Tuesday’s guilty verdict was a finale the president’s son needlessly courted.

Politics is a cynical business

The conviction of Hunter Biden took a jury about zero minutes, given clear-cut law and overwhelming evidence, even in Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware. Perhaps our accumulating cynicism might be redressed if 75% of the press didn’t bend over backward to tell fairy stories about what happened and why. Any Justice Department wouldn’t be in a hurry to throw the book at the president’s son and Mr. Biden’s tried for several years to end the investigation without charges at all, according to credible whistleblowers. The department succeeded at least in permitting the statute of limitations to expire on the most politically irksome tax charges related to Hunter’s earnings from a Ukrainian oligarch when his father was vice president. Letting Hunter walk, though, seemed to become politically untenable after the whistleblowers spoke up. Even so, a generous plea deal was arranged that, contrary to normal practice, and in a fashion inherently suspicious, granted sweeping immunity for uncharged offenses in a side agreement that spared Hunter any embarrassing gun charges altogether. There’s no reason for a straight-shooing press not to report this background. When the Justice Department and Hunter still couldn’t agree before a judge on the extent of his immunity, Hunter walked away from a settlement that remained extraordinarily fair to him. A press playing it straight can explain all this.

There’s a lot more going on with Hunter than MSNBC wants to tell you. Many people experience searing family tragedies—such as Hunter’s loss of his mother and sister in a car crash in 1972, or the death of his brother from brain cancer in 2015—and don’t become addicts. Many become addicts without any personal tragedy at all. Addiction seems to be a psychological and biochemical predisposition some are born with. But being an addict also doesn’t mean acting out in the other manifold ways Hunter Biden did, from illegally possessing guns and writing off sex club memberships as business expenses, to making time with his brother’s widow and attempting to cash in on his vice president father’s oversight of the Ukraine portfolio.

His addiction history also didn’t require high-handing every reasonable attempt by his father’s administration to spare him Tuesday’s verdict, decisions that Hunter made presumably despite now being clean. His lawyer’s argument in rejecting the plea deal, making this week’s trial necessary, was essentially a demand for a politicized immunity agreement based on fear of a politicized Trump prosecution down the road should the investigation remain live at the department.

With the deus ex machina of Kevin Morris, the Hollywood millionaire who was bankrolling him, Hunter made deliberate choices to drag out his legal turmoil and his Technicolor displays of personal suffering during his father’s re-election campaign. Our press should be able to say this.

A car accident in 1972 doesn’t explain this yet such is the cynicism of the press that it can only mouth the lines a cynical Biden White House wants the press to mouth. Real reporting would make better sense of this week’s trial and also September’s coming tax trial, neither of which needed to happen at all.

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