The headline of The Washington Post’s “EXCLUSIVE” gives the Democrats’ game away: Hunter Biden isn’t going to prison, and two-tiered justice is alive and well in the good ol’ US of A. If that sounds deeply cynical, well, mission accomplished. We’ve been down this rigged road too many times before, haven’t we?

“Federal agents see chargeable tax, gun-purchase case against Hunter Biden,” reads the aforementioned Post headline, and it’s followed by a subhead meant to work the refs: “Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a Trump appointee, must decide whether to charge the son of the current president.”

So there you have it: Nothing will happen between now and the November 8 midterms, because the Golden Rule of the Department of Justice says that no federal indictments shall issue forth against Democrats within 90 days of an election. But Hunter Biden will be charged sometime after the Democrats get spanked in next month’s midterms. He’ll pay some fines for failing to report income, and he’ll get a slap on the wrist for lying about his drug addiction on that federal gun form. And that’ll be that.

Then, sometime after all this Hunter smoke has cleared — or perhaps before, depending on how bad is the Democrats’ shellacking, and how loud are their recriminations toward the party’s dithering, doddering standard-bearer — Big Guy Joe Biden will announce once and for all that he’s not running for reelection in 2024. But — and this is a key point — he’ll be able to finish out his disastrous term knowing that the investigation into the Biden Crime Family’s influence peddling and corrupt business dealings will have ended with his son.

Conspicuously absent from the Post’s EXCLUSIVE, as columnist Miranda Devine notes, “is any mention of previously mooted charges over money laundering and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), both of which could lead prosecutors to inspect the president’s involvement in an influence-peddling scheme run by his son and brother Jim Biden during Joe’s time as vice president.” Seems like a pretty glaring oversight for a paper that wins so many Pulitzers, no?

As Scott Johnson writes at Power Line: “The Hunter Biden case is not the Hunter Biden case. It’s the Joe Biden case. All the rest is the saga of a corrupt and degraded reprobate.”

Johnson continues: “In his New York Post column on the leaked story, [former federal prosecutor] Andrew McCarthy musters the high level of cynicism to read it correctly. He first mocks the Post for its suppression of the underlying story and its self-congratulatory story on the leak.”

Then Johnson turns it over to McCarthy, who reads the same tea leaves we did:

[H]ere is the theater I envision: The Justice Department will announce a guilty plea deal to trivial charges. Hunter will emote his deeply sincere contrition. President Biden will beat his chest and say, “See, I didn’t interfere in any way whatsoever” (I doubt he’ll add “just like I never discussed my son’s foreign business deals”). And the Justice Department will convene the victory-lap press conference at which it congratulates itself for its courage and independence in prosecuting the president’s son, without fear or favor.

And then they’ll hope the whole thing goes away. Case closed. The guilty plea settles all outstanding issues. Swept under the prosecutorial rug is any mention of the corruption and self-dealing in which the president himself is implicated.

Let’s face it: There are nearly 1,500 words in the Post’s article, and not one of them is “Bobulinski,” and not one of them is “China.” What this is, then, is an intentional leak from Team Biden and the DOJ to its most reliably friendly news organ. It’s a nothingburger meant to reassure jaded voters just before the midterms that there isn’t a two-tiered justice system (even though we all know that there is) and that no one is above the law (even though we know that some people are).

How do we know it was a leak from the Left and not the Right? Because Hunter Biden’s faux-indignant attorney, Chris Clark, told us so: “It is a federal felony for a federal agent to rake information about a grand jury investigation such as this one. Any agent you cite as a source in your article apparently has committed to such a felony. We expect the department of justice will diligently investigate and prosecute such bad actors.”

Yeah, right. Within weeks of the January 6 Capitol riot, this DOJ arrested hundreds and hundreds of protesters and charged them with various federal crimes. And yet the investigation into Hunter Biden has been ongoing since 2018, and our corrupt FBI has had the guy’s deeply incriminating laptop computer in its possession for nearly three years — and we’re still awaiting so much as a jaywalking charge.

There’s one other possibility here, as Mark Alexander puts forth: “If Hunter is not able to cop an expensive plea deal to short-circuit all potential indictments, some of which may not be pardonable with just heavy fines, however unlikely, federal prosecutors may sweep up the Big Guy in their dragnet.”

For obvious reasons, we don’t think Hunter will take that risk if he can avoid it. This is two-tiered justice, after all.

Updated with a more cynical analysis from Andrew McCarthy.