A completely corrupt political prosecution

Marci Wheeler does an excellent job of laying out the utter political hack job that led to the prosecution of Hunter Biden, and how the media can’t be bothered to pay the slightest attention to it:

Let’s imagine that, two years from now, Pam Bondi rolls out charges against some onetime adversary of Donald Trump. To the extent that journalists will still be employed and reading court filings, to the extent that prosecutors under Emil Bove (who at SDNY oversaw a team sanctioned for discovery violations) comply with discovery requirements, the adversary in question learns the following about his prosecution:

• The case started when an investigator started looking into a transnational trafficking network
• The investigator discovered that the prominent adversary had paid one of the sex workers trafficked in the network
• Rather than pursuing the traffickers, the investigator used the payment for sex as cause to open an investigation
• Of course, no one is going to charge a John … so the investigator starts pulling divorce records and four year old tax returns to try to move from that payment for sex work to something that can be charged
• Then the investigator started incorporating oppo research from Peter Schweizer into his investigation
• Kash Patel’s FBI set up protected ways to accept tips from Trump supporters who’ve doctored documents to create a crime
• Trump called up Bondi and told her to take more aggressive steps
• Trump called up foreign leaders asking for help on this prosecution
• Bondi then set up a way to launder that information from foreign sources, including known spies, into the investigation of the adversary
• Patel’s FBI asked a partisan informant to fabricate claims against the adversary
• Trump publicly called out prosecutors — resulting in them and their children being followed — because they had not yet charged his adversary
• Ultimately, the adversary got charged on 5-year old dirt, and only then, after charging, did prosecutors quickly do the investigative work to win the case at trial

Now, as I’ve described it, you surely imagine you’d say, wow, that looks like a thoroughly corrupt prosecution, a clear case of Trump using DOJ to punish his adversaries.

Right?

It’s not so much that investigators didn’t, after the fact, find a crime to charge. They did. If you investigate most high profile people long enough, you’ll find something to charge, particularly if multiple people come to DOJ with doctored evidence to help create that crime.

It’s that someone found the name of an adversary in the digital records of crimes that were more important to investigate, and instead of pursuing that crime, used the electronic record as an excuse to keep looking until they found some evidence of a crime against Trump’s adversary.

Everyone would recognize that’s what happened, right?

Of course not. Of course no one would recognize that that was a political prosecution.

We need no further proof than the fact that none of those very same details showed up in any of the coverage of the Hunter Biden investigation. Not now that he has been pardoned. Not when all these details came out last year. Not in any of the retrospectives of the times Trump demanded investigations on his adversaries.

What will happen instead is that a bunch of self-important DC scribes will chase the most salacious allegations, provide endless headlines about sex workers and wild parties. The DC scribes will ignore every detail about the legal investigation — every one!! — and instead use the prosecution as an opportunity to sell political scandal. And also, they will point to their Tiger Beat coverage as proof, they say, they are not politically biased.

Rather than diligently rooting out the obviously politicized prosecution, the press will be complicit in it.

She also very properly rakes Merrick Garland over the coals here:

And don’t get me wrong. I think Biden fucked this one up. Not just for saying he wouldn’t pardon Hunter, but for not taking action far earlier — like firing David Weiss the day he was inaugurated, citing Trump’s first impeachment, or pardoning Hunter and firing Weiss on November 6 — to do something about this. I think Merrick Garland shouldn’t have given Weiss himself SCO status (not least, because Weiss continues to investigate crimes — the alleged attempted framing of Joe Biden by Alexander Smirnov — to which he is a witness). I think Garland’s supervision of Special Counsels allowed the abuse of the system, repeatedly.

Marci disagrees with Biden’s decision to pardon his son, on the rather esoteric grounds that it deprives Hunter the opportunity to expose all this fully during the appeals process (I don’t understand why the media would start paying any attention to these details in that context), but the important point here is that this was a complete abuse of prosecutorial discretion from beginning to end. Drug addicts don’t get charged with lying on gun purchasing forms about their drug addiction, unless it’s thrown in as a lesser included offense in a situation where there’s some sort of serious crime, and the lesser included is being used as more leverage in a plea deal. People who pay back all they owe in taxes and penalties don’t get charged with tax evasion.

This nausating hack work from Bret Stephens is typical of what we’ll now be hearing until the heat death of the universe about this Massive Scandal That Robbed Us of Our Innocence:

After the news of the pardon broke, a liberal friend wrote to say that perhaps it wasn’t such a big deal, at least when considering Donald Trump’s choices for attorney general and F.B.I. director. OK. But when a Democratic president behaves as Biden just did, it fuels the corrosive public cynicism that helped elect Trump yet again while licensing and excusing whatever plans the president-elect may have for politicizing justice and using it for the benefit of friends, family and self.

What a degrading finale for Biden’s feeble, forgettable, frequently foolish presidency.

No, this ISN’T two wrongs make a right. Pardoning the victim of a completely corrupt political prosecution is the right thing to do. It’s the right thing to do if it’s your own son, and it’s the right thing to do if you had to lie about it in advance in order to avoid helping a fascist get elected president.

That Hunter Biden is not to put it mildly an admirable person in general has exactly nothing to do with any of this. Corrupt political prosecutions aren’t somehow any less corrupt because the target is no angel, to coin a phrase, any more than police murders are somehow any less murderous if the victim also happened to be a bad guy, although probably not one that Tucker Carlson asked to write his son a recommendation to Georgetown.