No. of Recommendations: 4
He was ready to plead guilty to them until the DOJ caved to political pressure. That was an error on the part of the DOJ. Yes, Hunter pleaded innocent, but that was only because his plea agreement he was ready to accept fell apart due to political pressure.That's not accurate. His plea deal fell apart because he was trying to get immunity from prosecutions for matters outside the case:
President Biden blamed “political pressure” for the collapse of a plea deal for Hunter Biden, but it was the judge overseeing the case who questioned the agreement.
Hunter Biden’s plea deal did fall apart in dramatic form at the last minute last year. But it did so after the judge overseeing the case at the time raised issues about its unusual construction, involving two separate agreements meant to work in tandem. That construction violated one of the basic tenets of federal guilty pleas: that any agreement not have any side deals.https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/01/us/politics/bid...Trump has never admitted guilt, nor has he claimed actual innocence. His claims are all an attack on the legal process itself. It is those attacks that damage the legal system, not the issuance of a pardon to a guilty person.I don't think that's accurate, either - Trump has pretty consistently claimed that he's committed no crimes, and that the charges are being brought against him due to political pressure, not because the actions are themselves illegal.
The issuance of a pardon to a guilty person doesn't cause a lot of damage to the legal process (every pardon causes some). What damages the legal process
a lot is the false assertion that the legal process was flawed - the inaccurate claim that Hunter was prosecuted just because he was the President's son, rather than that he was prosecuted because he was a person who committed some serious crimes that could be proven in a court of law.
Biden decided to accuse the DoJ of succumbing to political pressure to bring charges for conduct that would not be charged absent that political pressure. Which exactly parallels the claims that Trump makes on a regular basis. Which makes it much,
much harder for Democrats to push back on Trump's assertions. Because if the DoJ is institutionally so weak that it can't resist the "political pressure" of the
out of power party against
the President's own son, then there's not a lot of reason to believe it is capable of acting independent of political considerations. If DoJ can't handle it if James Comer is making noise in his committee, how are they going to stand up to something like the January 6th Committee? They made an actual criminal referral! Which is fine, but only if you believe that DoJ can still exercise independent prosecutorial judgment even in the face of that political pressure....which Biden just threw them under the bus on.
