This afternoon the NY Times published a story titled "A Guilty Verdict for Hunter Biden Weighs on a Worried President Biden." The story does indeed suggest that Joe Biden is feeling a bit burdened by his son's conviction earlier today.
Within hours of the verdict, President Biden traveled home, disembarked from Marine One and embraced his son...
...the president has come to terms with the fact that there will be no easy end to his son’s legal problems.
He has also grown more resigned and worried than ever about what the future might hold for his son, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to relay private conversations.
Maybe that means Joe Biden no longer believes this oft-repeated statement that Hunter did nothing wrong.
But that aside, I think the NY Times may have buried the lede a bit. In my view, the most surprising new facts are buried in the middle of the story.
...people close to the Bidens say the president was in frequent touch with family members and his son. And this week, the people around Hunter Biden had been hopeful, even confident, that the jury would turn back a verdict of not guilty. They had appreciated that several jurors had relatives who had battled drug abuse.
Did they really believe he was going to skate? They were confident of that this week after all of the evidence presented last week? I find that truly hard to believe.
They spent all last week with Hunter's various exes saying, in one way or another, that Hunter was a crack addict. The repeatedly listened to Hunter's own voice saying he was a crack addict as the prosecutors played excerpts from the audio version of his memoir. No effort to undermine the witnesses on cross examination seemed to stick.
And it was pretty clear from the body language in court that the family knew Naomi Biden's testimony last Friday had backfired on them. Instead of rehabilitating Hunter, he came out looking, well...like a crack addict. They then canceled their other witnesses, including Hunter's uncle James Biden. Not a sign of confidence.
The defense left open the possibility that Hunter himself would testify Monday. It was a bluff to make them look confident. No one with any legal background believed it would actually happen. And sure enough, when Monday arrived Hunter did not testify. Instead, his lawyer spent more than an hour arguing with the judge about jury instructions. He failed there too.
In short, this trial was a disaster for the defense and they must have know it. So how in the world did members of the family think the result would be not guilty?
Based on what was in the story, I can only see two possible answers. The first is that these people are truly delusional. They believed that sympathy for someone's addiction, especially a Biden's addiction, would result in jury nullification. I guess if you're Jill Biden rushing to the trial each day with a platoon of Secret Service agents it's possible to believe some people are just too important to be convicted.
The other option is that this NY Times story is a lie. Someone on the Biden campaign team decided it was a better story if the family was shocked and dismayed by the outcome than if they saw it coming last Tuesday because it was blinding obvious Hunter was guilty. Given those choices, some White House PR flak leaked this little bit of "news" about the family's surprise to the NY Times. Think of it as a little play for sympathy from the public. Frankly, that might also explain why this got buried in the middle of the story. My guess is the reporter also found it hard to believe.
So take your pick. Are these people really that out of touch with reality or is this leak just a sad PR effort? Personally I'm leaning toward door #2 but that's only a guess.
