What the Hunter Biden conviction does and does not mean

WHAT THE HUNTER BIDEN CONVICTION DOES AND DOES NOT MEAN. The Wilmington, Delaware, trial of Hunter Biden on federal gun charges ended in the least surprising way possible: conviction on all counts. Even though there had been some fanciful talk about the possibility of jury nullification in Biden Country, the jurors quickly found the younger Biden guilty.

Unlike the recent business records case against former President Donald Trump, the charges against Biden, that he lied on federal forms when purchasing a pistol in 2018, were simple and easy to understand. If you want, you can argue that the case should not have been brought or that the charges should have been reduced, but there seemed zero doubt that Biden was guilty unless you believe that a raving crack addict miraculously got sober just long enough to affirm truthfully that he was not on drugs when purchasing a firearm, only to resume being a raving crack addict immediately.

So what does it mean? In terms of House Republican investigators’ longtime quest to show that Biden’s shady foreign business deals financially benefited his father, the answer is pretty much nothing. Biden’s gun problem was never a main focus of the House investigation. It jumped onto the radar screen last year in part because the Department of Justice tried to sneak through a sweetheart deal that would have given Biden immunity on the gun charges and who knows what else. The only thing that stopped it was the skepticism of federal Judge Maryellen Noreika. When the proposed deal fell apart, the gun charge was the result. Biden also faces indictment on tax charges in California. In any event, the verdict in Wilmington doesn’t advance the ball in the investigation into Biden family finances.

Subscribe today to the Washington Examiner magazine that will keep you up to date with what’s going on in Washington. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Just $1.00 an issue!

But what about the “rigged” justice system? Biden defenders argue that Trump advocates are wrong when they point to the Trump trial in Manhattan as evidence of Democratic lawfare against Trump. If lawfare is real, they say, then why did a DOJ run by Democrats prosecute and convict the Democratic president’s son?

Republicans would give three answers. First, they would point to the paragraph above, in which the Biden DOJ tried and failed to sweep it all under the rug; the department certainly attempted to ensure that the Biden gun prosecution didn’t happen. Second, they would point to the sheer novelty, the unprecedented nature, of the charges against Trump as evidence that he received special treatment of a very negative sort from the elected Democratic district attorney in Manhattan. And third, Trump supporters would note that the former president is the de facto presidential nominee of the Republican Party. The Democratic effort to imprison President Joe Biden’s opposition, they would say, is so consequential that it stands alone in any discussion about the integrity of the justice system.

Perhaps the greatest effect of the Hunter Biden trial had nothing to do with guns. In court, the prosecution introduced the infamous laptop as evidence, with confirmation that the FBI had verified its authenticity. Prosecutors also revealed that they collected evidence, all confirmed as authentic, from the Cloud data originating with the laptop and Hunter Biden’s phone. In that moment, all the Democratic efforts of misdirection and obfuscation — that the laptop was Russian disinformation, that the data were hacked, that none of it was reliable — went up in smoke. That was also proof that many top media organizations, in the weeks before the 2020 election, suppressed accurate information and ended up spreading disinformation of their own.

So now Hunter Biden will try to appeal his conviction, which probably won’t work, and then move on to his tax trial in California. Will this case have any lasting political effect? The answer is probably no. As the weeks pass and a presidential debate arrives and the conventions arrive and the fall campaign arrives and the election takes place on Nov. 5 — as all that happens, the gun case, as a political issue, will likely recede into the past.