
Speaking on MSNBC this week, podcast co-host and legal analyst Andrew Weissmann said that President Joe Biden’s reaction to his son Hunter Biden‘s guilty verdict proves the President’s respect for the rule of law.
In the wake of Hunter Biden’s conviction on federal charges related to his buying and owning a firearm while addicted to drugs, Weissmann praised President Biden for not Intervening in his Justice Department’s prosecution of his son.
“You have a president of the United States who is living embodiment of the rule of law,” Weissmann told MSNBC host José Díaz-Balart.
“This is a gun charge. The proof was overwhelming,” Weissmann, a former FBI general counsel, said. “I agree with your other panelists that it is rarely charged. In my experience, over 21 years at the department, I never saw this kind of case brought. It would normally be somebody who is a felon in possession of a gun that would be charged.”
“I am more interested in what it tells us about the rule of law in this country in two ways: One, the son of the sitting president was pretty quickly tried. He was given due process, and he was found guilty,” Weissmann continued. “And you have the current president, the father of the defendant, making it absolutely clear that he is not pardoning him, that he could have ordered at any time his Justice Department to get rid of this case. He did not do that.”
“You really can contrast that to the former president’s denigration of the rule of law,” Weissmann said. “Every single time [Trump] is found either guilty in a criminal case or liable in a civil case, including sexual assault and fraud, he says the system’s rigged against him.”
“So, I think that that to me is the really strong contrast between the two views of the institution of the justice system, whether it’s civil justice or criminal justice, that I think is speaking to me very loudly about the impact and the import of this case,” he added.