'Brazen Republican hypocrisy' over Biden family’s foreign business deals called out

Former President Donald Trump, facing four criminal indictments, has repeatedly said that prosecutors should be going after the "Biden crime family" instead of him. And that type of rhetoric is being echoed by Trump's defenders in right-wing media, who continue to claim that journalists are paying too much attention to the Trump cases while downplaying Hunter Biden's legal problems.

But Rachel Maddow producer Steve Benen, in an op-ed published by MSNBC's website on August 23, lays out some reasons why Trump's accusations against President Joe Biden and Hunter Biden are disingenuous and wildly misleading.

"When Republicans admonish President Joe Biden for politicizing the Justice Department and 'weaponizing' federal law enforcement," Benen argues, "there are a couple of obvious problems. The first, of course, is the fact that the complaints are detached from reality: The White House and the Attorney General's Office simply haven't done what their GOP critics have alleged. But the other dramatic flaw in this line of attack is the brazen hypocrisy: Donald Trump went further than any president since Watergate to turn federal law enforcement into an instrument of raw political power."

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Trump, Benen notes, "quite literally asked Justice Department officials to prosecute his political enemies, without regard for evidence or merit." And Benen adds that Republicans have repeatedly attacked members of the Biden family for their involvement in "international business deals" — despite the fact that GOP presidents, including Trump, have also done that.

"Unlike the 'weaponization' claims," Benen explains, "this isn't necessarily ridiculous — some of Biden's relatives really have been involved in business agreements with foreign entities. But like the 'weaponization' claims, there's a striking degree of hypocrisy that Republicans prefer to simply ignore. A New York Times analysis highlighted Trump's selective outrage 'when it comes to presidential families taking millions of dollars from foreign countries.'"

In an article published on August 22, the New York Times' Peter Baker emphasized that members of the Trump family have engaged in plenty of international business deals.

Benen writes, "The point is not that Biden's relatives have steered clear of foreign deals. We know better.… But if we're going to have a needlessly acerbic public conversation about such private-sector work, can Republicans at least pretend to show an interest in the fact that Trump engaged in far more outlandish behavior in this space, without so much as a shoulder shrug from GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill?"

READ MORE: Republicans' 'untethered' Hunter Biden claims demolished by WaPo fact-checker

Read Steve Benen's full MSNBC column at this link.