Hunter Biden Saves Father From a Political Nightmare

President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, may have just saved his father's campaign from a major headache.

On Tuesday, court documents revealed Biden planned to plead guilty to a series of federal misdemeanor charges later this week, averting a trial and bringing a yearslong push by conservatives for his prosecution in at least one case to a swift close.

Conservatives will likely continue pursuing the Bidens, particularly as Congress continues pushing for evidence on an alleged influence-peddling scheme involving both the president and his son. But from a crisis communications standpoint, experts say Hunter Biden played it right.

In pleading guilty, crisis communications experts tell Newsweek the younger Biden showed a willingness to sideline himself from playing a visible role in the 2024 presidential race, helping to reduce the number of negative stories to emerge around his father's name as he seeks re-election in 2024.

But the decision also lays out all the facts of the case ahead of him and minimizes broader scrutiny into what Biden's son may or may not have done. By pleading guilty, Hunter Biden robbed the narratives around his crimes of additional oxygen, helping hurry the story into obscurity.

"News stories and political campaigns, they're both built on friction," Sarah Larson, executive vice president at Pennsylvania-based crisis communications firm Furia Rubel, told Newsweek. "We don't write stories about things that are going right. No one's going to read the story about the cat that didn't get stuck up in the tree that day. So in this particular case, by pleading guilty, Hunter Biden ends that storyline. He takes away that issue. It's a non-story, there's nothing to report."

In this case, Larson said, Biden's decision to take the quickest approach also allowed him to take advantage of the ever-quickening pace of the modern news cycle. Where cases she'd worked in her 10-year career once had staying power, even high-profile cases can blow over in the press blow over in a matter of weeks, if not days.

For the Bidens, the sooner the case was resolved, the better.

"You have to assume the Hunter Biden plea deal was at least partially designed to avoid a distraction for his father as the campaign heats up," James Haggerty, a leading communications consultant and a onetime aide to former U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, told Newsweek in an email. "Even in a criminal case, litigants have a certain amount of control over timing, and it would be a smart move to flush the news out in a quiet week before the Fourth of July holiday, with all the public events around that time."

Compare that to Biden's chief political rival in the 2024 race, Donald Trump, who as a candidate is currently battling a series of charges and criminal probes in several states that threaten to upend his campaign well into the upcoming election cycle.

While he has not had an option yet to settle, the former president has contradicted advice from friends and allies to stay silent throughout his legal fights, and has regularly publicized his battles in the press. He has also been handsomely rewarded for it, seeing boosts in the polls and helping coalesce support from all corners of the Republican base around him after elements of "Trump fatigue" began setting in after the 2022 midterm elections.

His campaign has leaned into rhetoric about the Department of Justice being poised against him, for example, working to drive the conversation around his treatment by the criminal justice system into the talking points of candidates claiming to be working to defeat him. In that way, Haggerty said, every new incident could be seen not as a detriment, but as an opportunity.

"Given the way his base views these prosecutions, you are right that a good PR team could spin these court cases into a positive," said Haggerty. "If his voters assume he has been unjustly targeted, then the more newsworthy the legal wrangling, the more they feel the urge to get out and support him. And if he beats the charges, then he is a hero fighting the good fight against corrupt prosecutors."

But that battle also comes rife with peril: the more a candidate talks about the crimes they may or may not have committed, the more open they are to exposure—whether its additional information about their criminal past, or through rhetoric that could implicate them in more crimes.

"When you're working with defendants you have to try and measure how realistic they are on the situation," Montieth Illingworth, a former journalist and now-CEO of his own public relations firm that handles litigation communications. "And someone who's not realistic also tends to be intemperate, and that intemperate person is not going to take advice. Trump clearly fits squarely in that category. You can look for the best deal you can, you pay the price whatever that may be, and you're left to fight another day. Then you keep quiet, because all speaking out does is complicate your situation even more."

But when the government is on the other side of the courtroom, Illingworth said, defendants will have to be ready to match them dollar-for-dollar before they can even think to outrun them. And even then, it's ultimately the American public you need to win over. With more than a year to go until election day, Trump will need to have the stamina to maintain the support he continues to have.

"We get all wrapped up in what [Trump's] strategy is and gaming what he'll get away with or not," he added. "But this really is not about him. This is about us, the American people, and about why we would support someone like that."