A Delaware jury today found President Biden's son Hunter guilty on three charges of lying on a federal firearm application. While this will surely fuel another round of hallucinatory speculation about the troubled scion's fabled laptop and the yet-to-be-discovered exploits of the so-called Biden Crime Family, the reality is that Hunter himself is solely responsible for the unraveling of his life, and he will now pay the price for at least one of his many transgressions. Unlike so many Trump cultists who think their guy is an innocent victim of political persecution, though, you won't find many Democrats wailing in agony over this one.
That's not to say this trial doesn't reek of political motivation. It does, and the whole affair feels more like some kind of lifetime criminal achievement award for Hunter's long career in influence peddling than a defensible prosecution. The sordid details of Biden's crack addiction and his romantic misadventures are sad and appalling but hardly matters of great importance to American democracy. But, to be clear, people shouldn't lie on their gun applications, and—sing it along with me—no one should be above the law. Hunter Biden lived a life of extraordinary privilege and power, and while you can sympathize with his struggle against drug abuse, as well as his grief after losing his brother to cancer, he's still a difficult person to have sympathy for overall.
But it's also important to have a bit of perspective on the Hunter Biden character arc. For one thing, it is not unusual to see family members of rich, famous and powerful people getting caught up in legal or ethical trouble. James Madison's stepson John Payne Todd was a gambling addict who repeatedly ended up in prison. Jimmy Carter's brother Billy was a registered foreign agent of Libya who may have embezzled money from the Qaddafi regime. Bill Clinton's younger half-brother Roger, convicted on cocaine charges in the 1980s, was given code name "Headache" by the Secret Service in honor of his many patience-testing exploits and later unsuccessfully lobbied for a pardon on behalf of mobster Rosario Gambino.
At least Hunter wasn't given a security clearance and assigned policy portfolios about which had no meaningful expertise or insight, like former President Donald Trump did with his daughter Ivanka and her husband, the real estate vulture Jared Kushner. Kushner's private equity firm recently nabbed a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia, which looks a bit like quid pro quo for Kushner's pro-Saudi role in the White House. Seems like that should be illegal, but apparently isn't.
All cliches exist for a reason, and the one about the corrupting influence of power is particularly apt. Presidents possess awesome powers (which may soon be upgraded to the nearly godlike by the far-right Supreme Court) that are practically an invitation to wrongdoing. Presidential pardon powers, sweeping and written directly into the Constitution, were a particularly poor design choice vulnerable to bribery and graft. And there is no question that Hunter Biden spent many years seedily cashing in on his dad's powerful positions in Washington, but a year-long impeachment inquiry has failed to find any evidence that President Biden profited from these dealings or did anything illegal in connection to them.
Maybe there should be laws preventing the family members of presidents and members of Congress from taking obscenely lucrative positions sitting idly on the boards of foreign energy companies. But there aren't, and it's not clear how restrictions on individuals whose mere proximity to power tempts them into shadiness could possibly be constitutional. A better idea would be to tighten ethics rules and investment restrictions, to claw back some unaccountable powers from U.S. presidents and to require that all elected officials fully divest from business interests, not only while they are in power but for some period afterwards.
I'm guessing that there won't be a ton of right-wing buy-in on that one considering that the presumptive Republican nominee maintains a business empire that has been found guilty of criminal tax evasion, among many other things, and who spent his entire presidency steering powerful guests to the hotel that he inexplicably was allowed to continue owning in the nation's capital.
In any case, Hunter isn't going down for any of that kind of stuff. There aren't any broader implications to this verdict, as disappointing as that might be to media personalities in the right-wing echo chamber, except perhaps as a warning to the spouses, siblings and children of presidents that they should work extra hard to stay clean and steer clear of trying to cash in on their family connections. In today's atmosphere of heightened partisan tensions and with the Republican nominee promising to order investigations of leading Democrats, there has probably never been a better time for the children of the powerful to live ordinary, unimpeachable lives.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
