Not Illegal, but Clearly Wrong
Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to convert the federal prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden into a special counsel ensures that Democrats will be fielding uncomfortable questions throughout the 2024 presidential campaign. They would do well to think before they speak. Asked one such question in a television interview in May, President Joe Biden insisted, “My son’s done nothing wrong.”
But is that true?
It now seems quite likely that Hunter Biden has violated one or more U.S. laws. And that’s not all the wrong he has done. There is a difference between what is technically illegal and what is wrong.
Some context may help explain the chasm that has opened up between the two—the gulf between what most ordinary Americans understand as corruption and the mincing definition that reigns in the professional spheres of politics, the law, and big business.
Since 1987, and most recently in , a series of Supreme Court cases has relentlessly narrowed the legal definition of corruption. This is the body whose cavalier attitude. The Court has whittled down what was once our right to the “honest services” of our public servants to a rule outlawing only the trade of “official acts” performed as part of government duties for money or material gifts. Then the Court chipped away at what counts as an “official act.” Pressuring subordinates or hosting an official lunch? on the busiest bridge in the United States to pursue a political vendetta? In after , each of these was disqualified.
