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As of time of writing, it’s possible the Hunter Biden plea deal may be falling apart.
Apparently the government isn’t after all quite willing to dismiss any future gun related charges after being pressed by the judge. If this is the case it looks like the media circus about the plea deal being unethical might not even have been necessary? It’s my opinion that the court process usually figures this stuff out on its own, unless anyone thinks media attention somehow influences the in court decisions of any interested parties significantly?
My personal understanding of the situation is that while influence-selling and corruption have been going on for quite a while, there was generally a level of discretion involved - the system may be incredibly corrupt and deeply compromised by both vested interests and foreign powers, but they do their best to maintain the appearance of good behavior, because that image does actually matter to the public. Hunter Biden is unique simply because he has been so incompetent, careless and nakedly corrupt that the human machinery of the state is revolting in protest. Taking money from Russia in order to approve uranium exports or taking money from tax preparation software companies in order to make sure taxation stays arcane and convoluted is just business as usual... but there's enough plausible deniability that they can make a case for their innocence which stands up to the incredibly anaemic scrutiny provided by the media.
But Hunter Biden is a level beyond that. Not hiding his crack addiction at all, not hiding his corruption or influence-trading, getting super high and drunk and just leaving laptops with mountains of incredibly incriminating evidence at repairshops and ignoring the calls about it... he was just incredibly sloppy, and he was incredibly sloppy on camera. While the media doesn't dare report on it, when you think about the actual implications of the content that's on the laptop it becomes clear just how severe a breach this is. Why would someone take a bunch of photos of them doing crack and having sex with prostitutes in China, photos that make their identity crystal clear? I've been to some pretty wild parties, but I can't think of any innocent reason as to why he took the pictures he did. Rather, I think that there's a very plausible case to be made that those photos were Hunter's copy of the blackmail material he provided to his foreign partners.
There's just so much evidence of wrongdoing, and the sheer amount of fingers being planted on the scale to make that mountain of problems go away is egregiously offensive to a lot of the human infrastructure of the state - which is why we're getting so many whistleblowers on this case. The administration and DOJ want to make it go away, but the corruption and influence-trading here is so on-the-nose and blatant that even democrat-aligned government workers are coming forward and whistleblowing. Hillary at least had the sense to make sure her corruption was murky, hidden and plausibly deniable - but anyone who can post on this site can go stare at the photos of Hunter Biden staring into the camera as he measures out a precise amount of crack, smokes it and then fucks a prostitute, all the while reading about how multiple former business partners have come forward and spoken about how the Bidens screwed them over while selling influence. The system can tolerate a lot of corruption, but Hunter has just been so incredibly sloppy and his corruption is so undeniably blatant that it represents a bridge too far for a lot of people.
I think this is basically the same reason why Trump was and is subject to such extraordinary scrutiny. His level of corruption is in the same ballpark as other recent presidents, but he is too sloppy and is unable or unwilling to correctly play the plausible deniability game.
Actually I think he has substantially less corruption. He already made his money with "deals", buildings, dodgy scams like selling non-kosher vodka to Israel and Trump University, so he doesn't have to actually engage with a lot of the influence-selling and other scams. I don't think there's anything in Trump's past that compares to the Burisma business that Biden is involved in, for instance.
One reason that Trump does not have a scandal where he sold influence in the past is that he did not hold elective office before being President. He really did not have the chance to be corrupt in that way.
He seems less dodgy than most land developers, especially New York ones, but that is not the highest bar.
The most obvious place where he could have been worse than Biden is in Epstein-like behavior, but it seems that he is not interested in teen girls. His type is very obvious, and that has kept his troubles contained. Stormy Daniels is 44, so she was 27 when they had their dalliance. His affair with Karen McDougal was when she was 39 (which is almost respectable and obeyed the half your age + 7 rule - just). Alana Evans, who failed to show up for Trump, was 34 at the time.
Yeah, I don't think he's uniquely morally strong or anything - hell, I think influence selling would have been in his character if he was in politics, he's just wealthy enough already that he didn't actually need to do it. Even still, I think having a leader that isn't in the pocket of one or more large donors is a positive by itself no matter how it happened.
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