Joe Biden spoke about guns just hours after his son was convicted on three gun charges. He did so without mentioning Hunter but instead focused on threatening Americans. Meanwhile, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy noticed a huge problem.

In the wake of Hunter Biden’s conviction on three slam-dunk felony firearm charges, we’ve now had a victory-lap press conference by so-called special counsel David Weiss, and the predictable chest-beating by Biden apologists about how the president’s Justice Department courageously prosecuted the president’s son without fear or favor.

Astonishing chutzpah, even from this crowd.

The crimes found by the jury were committed on October 12, 2018, and were fully known to law enforcement within less than two weeks when the gun was recovered after the defendant’s then-girlfriend — the wife of his late brother, whom he’d also gotten hooked on crack — took the Colt Cobra .38, which he’d illegally purchased while lying on the required federal form, and recklessly discarded it in a trash bin near a school, out of fear that in his drug-addled state he’d hurt himself or others. If the defendant’s name had been Robert Hunter Smith, any normal federal prosecutor would have prosecuted him for these crimes by early 2019, if not sooner — and there’d have been no concerns about the Secret Service mysteriously intervening to make the damning evidence disappear.

But the defendant was named Robert Hunter Biden and the federal prosecutor was the abnormally political David Weiss, so the prosecution took six years — and if Weiss and the Biden Justice Department had had their way, it wouldn’t have happened at all.

Yes, Weiss was appointed by Donald Trump, McCarthy concedes, but “only due to the recommendation of two Biden-allied Democratic senators.” That must be why “Weiss was the only Trump-appointed U.S. attorney who was not defrocked” when Biden took office. At that point, Weiss had already procrastinated on Hunter’s case for two years.

During the first three years of the Biden administration, Weiss spent most of the time sitting on his hands as the statute of limitations chewed up the Biden investigation. Especially egregious was his willful failure to move on tax offenses (and potentially other offenses) based on Hunter’s peddling of his father’s political influence during the last years of the Obama administration, when the elder Biden was vice president (e.g., Hunter’s raking in millions from the corrupt Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, while dad pressured Kyiv to fire the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma). Because of Weiss, those crimes can no longer be prosecuted (which is why they are not in the tax indictment Weiss finally brought after his effort to tank the case entirely failed).

Much attention has been paid to the failed sweetheart plea deal on which Weiss colluded with Hunter Biden’s lawyers. That’s entirely appropriate, but it is easy to forget that Weiss tried to make the case go away with no charges at all. That became politically impossible once the whistleblower revelations about Biden Justice Department interference in the investigation became public.

It was only at that point that Weiss’s objective became the formulation of a plea bargain that would (a) make it look like the president’s son was being held accountable, (b) ensure that the president’s son faced no imprisonment on either the gun felonies or the evasion of tax on over $4 million in income (i.e., the evasion crimes still left after Weiss let the statute of limitations lapse on the earlier ones), and © concoct a vaguely worded, carefully hidden immunity term that would prevent Hunter from being prosecuted on any crimes arising out of the 2014–19 timeframe — covered in a “statement of facts” (see here, “Attachment A — Statement of Facts”) that was obviously written by Hunter’s lawyers rather than prosecutors. That last part of the scheme would enable Hunter to claim immunity from prosecution no matter what damning evidence was unearthed by the House committees investigating the Biden family business of international influence-peddling, regardless of whether a Republican administration took over the Justice Department in 2025.

Only an honest judge and “a fit of pique” from Biden’s lawyers prevented the deal from happening. More of what McCarthy called “play-acting” was even more egregious. AG Merrick Garland dubiously pretended Weiss was in charge while Weiss ludicrously pretended U.S. attorneys in other states were thwarting him.

Clearly, Garland and Weiss were trying to pull off a hat trick: (1) making it appear that there was a good faith investigation of Hunter Biden, while (2) refraining from bringing any actual charges against Hunter Biden, and (3) seeking an opportune time to drop the investigation on the pretext that the evidence was insufficient — even as Republican-controlled House committees gathered mounting evidence of Hunter’s lucrative influence-peddling and perusal of his laptop data kept yielding more proof of criminality.

The circle proved impossible to square when the sweetheart plea deal blew up. That debacle brought unprecedented scrutiny to the overwhelming evidence of Hunter’s guilt. Ergo, pressure mounted on Garland to appoint a special counsel. Finally, Garland relented — in a manner of speaking. The special counsel he chose was … yes … Weiss — the very prosecutor who had spent five years sabotaging the investigation.

This could not have been more fraudulent.

The same goes for the upcoming tax trial, but even more so for the Biden Crime Family’s influence-peddling operation.

National Review subscribers can read the whole thing here.