When Republicans admonish President Joe Biden for politicizing the Justice Department and “weaponizing” federal law enforcement, there are a couple of obvious problems. The first, of course, is the fact that the complaints are detached from reality: The White House and the attorney general’s office simply haven’t done what their GOP critics have alleged.
But the other dramatic flaw in this line of attack is the brazen hypocrisy: Donald Trump went further than any president since Watergate to turn federal law enforcement into an instrument of raw political power. The Republican quite literally asked Justice Department officials to prosecute his political enemies, without regard for evidence or merit.
Leading GOP voices had — and continue to have — nothing to say about Trump doing exactly what they’ve falsely accused Biden of doing.
But one of the other more common lines of attack against the Democratic president is that members of his family have engaged in international business deals. Unlike the “weaponization” claims, this isn’t necessarily ridiculous — some of Biden’s relatives really have been involved in business agreements with foreign entities.
But like the “weaponization” claims, there’s a striking degree of hypocrisy that Republicans prefer to simply ignore. A New York Times analysis highlighted Trump’s selective outrage “when it comes to presidential families taking millions of dollars from foreign countries.”
During his four years in the White House and in the more than two and a half years since, Mr. Trump and his relatives have been on the receiving end of money from around the globe in sums far greater than anything Hunter Biden, the president’s son, reportedly collected. Unlike other modern presidents, Mr. Trump never gave up control of his sprawling business with its interests in multiple countries, nor did he forswear foreign business even as president. He shattered norms in his money making and unabashed boosting of his family’s company.
What’s more, as the Times’ analysis added, while Biden’s relatives have held no governmental positions — Hunter Biden, for example, has never worked in his father’s administration in any capacity — the former Republican president was only too pleased to give powerful roles to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the latter of whom parlayed his position helping shape Middle East policy into highly lucrative investments from Middle Eastern countries.
The point is not that Biden’s relatives have steered clear of foreign deals. We know better. Whether one considers those foreign deals controversial is a matter of perspective, though there’s still no evidence whatsoever of the incumbent president benefiting from the deals in any way.
But if we’re going to have a needlessly acerbic public conversation about such private-sector work, can Republicans at least pretend to show an interest in the fact that Trump engaged in far more outlandish behavior in this space, without so much as a shoulder shrug from GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill?