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Hunter Biden will plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and has struck a deal with federal prosecutors over a felony gun charge. According to a court filing released by US Attorney David Weiss on Tuesday, Biden was charged with two counts of “willful failure to pay federal income tax” and for “possession of a firearm by a person who is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance.”  Weiss, who has overseen the federal probe into Biden’s taxes since 2018, has agreed to recommend probation for Biden’s tax violations and it is unlikely he will serve jail time for either his tax and gun charges, according to the Washington Post. If Biden complies with the terms of his pretrial diversion, he could have the gun charge removed from his record in two years.

Sloppy Joe Biden may face strong political headwinds with just seven months to go before the first presidential primary, but at least he’s in good company. Assessing the Washington landscape in mid-June 1963, when John F. Kennedy set off on a European tour designed to bolster not only the NATO alliance but his own poll numbers, the British ambassador David Ormsby-Gore cabled back to London: He will be leaving behind a disquieting domestic situation, [with] economic troubles to the fore... The Negro leaders are beginning to talk about large scale civil disobedience on a nation-wide basis... Moreover, the racial crisis is causing new difficulties for [Kennedy’s] legislative program...

This is said to be a uniquely angry time. Every third newspaper column is a riff on polarization and rage. Writers at serious outlets warn of civil war and even wonder about the merits of national divorce. And yet, for all the real-if-overstated divides in America, it’s increasingly clear that the prevailing mood as this presidential cycle kicks into gear isn’t anger but apathy.   When Donald Trump was arraigned this week, it was the second time in as many months that a courtroom appearance by the former president failed to precipitate the kind of Weimar-style street brawl that both Trump and his loudest critics seem to be lusting after. Before his first indictment, he warned of “potential death and destruction.

The arraignment of Donald Trump at a Miami courthouse yesterday was of a piece with many other dramatic moments in the former president’s political career. The day mixed the deadly serious — a president pleading not guilty to thirty federal charges — and the absurd — a rendition of happy birthday in the famous Cuban hangout Versailles and a speech outside a country club. In other words, it was all impeccably Trump. With their predecessor making the political weather, his Republican presidential rivals demonstrate no real confidence in how to handle him. (The honorable exception here is Vivek Ramaswamy, who has jumped with such enthusiasm at the chance to defend Trump that it is difficult to know why he is still running for president.

Former president Donald Trump decried what he characterized as the “fake and fabricated charges” brought against him by the Department of Justice in a half-hour speech on the evening of his arraignment Addressing a crowd of around 900 loyalists at his Bedminster resort in New Jersey, Trump referred to Jack Smith’s indictment of him as “election interference” and “political persecution.” “This day will go down in infamy,” he told his adoring fans, claiming that Biden wanted to see him spend “400 years in prison” for “possessing my own presidential papers.

In recent months, the Biden administration has indicated a thaw in US-China relations. The easing of tensions is, according to the White House and the State Department, simply responsible statesmanship: high-level channels of communication must be maintained to avoid disaster, the temperature should be lowered to avoid an ill-considered confrontation; better jaw-jaw than war-war.  As part of this softening, Antony Blinken is set to visit China later this month. That trip was supposed to take place in February, but was cancelled at the last minute after a Chinese spy balloon drifted across the continental United States. (Blinken has reportedly told Chinese officials he wants to “move past” the incursion.) CIA chief William Burns was in Beijing in May.

Donald Trump is the first president in history to be indicted for federal crimes, in this case thirty-seven counts that center on his taking of highly classified materials from the White House to Mar-a-Lago in January 2021. The charges also implicate the former president and a close aide, Waltine Nauta, in a conspiracy to hide the documents in whole or in part from the National Archives, the Department of Justice and his own legal team — and making false statements along those same lines.  Hundreds of documents are of concern, classified at the highest levels with origins at the CIA, NSA and elsewhere in the intelligence community. While leaks and speculation prior to the unsealing of the indictment suggested this was a routine Espionage Act case — i.e.

Mandy Cohen — the doctor rumored to be President Joe Biden’s successor to the scandal-plagued Rochelle Walensky atop the Centers for Disease Control — loves Anthony Fauci, multiple sources familiar with her record tell The Spectator. Biden’s likely pick to helm the CDC has what many view as a troubling record of politicizing science and unnecessarily supporting draconian lockdown measures, even in the face of scientific reality. Most are seizing on a photo of Cohen wearing a mask emblazoned with a giant picture of Anthony Fauci and a video of her at a briefing (while North Carolina was under a strict mask mandate) in which she looks to see if the cameras are on, pretends to put on her mask, then pretends to take it off. https://twitter.

A distant cousin of Elvis Presley is running as a Democrat to be governor of Mississippi. And much like the King of Rock and Roll, Brandon Presley can’t help falling in love — at the most politically expedient times.  Just days before his campaign season wedding to Katelyn Mabus was scheduled, he scrambled to let invitees know that his show will not in fact go on. Presley, a lifelong bachelor, has been running for office since he was a young man. He was elected mayor of his North Mississippi town at twenty-four years old and has served as an elected energy regulator since.  In December 2022, just twenty-four days before announcing that he’d be challenging Governor Tate Reeves in an attempt to turn Mississippi blue, he had an even more special announcement.

Ron DeSantis has declared war on woke. Donald Trump yesterday declared war on the word “woke.” Speaking in Urbandale, Iowa, yesterday, the Republican frontrunner said: “I don’t like the term ‘woke,’ because I hear the term ‘woke, woke, woke.’ It’s just a term they use, half the people can’t define it, they don’t know what it is.”  Close textual readings of Donald Trump’s stump-speech riffs are a dangerous game, but in this case a difference of opinion over word choice goes to the heart of Team Trump’s plan to paint DeSantis as a career politician who speaks in jargon, in sharp contrast to their candidate’s direct language and quick wittedness.