Republicans have asserted for several years now that Democrats have politicized and weaponized the justice system, with the reportedly slow-walked and years-long federal investigation of Hunter Biden being a prime example.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), during a campaign speech in Iowa on Tuesday, suggested that Hunter would likely already be in jail if he were a Republican instead of a Democrat, the Washington Examiner reported.
The event, held at Eternity Church in Clive, Iowa, a suburb of Des Moines, was the first full-fledged campaign event for the Florida governor since he launched his 2024 presidential candidacy last week.
"We have a bureaucracy that our Founding Fathers would find unrecognizable," DeSantis said, according to Fox News. "It is an unaccountable, weaponized, administrative state that unevenly wields authority depending on its targets."
"Two different sets of rules depending on whether you're a member in good standing of elite society or not," he added. "If Hunter were a Republican, he would have been in jail years ago."
Fox News reported that Hunter Biden has been under federal investigation since at least 2018, initially with regard to his dubious foreign business dealings and money laundering but now more narrowly focused on alleged tax law violations and making a false statement on a gun purchase form.
IRS whistleblowers recently emerged to assert that the Justice Department has interfered with and mishandled the years-long investigation in an effort to try to protect the son of President Joe Biden, however.
According to the New York Post, in addition to the remark about Hunter already being in jail if he were a Republican, Gov. DeSantis also took a few shots against President Biden and his chief competitor for the GOP nomination, former President Donald Trump, and the political establishment in Washington D.C.
"It is great to be back. And it’s great for me to report that our great American comeback starts by sending Joe Biden back to his basement in Delaware," DeSantis said to begin his speech. "I mean, he’s spent so much of his time as president on vacation, we might as well make it permanent."
With regard to Trump, DeSantis said, "At the end of the day, leadership is not about entertainment. It’s not about building a brand. it’s not about virtue signaling. It is about results, and in Florida, we didn’t lead with merely words, we followed up our words with deeds, and we have produced a record of accomplishment that we would put up against anybody in this country."
He also knocked Trump for failing to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci during the COVID pandemic and further argued that it would take at least two terms in a row to fix the nation's problems as he noted that the former president would be limited to just one more term if re-elected.
As for the D.C. establishment, Gov. DeSantis also appeared to take a swipe at House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) over the debt limit deal reached over the weekend, and said, "We now see Washington has now cooked up their latest ‘debt deal.’ And I can tell you this, our nation was careening towards bankruptcy before the debt deal, and it will still be careening towards bankruptcy after this debt deal."
"This is greenlighting $4 trillion in new debt in less than two years. It took us almost 200 years to get to $4 trillion in debt in the first place. It locks in inflated COVID-era levels of spending. And it keeps 98% of the 87,000 new IRS agents that Joe Biden instituted," the governor added.
