The game of politics is a dirty one; presumably, candidates know this going in and are prepared to take the heat: insults, lies, dredging up all the skeletons in the closets, and with today’s increasing practice of creating false “news”, even inventing sins and crimes that were not committed.
But do prospective candidates fully realize at the time that they step into the spotlight how the public scrutiny will affect their loved ones as well? How much damage their family members, who are not themselves in politics, may have to endure?
This is something that the Biden family must be living with every day. Would Hunter Biden have been mercilessly pursued if he had been a private citizen for a crime that experts say is rarely prosecuted? As Andrew Prokop writes in Vox, “The evidence against Hunter in the gun case appears strong, but it would be very unlikely to have been brought if his name was Hunter Smith.”
As multiple experts have opined, “The gun charges stand out as unusual…They focus on a nearly six-year-old incident where no one was hurt, and on a defendant who got sober nearly five years ago.” The pain and devastation of the Biden family continues on a daily basis.
The facts are well documented and now widely known. Hunter had struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, but when buying a gun, he checked a box on a form stating that he did not use drugs.
This lie triggered an investigation that led to charges being brought against him in Delaware, with violating three different laws: two false statements laws and one law banning firearm possession by a drug user.
Even a Trump toady like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said this week: “I don’t think the average American would have been charged with the gun thing.”
The same question of fairness and equity has arisen in regard to Trump and the myriad investigations against him and the 34 felonies that he has now been convicted of. But there is a crucial difference between Donald Trump, politician and former president, and Hunter Biden, private citizen.
Essentially this is a persecution of Joe Biden, by proxy. While no American citizen is above the law, as the Trump verdict of guilty has demonstrated, private citizens do not sign up for a hypothetical public crucifixion. And the fact that there is wide agreement that the charge brought against Hunter Biden would not have been brought against Hunter Smith or Jones, only strengthens the suspicion that he is getting a raw deal simply because he is the weakest link in the chain that is meant to drag down Joe Biden.
As Anjali Huynh writes in the New York Times, “For Mr. Trump and his allies, decrying Hunter Biden has long served as a political applause line.” She adds that, “Mr. Trump repeatedly circulated unsubstantiated claims in efforts to link his Democratic rival to his son’s business dealings, which he painted as corrupt, even before Mr. Biden became his party’s nominee.”
Trump’s exploitation of his political opponent’s family is not subtle. Trump called for his attorney general, William P. Barr, to take action against Joe Biden’s son when Biden was Trump’s Democratic challenger for a second term in the White House, just two weeks before the 2020 election.
The many false accusations that Trump has made against Hunter Biden—of corruption, of tax evasion, of collusion with China—have all been discredited. The only one that has stuck so far is the gun charge. Yet this has been enough to devastate the entire family—parents feel their children’s pain as intensely as they do themselves.
Mike Allen does not exaggerate when he writes in Axios: “The vicious nature of contemporary politics has ripped through the Biden clan since he re-entered politics in 2019. His historic presidency has doubled as a family tragedy.”
