News flash: Republicans haven’t said it in so many words, but they seem to have a new line of attack against President Joe Biden: He suffers from dissociative identity disorder. Biden has multiple personalities.
For months on end, Republicans have hammered the message that he’s an addled octogenarian — a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” in the gratuitous, much-repeated words of the Republican special counsel who cleared Biden of criminality for having a few classified documents.
Then Republicans flipped the script: Biden is a criminal mastermind!
They’re telling us that this political superman has successfully “weaponized” the justice system and executed “the most egregious miscarriage of justice in our nation’s history” by getting a jury to find Donald Trump guilty of 34 felonies in advance of the 2024 election. And stand by for the sentencing: On July 11, Biden the deep state puppetmaster surely will pull Judge Juan M. Merchan’s strings again, to ensure that he throws Trump in the clink.
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“I grew up in Miami listening to the stories about the Castro show trials in Cuba,” Florida’s politically pliant Republican senator, Marco Rubio, wailed in Trump’s defense. “Not even in my worst nightmares would something like that ever happen here in America. But it did.” (It bears repeating: In 2016 Rubio said, “Many people … are going to be having to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump.”)
How does Biden do it? How did he get a state grand jury, trial jury and judge to do his bidding? Well, leave it to Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, that wrestler-turned-congressional combatant who chairs the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government (yes, there really is such a thing), to seek the answer. Jordan has summoned Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Bragg’s lead prosecutor in the Trump trial to testify under oath next Thursday. Never mind that they are New York officials, not cogs in the federal government under Biden’s management.
But, wait — the supposed commander in chief of this weaponized government has morphed yet again. His new persona: Biden the bungler.
Republicans would have us believe that the president engineered a “sham” case to make Trump a convicted felon, and yet Biden has been unable to prevent “his” Justice Department from putting his own son on trial. Hunter Biden is in court now, on three criminal charges alleging that he lied about his drug use when he bought a firearm in 2018.
And there are more prosecutions that only a bungler, not a diabolical mastermind, would have allowed. The Justice Department this week also is trying a Democratic senator, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, on corruption charges. And last month, the DOJ indicted yet another Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, also on bribery charges involving foreign interests.
Apparently Biden created a Frankenstein’s monster out of the nation’s top law-enforcement department, which has not only turned on his own party, but also his own family.Republicans, Fox News and the rest of MAGA Media Inc. are reveling in the Hunter Biden trial, without, of course, acknowledging that it contradicts their co*ckamamie “two-tier system of justice” blather. But even among those celebrating what they consider to be righteous prosecutions, some can’t help themselves. They’re claiming that both the current federal trial and a second one that Hunter Biden faces in September in Los Angeles, on tax-evasion charges, are “rigged.”
Fox News’ Steve Doocy began an interview Monday with right-wing columnist Miranda Devine of the New York Post by noting that Hunter is being tried in Wilmington, Del., President Biden’s hometown and the site of his campaign headquarters. “Every other federal building,” and even a popular I-95 rest stop in Delaware bears the Biden name, Doocy said. Who, he asked, would “want to go against the Biden family?” As if it were a crime family.
Devine, live from Wilmington, played right along. With the president in town over the weekend, she said, “everybody” knows he’s “keeping a very close eye on what Judge Maryellen Noreika is doing in her courtroom.” He’s making “a real conspicuous display of being alongside his son,” she said. That’s a presidential signal, she claims: “ ‘Mess with my son, you mess with me.’ “Hunter Biden’s trial is “the opposite, really, of Donald Trump,” Devine said. “The odds are stacked for Hunter Biden in this case.”
Really?
The investigation of Hunter began six years ago at the Trump Justice Department (without any bleating from Joe Biden about “weaponization of justice”). When the father became president, he kept in place the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney investigating his son, Republican David Weiss. (Can’t you just see Trump, as president, doing the same if a Democratic appointee were investigating Donald Jr.?) When Hunter’s plea deal on gun and tax charges collapsed in July (quashed by the Trump-appointed judge, Noreika), President Biden’s attorney general granted Weiss’ request to become a special counsel. As such, Weiss could bring charges against the son in any federal court. Blame him for choosing Bidenland, Delaware, and blue L.A.
Nothing about Hunter Biden’s humiliating legal predicament suggests odds-stacking by Joe Biden, Mastermind. And God love ‘im, as Biden himself might say. For respecting the rule of law, even against his sole living son.
Jackie Calmes is an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times in Washington, D.C.
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