for all, it’s letting Hunter walk away with the kind of slap on the wrist most defendants can only dream about from inside a prison cell.
In the same breath in which DOJ announced it was filing charges against Hunter Biden, it also stated that the case had already been resolved. Hunter will plead guilty to and serve probation for two tax fraud misdemeanors while a felony firearm possession charge will disappear after he completes pretrial diversion. It’s a resolution that if the defendant’s last name weren’t Biden would sound almost too good to be true.
The feds are notoriously tough on firearms. Nationally, for example, 94.2 percent of federal firearms convictions in 2022 involved some prison time, and the median sentence was 39 months.
Of course, Hunter won’t even have to end up with a conviction. This is an even rarer event. In 2021, fewer than 1 percent of cases filed by U.S. attorneys in federal court resulted in the kind of pretrial diversion offered to Hunter.
It’s that disparity between Hunter’s case and everybody else’s that’s the true problem, not necessarily the sentence itself. After all, the law in question, which prohibits
