Hunter Biden Discovers There is No "Nicer' Way to say "I'm Guilty"
Jonathan Turley, johnathanturley.org
Below is my column in Fox.com on the Hunter Biden guilty plea. The plea proved vintage Hunter Biden for all of the wrong reasons. The effort to plead guilty without admitting guilt left him looking like the most privilege person since Marie Antoinette. However, it was consistent with a bizarre criminal defense that never seemed connected to a legal strategy. In a twist on the famous tag line from Love Story, Hunter believed that being a Biden “is never having to say you’re guilty.”
Here is the column:
“Guilty.” That word repeated nine times by Hunter Biden in a federal courtroom in California represented something that he had evaded for much of his life: accountability.
Five years ago, Biden had to explain the rule to ABC News reporter Amy Robach, who had the audacity to ask about his history. Biden instructed the TV journalist to “say it nicer.”
The president’s son spent his adult life with his father, his family, political allies, and reporters enabling every corrupt deal and human debauchery. Even at his plea hearing, Biden was closely shadowed by his so-called “sugar brother” Kevin Morris, who bankrolled his lavish lifestyle for years.
This week, Biden was still demanding that even prosecutors “say it nicer” on the eve of his criminal trial. He created chaos at the start of jury selection by announcing that he would plead guilty but demanded an “Alford plea.” The Alford plea allows a defendant to accept that there is sufficient evidence to convict while declining to admit guilt.
Roughly 17 percent of state cases and 5 percent of federal cases end in Alford or no contest pleas. However, as a criminal defense attorney, I have never heard of a defendant seeking an Alford plea without previously discussing the option with prosecutors. These pleas ordinarily require the approval of prosecutors and Justice Department rules require the approval of high-ranking officials or the Attorney General himself.
Prosecutors were gobsmacked by Biden’s sudden announcement and told the judge that they had not been consulted on the demand. Not surprisingly, they were miffed and quickly opposed any such plea.
The result was all too familiar for those of us who have witnessed the chaos of the Hunter Biden defense. After causing a stir, the effort failed and Biden was left standing in the courtroom repeating a standard guilty plea nine times.
It is the continuation of a legal strategy that could be best described as controlled chaos. In 2023, Biden stood with his lawyers in open defiance of a congressional subpoena outside of Congress. He demanded that the House committees meet his demands for appearing as a witness. After all the drama, the effort failed. Facing a criminal contempt sanction, he appeared as demanded by Congress and was later accused of perjury.
It was the same pattern that emerged when Biden secured a sweetheart plea deal that avoided any jail time, avoided a host of federal charges, and gave him sweeping immunity for unnamed offenses. It collapsed in court when the judge asked the prosecutor if he had ever seen such a deal offered to any other defendant. He admitted that he had not.
The response from the Biden team was the same privileged fit. One lawyer told prosecutors to “just rip it up.” Later the Justice Department attorneys stated that they still tried to reach a new plea deal but that Biden gave them the stiff arm.
The result? An unmitigated failure. Biden was convicted on every gun count before a sympathetic jury in the hometown of the Biden family.
This burning train then continued down the track to California where the team insisted that it would make the same addiction defense that failed in Delaware. It then pulled another jump scare with the Alford plea demand.
From the beginning to the end, it is a series of total failures produced by sheer hubris. As I wrote in 2023, Biden ultimately was undone by his entitlement and appetite. He expects everyone from reporters to representatives to prosecutors to “say it nicer.”
At every stage, his bravado and defiance led to the worst possible result. Ironically, he had a prosecutor in David Weiss who fought to help him avoid any prosecution or jail time. Weiss allowed major felonies to expire for now explicable reasons and refused to indict Biden for being an unregistered foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
Yet, somehow, Biden succeeded in forcing Weiss to prosecute him against every apparent inclination to the contrary.
In a statement after his guilty plea, Biden continued to seek to excuse his actions. Just hours after accepting guilt for federal felonies, he insisted that he did it only to protect those he loved: “I will not subject my family to more pain, more invasions of privacy and needless embarrassment.”
It was strikingly belated. Biden could have avoided over a year of such “needless embarrassment” by pleading guilty last year. A plea at the time would likely have secured real benefits for him in sentencing recommendations. Instead, he waited literally until the start of his trial to enter a plea at the very last moment when it offered the least benefit to himself or his family.
Yet, the long road to “guilty” did bring clarity for others as well as Biden. There were no more of the mantras of how my son “has done nothing wrong” or legal experts struggling to rationalize his conduct. He now has over a dozen convicted crimes, including nine related to the millions that he acquired through a massive influence-peddling operation by the Biden family.
There is no way to say that “nicer.”
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
