Rigged: How Donald Trump and Hunter Biden are building defenses around claims of bias
Kaelan Deese
Video Embed
Former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden‘s son Hunter have found a rare commonality in that they are both building defenses around their allegations of bias by the Justice Department.
After Trump’s 34-count indictment on April 4 over an alleged hush money scheme and the three other criminal indictments that followed, the former president claimed the charges are nothing more than a “politically motivated witch hunt” concocted by corrupt prosecutors whose aim is to keep him from running for president on 2024.
DOJ BLOCKED FORMER HUNTER BIDEN PROSECUTOR FROM DISCUSSING CASE WITH CONGRESS
How Hunter Biden tore a page from Trump’s ‘partisan’ witch hunt playbook
Hunter Biden‘s legal woes didn’t fully actualize until June 20, when he was charged with two misdemeanor tax offenses and a felony firearm charge. The president’s son sought a plea deal with prosecutors, but after scrutiny of that deal from a Delaware federal court in July, he now faces three counts related to possessing a gun as a drug user. Following a separate indictment in early December, he is scheduled to be arraigned on three felony and six misdemeanor tax offenses in California on Jan. 11.
The younger Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell recently composed a strikingly similar defense to Trump’s corruption and bias allegations as his client seeks to fight his felony gun charges. Lowell claimed there were “certain instances that appear to suggest incessant, improper, and partisan pressure applied” by then-President Trump to then-Attorney General William Barr and two ranking deputies, Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Donoghue.
Lowell’s allegations were made in a request to subpoena Trump and other officials in the gun case. Prosecutor Leo Wise responded in court documents on Dec. 4 that Hunter Biden’s claims were “inadmissible, far-reaching,” and concerned people who weren’t making the relevant prosecutorial decisions in the case.
U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika, the presiding judge over the younger Biden’s gun case, has yet to decide whether to allow subpoenas for Trump and the former officials.
The first son sought to crystallize his view that he is being unfairly targeted when he declined a House GOP request to sit for a closed-door deposition at the Capitol on Dec. 13, just hours before Republicans launched their impeachment inquiry into his father. The investigation led by multiple GOP-led House committees is seeking to prove the younger Biden’s overseas business dealings were brokered by corrupt influence-peddling deals that used his father’s name as leverage.
Trump’s weaponized justice claims are twofold
For Trump, making the case that the DOJ is unfairly targeting him is in part a legal defense and a 2024 campaign reelection strategy to appeal to his base, some of whom believe the government is unfairly charging hundreds of defendants who were prosecuted for certain actions at the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally at the Capitol.
To be sure, at least half of Republicans surveyed by Reuters-Ipsos earlier this year said if Trump were to be convicted in any of his four criminal cases, it wouldn’t stop them from voting for him.
Trump also has a unique angle to point to his 2017-21 term in office and say that the country functioned without much disarray. Despite the nonstop criticism from the media, the Democrats, and his eventual acquittal from two impeachment votes, he can point to matters like the Russian collusion investigations.
In the federal 2020 election subversion case brought by special counsel Jack Smith, Trump has been fighting a tangential battle that will likely be headed toward the Supreme Court over a gag order that bars him from speaking any rhetoric about prosecutors and witnesses who could be brought to testify in that case during a trial next year. Trump has openly bashed this order as an infringement on his First Amendment rights to speak to the nation as he mounts his 2024 election bid.
An appeals court has since paired back that gag order by some degree, freeing Trump to go after Smith, the public face of the prosecution, and now allows Trump to criticize witnesses only if his remarks were not connected to their roles in the case.
Trump makes the case that his judges are biased
Trump is also under another limited gag order in his civil business fraud trial in New York, which is presided over by Judge Arthur Engoron. The former president has gone to extensive efforts to make this trial seem one-sided against him, a tactic that is fueled by Engoron’s pretrial ruling on Sept. 26 that found him and his family fraudulently inflated the value of his properties and other assets.
Engoron fined Trump a total of $15,000 for twice violating the order.
“Incendiary untruths can and have led to serious physical harm. I will now allow the defendant to explain why this should not end up with serious sanctions or I could possibly imprison him,” Engoron said on Oct. 20 after finding Trump failed to delete a post about his clerk.
Republicans, including Trump, have alleged Engoron is a partisan actor because records show he’s made over $5,000 in political donations since 1999 exclusively to Democratic candidates and committees.
But the crux of the gag order in that case was prompted by Engoron’s frustrations at Trump and his attorneys for making comments about the clerk who sits next to him during the trial, Allison Greenfield. Trump at one point said there were grounds for a mistrial, pointing to Greenfield’s more than $1,000 in donations to various Democratic campaigns and causes in 2023 alone.
Trump has sought to make similar bias connections about a Colorado judge who previously made a $100 donation to a group that likened the Jan. 6 Capitol riot to an “insurrection.” Judge Sarah Wallace was tasked to find whether Trump could be disqualified from the ballot in the state under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and she refused to bend to recusal requests from Trump’s team.
The donation was made by Wallace before she became a judge, and she declined to boot Trump from the state ballot despite finding that the evidence showed Trump did engage in insurrection through “incitement.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
On Dec. 19, Wallace’s ruling was overturned in a 4-3 decision by the Colorado Supreme Court, which found that the language of Section 3 applies to the presidency and thereby found that Trump cannot be on the ballot.
Trump is poised to appeal this ruling to the Supreme Court after Christmas, declaring the move as “nonsense” and a form of “election interference.”