OPINION:
Don’t be fooled by Hunter Biden‘s conviction this past week on three gun charges.
Sure, he’s guilty, but it’s just a distraction, like the Monica Lewinsky case during the Clinton administration. More on that later.
The real scandals involving the Biden family, China, Ukraine, Russia, 20 shell bank accounts and possibly President Biden himself are being ignored by the Justice Department and the media.
The gun disgrace is one of the few scandals lurking in Hunter’s “laptop from hell” that doesn’t entangle the rest of the Bidens, who are hip-deep in influence peddling.
Special counsel David Weiss has done everything possible to avoid prosecuting the real crimes. He slow-walked investigations, let statutes of limitations run out and even tipped off the Biden lawyers about classified documents at the Biden home and office.
Contrast that with the FBI’s raiding former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, as well as the homes of several of his former aides.
By the way, Hunter Biden is facing charges in Los Angeles involving $1.4 million in allegedly unpaid federal taxes from 2016 to 2019. Have you heard about that? I thought not.
Hunter’s gun charge conviction is supposed to cover the fact that Democrats are ruthlessly using the legal system to persecute their main opponent and his aides in multiple jurisdictions purely for political reasons.
They are also using federal agencies to punish dissenters from their “woke” agenda, like the way former President Barack Obama’s IRS illegally targeted tea party and other conservative groups.
Hunter’s conviction, however, is supposed to show us that justice is blind.
A Washington Post editorial cartoon perfectly expressed this with a “both sides do it” theme. It showed a newsstand headline of Hunter’s conviction and another showing Republicans lamenting the “weaponization” of the justice system. We’re even now, OK?
Similarly, the Monica Lewinsky sexcapade in the late 1990s embarrassed President Bill Clinton and got him impeached but kept the spotlight off the far more serious “Chinagate” scandal.
That’s when the Clinton administration greenlighted sensitive American technology to China in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding for Democratic campaigns.
A president committing perjury is bad, and his seduction of a barely adult White House intern is morally reprehensible. But it wasn’t treason like Chinagate or President Biden’s deliberate refusal to secure the border.
Or Mr. Biden’s attacks on fossil fuels and gasoline-powered vehicles to force us to rely on China for battery components, solar panels and windmill parts.
The Clintons modeled this kind of sellout. In his 1999 book “Betrayal: How the Clinton Administration Undermined National Security,” Bill Gertz, The Washington Times’ defense and national security correspondent, explains how the Clinton administration eased exports of sensitive, high-speed computer, software and satellite technology to China in exchange for campaign funds from big-pocket Democratic donors.
“Shortly after the ‘decontrols’ took place,” he wrote, “American supercomputers began showing up in both Chinese and Russian nuclear weapons development centers.”
Money also came in from China itself and Russia.
A bagman, Johnny Chung, “first met the Clintons in 1992,” according to American Spectator investigative reporter Robert Zapesochny. “From 1994 to 1996, Chung visited the White House 49 times. … In one visit, Chung paid the DNC $50,000.”
Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 for a Moscow speech after Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved giving Russians control of one-fifth of America’s uranium capacity.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton and the Democratic National Committee paid for the salacious Steele dossier that the media used as a club to bash Mr. Trump.
When it was found to be a fraud, the DNC was fined $105,000 and Mrs. Clinton a mere $8,000 for misrepresenting the payments as “legal services.” That’s essentially the same charge that landed Mr. Trump with 34 felony convictions in a New York court last month. Only Mr. Trump had actually sent the money to his lawyer.
Earlier, Mrs. Clinton falsely accused Mr. Trump of colluding with a Russian bank while prodding the FBI to spy on him. This began the “Russian collusion” hoax. One of the masterminds was Jake Sullivan, who is now President Biden’s national security adviser. See a pattern here?
Mrs. Clinton, whose home basement server compromised national security, erased 33,000 emails sought by investigators and had several cellphones full of evidence smashed. No penalties whatsoever.
Contrast this with Mr. Trump, who was impeached twice on trumped-up charges. Now, along with his loss in a New York civil case with no victims, he faces prison time and hundreds of millions in fines. Meanwhile, Democrats are prosecuting him in three more courts.
Former Trump aide Peter Navarro is serving a four-month prison term for defying a Jan. 6 committee subpoena. He refuses to discuss confidential conversations in the White House. Another former aide, Steve Bannon, was also convicted of contempt of Congress and is slated to enter prison on July 1.
Think about all this while you see story after story about poor Hunter Biden and his beleaguered family and how his conviction somehow “upholds the rule of law.”
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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