Hunter Biden, the president’s son, was convicted this week of lying to a federally licensed gun dealer and thus illegally possessing a firearm in 2018. The Biden family got the full-on mawkish treatment from painfully sympathetic reporter Katie Rogers in Wednesday’s New York Times. “A Guilty Verdict for Hunter Biden Weighs on a Worried President Biden.”
Hunter Biden was waiting for his father on the tarmac.
He had just been convicted on three felony gun charges by a jury in Wilmington, Del., his hometown. His father had hastily rearranged his schedule and rushed up from Washington.
Within hours of the verdict, President Biden traveled home, disembarked from Marine One and embraced his son. The president hugged Hunter Biden’s son and wife, as well, and bent over to kiss the head of his grandson, Beau Biden.
To call the relationship between father and son battle tested is an understatement.
Together they have survived the deaths of Mr. Biden’s first wife, eldest daughter and eldest son. They have weathered the fallout of crack addiction and alcohol abuse that has plagued Hunter Biden as well as several other members of the family. Over the past three years, they have been targeted by Republicans who have accused them of corruption and financial crimes.
But for all of the challenges that have tested them and ultimately brought them closer together, a guilty verdict in a federal courtroom -- rendered in the middle of Mr. Biden’s final presidential campaign -- is a first.
People close to Mr. Biden say he still believes in his son and his ability to stay clean. Hunter Biden has maintained that he has been sober since 2019. But the president has come to terms with the fact that there will be no easy end to his son’s legal problems.
Rogers gave the president points for staying close to his troubled son, which really isn’t the highest bar to clear.
Over years of personal and legal scandals surrounding his son, Mr. Biden has refused to shut out his son or treat him as a political liability -- in fact, the president has a tendency to pull his son closer the worse things seem to get.
Rogers also manufactured this spin on CNN:
Gush on 'Erin Burnett Outfront,' as the CNN host nudges @nytimes reporter Katie Rogers to tell people just how emotionally affecting all this Hunter legal drama is on the president.
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) June 13, 2024
Or as AI summarizes: "It highlights the president's support for his son's recovery." pic.twitter.com/mYTzeYNfhu
In September 2023, Rogers also treated the Hunter Biden crime story as a sentimental family one under the headline “Biden Puts Son First, In Spite of Political Price.”
P.S. In Charlie Savage’s “Convictions of Biden’s Son and Trump Put the Justice System on Trial,” the paper’s legal reporter gave liberal Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) the last word but skipped his hypocrisy:
Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on Mr. Comer’s Oversight Committee, emphasized the differences in approach [between Republicans on Trump’s felony conviction vs. Democrats on Hunter Biden’s].
At the same hearing as Mr. McGovern, [Raskin] noted that he had “not heard a single Democrat anywhere in the country cry ‘fraud,’ cry ‘fixed,’ cry ‘rigged,’ cry ‘kangaroo court’” in response to Hunter Biden’s federal conviction, as Republicans had after Mr. Trump’s conviction -- even as they pushed a conspiracy theory that President Biden somehow controlled the state case.
“Compare and contrast the difference in reaction between the Republicans and the Democrats,” Mr. Raskin said. “The Republicans are attacking our entire system of justice and the rule of law because they don’t like the way that one case came out, whereas the son of the president of the United States is prosecuted and I don’t hear a single Democrat crying foul.”
This ignores that attacking the prosecutor in Hunter's case would mean attacking the Biden Justice Department's Special Counsel. Speaking of “attacking our entire system of justice,” two weeks ago Raskin attacked the Supreme Court in an impossibly lame Times op-ed and just introduced legislation to rein in the “rogue” court.
