(Dobbs) The Biden Case, The Trump Case: There Is No Comparison
Only one is about threats to our national security.
“A slap on the wrist.” That’s what House Speaker Kevin McCarthy today called the plea deal struck with Hunter Biden. “If you are the president’s leading political opponent,” he said, obviously referring to Donald Trump, “the DOJ tries to literally put you in jail and give you prison time. But if you are the president’s son, you get a sweetheart deal.”
Trump himself had his own words for the plea deal: “The corrupt Biden DOJ just cleared up hundreds of years of criminal liability by giving Hunter Biden a mere ‘traffic ticket’.” Put aside questions about where he’s going with “hundreds of years of criminal liability” and we still have to deconstruct the comparisons made by the GOP’s leading lights between the cases of Hunter Biden and Donald Trump.
I’ll make that short and simple. There is no comparison. Hunter Biden is charged with filing his taxes late, a misdemeanor, and lying about his drug use on an application to buy a gun, called Form 4473. That is a felony and has landed people in prison, but here’s the first way any comparison between the cases falls apart: according to the National Criminal Justice Association, actual prosecutions for this crime, largely because cases about drug use usually don’t have a paper trail, are rare. CNN’s investigative unit reports that out of more than 12,000 similar cases six years ago, “more than 99.9% of those who were investigated escaped with nothing more than a warning.” In other words, a “slap on the wrist,” or as Trump put it, a “traffic ticket” for the non-violent crime of lying on Form 4473 is not uncommon.
And don’t forget: while we heard accusations yet again today that Biden’s plea deal is further proof that the Department of Justice has been “weaponized,” the prosecutor against Biden, the U.S. attorney who agreed to the “slap on the wrist,” is not a Biden-appointee, he is a Trump appointee.
Donald Trump on the other hand is charged with criminal obstruction of justice, and with espionage. Just on the face of it, those alleged crimes are as different as night and day from the crimes to which Biden is pleading. If the charges against Trump are accurate—and there seems to be damning evidence that they are— then he “willfully retained” top secret documents, revealed those documents to others, and lied to federal investigators about whether he even had them. And this is the second way the comparison of the two cases falls apart. Personally I believe Hunter Biden’s lawbreaking deserves a reckoning more severe than a slap on the wrist, but no one could argue that his crimes posed any threat to our national security. Federal prosecutors can and will argue that Donald Trump’s alleged lawbreaking did.
That’s why, typically, the DOJ does seek prison time and not just a slap on the wrist in a case like Trump’s. He complained after he was indicted that “the Espionage Act has been used to go after traitors and spies.” But it’s usually not that simple.
An Air Force lieutenant colonel named Robert Birchum was sentenced earlier this year to three years in prison for storing classified documents in his home and in a storage shed next to it. An FBI analyst named Kendra Kingsbury was sentenced last year to federal prison for storing national defense information in her home. A retired Army Special Forces sergeant named Jeremy Brown, charged with the same crime among others, got seven years. And there are others. None was convicted of betraying their nation. They were convicted of possessing documents with which they, or someone else, could.
And here’s the third way any comparison falls apart: Hunter Biden has agreed to plead guilty to the charges against him. If history is any guide, it will be a cold day in hell before Donald Trump pleads guilty to anything.
Of course the Republicans in Congress also are going after Biden— as a path to incriminating his father— for business dealings and handsome profits in both Ukraine and China. But we’re still waiting for them to “show us the money.” They’ve held hearings in both the House Oversight and House Judiciary Committees— where Donald Trump’s misdeeds don’t rate a mention— and they bloviate a lot about what they’ve got against the Bidens. But so far, if they have much more than dark suspicions, they have kept it a secret.
I’ve covered presidents off and on since Richard Nixon, and none has steered clear of scandal. Nixon of course had Watergate, for Gerald Ford it was his Nixon pardon. Jimmy Carter took grief for the way his own brother Billy worked for Libya. Ronald Reagan concealed Iran-Contra. For George H.W. Bush there was discrimination against African-American and Hispanic voters. Bill Clinton infamously lied that “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” George W. Bush went to war on bad advice. Under Barack Obama the IRS targeted conservative groups.
But then along came Donald Trump, who made every predecessor almost seem like a saint. There have been scandals aplenty, culminating in his efforts to overturn the election, his part in the insurrection of January 6th, and his illegal hoarding of top-secret documents that could fall into the wrong hands, not to mention his unrelated conviction just last month for sexual assault.
The rationale for Hunter Biden’s penalty-free plea deal is debatable, and I for one don’t like it. But there is no comparison to the case of Donald Trump. No one deserves to get away with only a “traffic ticket” for what Trump apparently has done.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Never does trump directly answer the accusations against him. He always deflects by attacking someone else. It's his MO. Childish for sure but his followers fall for it.
Well said. Thanks Greg.
Do you think it’s trump or guiliani or lindell who is actually Rep Comer’s secret, disappearing informant?