It’s not just crackpot antisemite podcaster Candace Owens who is giving Hunter Biden uncritical attention so he can rewrite history.
Inexplicably, top Trump administration officials are also validating the former crackhead first son’s outrageous lie that he was prosecuted only because he was Joe Biden’s son.
It’s not clear why Acting AG Todd Blanche and VP JD Vance cited Hunter this week as their exemplar of bipartisan largesse to defend the new $1.7 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” for victims of lawfare, but it was a terrible idea.
It’s so terrible, you could be forgiven for wondering if it was dreamed up by deep-staters intent on denying justice to the real victims of the Biden administration’s lawfare.
People like Michael Flynn, Michael Caputo, Christina Bobb, Jeff Clark, Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon, Tina Peters, Carter Page, Bevelyn Williams, Mark Houck, Father Fidelis Moscinski, Tom Barrack and Matthew Perna suffered a variety of life-altering consequences when they were maliciously and selectively investigated and prosecuted by Joe Biden’s FBI and DOJ just because they supported Donald Trump.
Hundreds of these victims were targeted, whether to stop them from helping Trump or simply to serve as a wider warning that anyone associated with Trump or his conservative agenda will come to harm.
Some served prison time, many faced FBI dawn raids and ongoing surveillance, fines, disbarment, debanking, crippling legal bills and bankruptcy.
Even if they were acquitted or never indicted, careers and reputations were destroyed, and many suffered lasting harm to their physical and mental health.
And there were suicides.
Blanche announced the $1.776 (get it?!) billion compensation fund on Monday, aimed at helping people who were selectively targeted for investigation or prosecution under the Biden administration.
The next day, when testifying before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, Blanche came under heavy fire from Democrats who smelled blood because the botched rollout of the fund had made it vulnerable to accusations that it’s a corrupt “slush fund” for Trump’s cronies.
The lawfare compensation fund is a noble cause, along the lines of an asbestos victims’ compensation fund or a fund the Catholic Church in Australia set up for victims of historical sexual abuse.
In this case, it would at least repay millions of dollars in legal fees and perhaps health costs incurred by lawfare victims.
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A gift to Dems
But instead of setting up a clean, easily understood and justifiable mechanism, the DOJ handed the Dems the gift of tying the fund to Trump’s legal agreement with the IRS that he would drop his $10 billion lawsuit over the IRS leak of his private tax information.
Cue Trump Derangement Syndrome.
The cutesy 1776 allusion in the compensation total was bonus idiocy from people who don’t understand this is not a game. It’s war, and there are victims who need to be made whole.
To make things worse, some bright spark decided to head off anticipated criticism that the lawfare fund was partisan by coming up with the too-clever-by-half talking point that Hunter, of all people, could apply.
“Whether you’re Hunter Biden or whether you’re another individual who believed they were a victim of weaponization, they can all apply,” Blanche told senators Tuesday.
Vance echoed the talking point: “This is about compensating Americans for the lawfare they experienced under the last administration.
“Republicans can apply for it, Democrats can apply for it . . . If Hunter Biden wants to apply for this particular fund, he’s welcome to.”
Hunter Biden was not a victim of the Biden administration’s dirty tricks.
He was a chief beneficiary.
Need I point to the CIA’s Dirty 51 letter, the bogus sweetheart plea deal, the FBI coverup, the multiple whistleblowers crushed for alerting authorities to the Biden family’s lucrative international influence-peddling schemes?
Yet at the first whiff of criticism, Hunter has been canonized by Republicans as a potential lawfare victim, brandished as if he were garlic to a vampire, with no thought given to the consequences to truth and justice.
Why would the DOJ want to pretend this is a bipartisan process?
It was not Democrats who were targeted by Biden’s DOJ.
The lawfare went only one way.
In most cases, the facts of unreasonable, overzealous, politicized investigations and prosecutions are clear-cut, from Russiagate, which was built on a lie, the J6 witch hunt with its years of punitive pretrial detention, to the weaponization of the FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances) Act to persecute peaceful pro-lifers.
The victims were all conservatives, Republicans and Trump allies.
Slap in the face
Perhaps most egregious of all, pretending that Hunter might qualify for compensation is a slap in the face to honorable IRS agents Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler, who blew the whistle on the Biden administration’s obstruction of their legitimate five-year investigation of the protected former first son’s tax fraud.
It implies that the subsequent successful prosecutions of Hunter in California and Delaware on tax fraud and gun charges were illegitimate.
Shapley and Ziegler’s disclosures to Congress led an honest judge to question the dodgy plea deal Hunter’s pricey lawyers had stitched up with his father’s DOJ.
The only reason he’s not in prison is that his father gave him a blanket pardon covering all crimes dating back to 2014, the beginning of the Ukraine grift.
Far from justifying what critics call a slush fund for the president’s friends, the foolish Hunter Biden ruse has undermined the purpose of the compensation.
Oh, how the Democrats must laugh.
I’m always dubious about a big honeypot of taxpayer money because it invariably benefits fraudsters. But there is still a way to make this work.
What some insiders have suggested should accompany the compensation is a sort of Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which would collect testimony from victims, witnesses and perpetrators in order to create a historical record, acknowledge the harm done to the victims, allow Americans to understand the truth of the abuses of that dark period, break the cycle of retribution and prepare a path for national healing.
We can only hope that the provision of a cash payout is not a taxpayer-funded consolation prize in lieu of what Joe Biden’s lawfare victims crave more than anything — to restore their good name and have their lawless persecutors brought to account.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
