WASHINGTON — Thursday’s indictment of former President Donald Trump has set a precedent enabling Republican prosecutors to seek criminal charges against President Biden, conservative legal experts told The Post Friday.
“All bets are off. You can expect grand jury indictments of leftist politicians like Biden, [former House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer as surely as night follows day,” said Tom Fitton, president of the conservative legal group Judicial Watch.
“You can be sure that there are prosecutors across Florida and Texas right now who are looking for a state law hook into the Biden family,” he added. “And if they’re not, they’re not doing their jobs.”
Trump, 76, is the first former president to face criminal charges as he seeks a 2024 rematch against Biden. The sealed indictment reportedly stems from a novel document-falsification theory pushed by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg regarding Trump’s 2016 hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
“Republicans need to learn how to take off the gloves and put on the brass knuckles and break glass jaws — politically and legally, not physically,” Mike Davis, a former chief counsel for nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee and president of the Article III Project, told The Post.
“If New York can turn a routine settlement of a business dispute seven years ago into a felony, I think our Republican AGs and DAs should get creative,” added Davis, who briefly worked as a federal prosecutor before clerking for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. “Two wrongs don’t make it right, but it makes it even.
“You just need probable cause. A grand jury can indict a ham sandwich. We just saw that in New York. And the Bidens actually committed real crimes. These are real crimes that the Bidens committed. There is smoking gun evidence that the Bidens were corruptly and illegally on Chinese and Ukrainian oligarchs’ payrolls.”
The recognition of the likely legal fallout from the Trump charges — and the potentially permanent change to US legal norms — spanned the political spectrum.
“The Republicans will be furiously seeking revenge and may try to pin Biden with something,” predicted left-wing social commentator Noam Chomsky, a professor emeritus at MIT, though the 94-year-old added that some cases — such as war crimes charges — would still be considered off-limits to partisans.
Trump ally Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., said he believes the legal system has a “double standard” against Republicans such as Trump, who in 2017 gave his first pardon to the controversial lawman in a criminal contempt case.
“The criminal justice system is not always fair, believe me, and this is an example,” Arpaio said.
“This sets a little precedent,” said the ex-sheriff of America’s fourth-most-populous county. “Now the word is out that you can go and indict an ex-president and a current president and they opened another door. But now everybody’s going to flex their muscles and use this case. So now we’re gonna threaten all presidents or ex presidents.”
Arpaio predicted that prosecutors wouldn’t actually bring a case against any president or ex-president “unless his name is Donald Trump,” but said the he could imagine finding enough evidence to charge Biden or even former President Barack Obama, whose Hawaii birth certificate Arpaio notoriously claimed was a “computer-generated forgery.”
Davis, who oversaw federal judicial and prosecutor nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee between 2017 and 2019, laid out specific ideas for a Biden prosecution.
“I understand the Bidens may have had some oil and gas deals that deal with Texas. I think maybe Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton should start looking at this long and hard … and Louisiana with [Republican state Attorney General Jeff] Landry,” Davis said.
“Paxton and Landry, they need to look at this,” he added. “And if you can find a conspiracy and any of the overt acts of a conspiracy are committed in any of those states, you can bring charges.”
An October 2017 email from first son Hunter Biden’s laptop identifies Joe Biden as a participant in a call about Chinese energy company CEFC’s attempt to purchase US natural gas in an effort that appears to have had corporate links to both Louisiana and Texas.
Trump is expected to present himself for arrest and arraignment next week in Manhattan. Additional criminal charges could follow as a result of an investigation by Special Counsel Jack Smith of the former president’s alleged mishandling of classified records after leaving office, as well as investigations of his efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 election.
Biden, 80, is preparing to launch a re-election campaign as early as next month and, like Trump, faces a federal special counsel investigation of his apparent mishandling of classified records at his Delaware home and post-vice presidency DC office amid GOP congressional investigations of his role in his son Hunter and brother James Biden’s international business dealings.
Hunter Biden reportedly is under criminal investigation by the US attorney’s office in Delaware for possible tax fraud, illegal foreign lobbying, money laundering and lying about his drug use on a gun-purchase form.
Hunter wrote in documents retrieved from his abandoned laptop that he paid as much as “half” of his income to his father, whom he often involved in his business relationships during and after his vice presidency.
“You’re looking at the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, bribery, tax evasion, gun charges, conspiracy, obstruction, espionage with using stolen classified records from the Obama White House for his Ukrainian and Chinese deals,” Davis said of potential charges against Joe Biden.
“Biden was broke when he was a senator. He was broke when he left. And all of a sudden he’s very wealthy. It’s not because of his brilliance or his charm. How did he make that money?”
The Post exclusively reported in October 2020 that Hunter’s laptop included a May 2017 email from associate James Gilliar proposing that the “big guy” get 10% of proceeds from the partnership with CEFC. A whistleblower, former Hunter Biden associate Tony Bobulinski, says that he met with Joe Biden the same month to discuss the CEFC arrangement and both Bobulinski and Gilliar have identified Joe Biden as “the big guy.”
Hunter and James Biden ultimately received at least $4.8 million in 2017 and 2018 from CEFC — a since-defunct arm of Beijing’s foreign-influence “Belt and Road” initiative — according to the Washington Post’s review of laptop records.
Joe Biden also met as vice president with his relatives’ associates from Mexico, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine — and Hunter’s boss from a different Chinese business venture called BHR Partners.
“Maybe these states have a long-arm statute when you’re dealing with foreign corruption. Who knows? Maybe New York and Florida and places like that can you start looking into this,” Davis said.
Another possible avenue to indict Biden would be on state tax fraud charges, Davis said.
“If you are making money in a state and you’re liable for state taxes, you’re not paying them — sure,” he said. “These Republican state attorneys general and Republican DAs and Republican prosecutors need to make sure that any and all allegations against the Bidens get a full and fair consideration.”
The Manhattan indictment against Trump is expected to include charges for falsifying business records linked to the 2016 payment to Daniels, whom Trump says was extorting him, and another payment the same year to former Playboy model Karen McDougal. That charge ordinarily is a state misdemeanor with a two-year statute of limitations, but under Bragg’s reported theory it would be elevated into a felony by alleging it was done in commission of a federal campaign finance violation.
Davis said Republican retribution should amount to a “dead chicken strategy” — recounting a story that he said Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas once told him over lunch.
“[Thomas] talked about growing up on the farm in Georgia. When dogs killed chickens, you would wrap those dead chickens around the dog’s necks. And as those chickens rotted around those dogs’ necks, those dogs lost the taste for chicken,” Davis said.
“We need to do the same thing to the Democrats on politicized and weaponized bogus charges against Trump and Republicans. We need to give Democrats a healthy dose of their own medicine so they stop doing this.”
The White House declined to comment.