Why Merrick Garland is who to 'thank' for Hunter Biden’s conviction: ex-federal prosecutor

11 June 2024

President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, was found guilty on all three of his gun-related charges by a Delaware jury on Tuesday.

In an op-ed published by The Daily Beast after the verdict, former federal prosecutor Shan Wu argues Hunter Biden's prosecution was "yet another example of the consequences of" US Attorney General Merrick Garland’s "approach to leading the DOJ [Department of Justice]."

Wu writes:

Conservative thinker Norm Ornstein and journalist Dahlia Lithwick wrote in Slate that while all Americans tend to have a normalcy bias, '[l]awyers have an almost terrifying normalcy bias. It leads them to assume that so long as they are winning good cases it means the justice system is a pathway to winning the larger political debate.'

There is no better example of this than Merrick Garland, whose obsession with cleansing the partisan poop smeared on the Justice Department walls by Trump officials, like former Attorney General Bill Barr, has led him on a slow death march right into ever-deeper piles of poop.

The former federal prosecutor also argues:

The AG’s delay in pursuing Donald Trump and his inner circle in the Jan. 6 cases—and allowing Special Counsel Robert Hur to make partisan slurs against President Joe Biden’s mental alertness under cover of clearing the president of wrongdoing—all may be well-intentioned efforts to appear that he is being non-partisan and independent of the White House. But all of those decisions have contributed to the robust comeback of former President Trump and his supporters.

Still, Republicans like Dan Eberhart, a GOP donor, told NBC News that "Hunter Biden’s conviction definitely weakens the argument" from Trumpworld that his own conviction is a result of the "weaponization" of the US justice system.

"To me, the justice system is working," Eberhart said.

Wu acknowledges, "There is little question that" Hunter Biden "would not have been charged but for his last name, and also little question that Garland believes this particular prosecution shows his DOJ brings cases 'without fear or favor'—one of his favorite phrases."

However, Wu adds, "Such a politically charged prosecution—the first-ever conviction of the son of a sitting president—smacks of both fear and favor on the part of Garland. It reeks of his fear over accusations of partisanship, which has resulted in little visible benefit to DOJ, while also being constantly attacked and denigrated."

The ex-federal prosecutor concludes, "We have Attorney General Merrick Garland to thank for the fact the case was brought, and that it was tried in the politically explosive time of a presidential campaign, only a month before the start of the Republican convention and two months before the Democratic one."

Wu's full op-ed is available at this link (subscription required).

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