First, there was an enormous amount of foot-dragging here, especially on the gun charges (tax charges always take some time to build). It should not have taken this long. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that these charges would never have been brought at all but for the need to provide some appearance of holding plain criminality in the president’s family to any standard at all, while the Justice Department was prosecuting Donald Trump. In that sense, these charges are not much, but they are the tribute vice pays to virtue.

Second, it’s a lot easier to work out a sweetheart deal if your friends and family run the DOJ. But: It still requires that you cooperate. Trump is in hot water in part because he took such a hard adversarial line — and in the real world, that matters.

Third, the charges here seem surgically calculated to insulate the president and the rest of the Biden family. Nothing here implicates millions of dollars flowing through shell accounts to the Bidens from shady or tyrannical foreign regimes.

[The point about Trump is worth noting. Trump could have settled his own case before the DoJ ever got involved, and then probably wouldn’t have been charged at all if he had complied with the subpoena. Hunter got a plea deal because he was willing to bargain. — Ed]