Going after Hunter Biden’s life of drug abuse, shady handguns, sex toys, and intimacy with strippers and high-end hookers achieves nothing. And that seems to me to be the point. 

For a story so embarrassing to the sitting commander in chief, the left-of-center media have been curiously vigilant in reporting on the handgun trial. Why might that be? Forgive my cynicism, but I suspect it’s because doing so helps to cut off Hunter—a troubled son, an addict, a sex fiend, etc.—from his father and the wider corruption of the Democratic establishment. This, just as the same establishment is waging a relentless campaign of lawfare against Biden’s Republican opponent in this year’s presidential election.

Al Capone was never formally convicted for the murders and mayhem he caused—they nabbed him on tax-dodging charges. Isn’t something similar at play with Hunter Biden? This week, our illustrious presidential son went on trial for allegedly lying about his substance-abuse habits when filling out a form used to obtain a handgun permit.

Isn’t this satisfaction enough for those, like my former colleagues at the New York Post, who exposed his foreign influence-peddling, only to face Big Tech censorship, accusations of spreading Russian disinformation, and the scorn of most of the mainstream media? That seems to be the unspoken message telegraphed by much of the mainstream coverage of Hunter’s gun trial: See, the rule of law has been vindicated. No one is above the law. Not even our crackhead dauphin. The system works.

Sorry, I don’t buy it.

The point of nailing Al Capone on his taxes was to take an arch-criminal off the streets and thus to contain the damage he was doing to public order. But merely imprisoning Hunter Biden for lying on a gun form—if it comes to that, and it’s a big if—won’t suffice to make the public whole or protect us against similar elite malfeasance in the future. It won’t bring accountability for the full extent of his influence-peddling. Nor will it unravel the nexus between Big Tech, the security apparatus, and the corporate media that shielded that influence-peddling when it really mattered: in the weeks ahead of the 2020 election. And it allows the establishment to protect Hunter’s father by making a sacrifice of the son.

Lying on a handgun form is a serious offense, and if Hunter is indeed guilty of it, then of course he should pay the legal penalty. But that matter, as well as his ongoing tax problem, aren’t a question of public, political concern in the same way as his undeniable influence-peddling.

To briefly recap that last set of misdeeds: In 2015, his laptop emails show, Hunter set up a meeting between his father, at that time the vice president and the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine, and executives from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm that was paying Hunter $83,000 a month. The emails uncovered by the Post also show that Hunter entered a shadowy business deal with a Chinese Communist Party–linked firm, in which 10 percent of the profits were to be set aside for someone referred to as “the big guy.” One of Hunter’s partners, a Democratic-leaning former intelligence officer, insists that “the buy guy” is none other than Hunter’s father.

All of this wheeling and dealing was premised on Hunter’s familial ties with a very powerful man, Joe Biden, who was involved in the relevant communications (under his real name in the case of the Burisma meeting and as “the big guy” in the Chinese arrangement). I needn’t detail what happened in the wake of the Post’s exposé: Facebook reduced circulation on the story pending “fact-checking” (something it never did with respect to numerous anti-Trump stories that proved to be factitious); and Twitter banned it outright, including from being shared in private messages, while suspending the account of the Post, America’s oldest continuously published daily, founded by Alexander Hamilton. Most of the mainstream media cheered this censorship, and the deep state lent it legitimacy in the form of a statement signed by 50 senior former intelligence officials who claimed, on the basis of exactly no evidence, that the Post’s story amounted to a “Russian information operation.”

As the trial unfolds, don’t lose sight of the real issues: the Biden clan’s shameless influence-peddling, which very much implicates Joe Biden; and the Big-Tech–deep-state–corporate-media alliance that removed their graft from public scrutiny and democratic debate ahead of a presidential election. In a sense, the people who supplied the censorship cover—the Silicon Valley executives, the 50 ex-spooks, and their mainstream-media amanuenses—are far guiltier than Hunter Biden.