Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest.

Hi everyone. It’s Peter Hamby here, popping in for The Best & The Brightest this week while some of my colleagues take a much-needed vacation. I felt compelled to write about something I noticed during a busy news cycle last week, in between the macabre coverage of the Titanic submersible and the whiplash we all witnessed in Russia after Yevgeny Prigozhin suddenly decided not to stage a coup after all. (Before you ask, yes, Julia Ioffe will be in your inbox tomorrow and will join me on Tuesday’s podcast to break it all down.)

What caught my eye was the coverage of Hunter Biden’s plea deal on tax evasion and a gun possession charge. Conservatives whined about the plea agreement, of course, but one thing jumped out at me White House press briefing on Friday was that the Hunter story is no longer just a fixation of the right wing. The mainstream media is putting a new kind of pressure on the White House, too. But I’m still skeptical that the corruption playbook MAGA forces ran so successfully against Clinton in 2016 will work against Biden.

I hope that you enjoy the story. And, if you don’t already, subscribe to The Powers That Be, where I chat everyday with my partners at Puck about what’s really going on behind closed doors on Wall Street, in Washington and Silicon Valley—and, of course, in D.C.

But first…

By Abby Livingston

• Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?: Before Peter gets into the broader implications of the Hunter Biden mess, here’s the latest sign of the Democrats’ own frustration with the ongoing saga of the president’s wayward son: many are pissed that Joe Biden invited him to the White House state dinner last week. This may be a manifestation of Biden’s own sloppy politics around his son (as Tara Palmeri has reported before, Hunter has his own mini political operation which sometimes conflicts with the administration’s messaging) and the fact that many Hill Democrats are newbies at dealing with unsavory revelations coming from a president or his relatives.

Unlike their Republican colleagues, who had to answer for Trump’s transgressions on a daily basis, most House Dems came to office after the Clinton years and enjoyed Obama’s largely scandal-free tenure. Jim Manley, a well-regarded former Democratic Hill staffer (Harry Reid described Manley at his office goodbye party as always having “a place in my heart and my head” and Politico deemed Manley part of Ted Kennedy’s “extended family”) reflected that private frustration on Twitter, writing “unbelievable.”

Of course, at least one Capitol Hill Democrat pushed back on this to me. This was hardly an ideal situation, this person conceded, but it offered an opportunity for Biden to demonstrate his compassionate approach to fatherhood and loyalty to his family.

• McCarthy & Friends: One of the enduring curiosities on Capitol Hill revolves around how Kevin McCarthy has held onto his speaker’s gavel despite the endless tumult within his own conference. His shortcomings, after all, are well-documented: miscounting votes, mismanaging expectations, a lack of strategic vision, and less-than-robust policy chops.

But McCarthy is a deft practitioner of “member services,” as they are known on the Hill, or feeding and placating House Republicans. Neither John Boehner nor Paul Ryan, his Republican predecessors, had such close relationships with so many of their colleagues. Indeed, when I first started reporting on the House, some 10 years ago, I asked every member I interviewed to name their best friend in Congress. Two-thirds of the respondents answered McCarthy. Dozens and dozens of Republicans described a unique bond with the then-majority whip.

Last week, a House G.O.P. operative recalled how, back in the day, McCarthy was “the backslapping guy we’d send out to recruit candidates. And each time he did it, he was pocketing more chits.” Now, of course, McCarthy is cashing them in. And while personal popularity does not equal invincibility, that vault of goodwill has bought him—the ability to “keep on dancing” for another day.

• A Swamp Creature Battle: On Monday, the Supreme Court upheld a law that the state must add a second minority-majority district, which all-but-certainly will favor Democrats, and reduce the Louisiana G.O.P delegation from five to four seats, in 2024. Unless there is an unforeseen retirement, two House Republicans will likely face off over a single seat. We just don’t know which ones yet.

The court’s dismissal fell under the umbrella of a ruling earlier this month that ordered a redraw of Alabama’s map to add a Democratic seat. Other southern states may have the same issue, which will lead to G.O.P. civil war skirmishes next year in G.O.P. primaries.

The week began with Hunter agreeing to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and accepting terms to avoid prosecution on a gun possession charge, averting the spectacle of a trial for the president’s son. The New York Times lent the news an air of finality, saying that Hunter’s plea agreement marked “a big step toward ending a long-running and politically explosive investigation into the finances, drug use and international business dealings of President Biden’s troubled son.” But even a few days later, nothing about the Hunter Biden story seemed like it was anywhere close to ending.

MAGA scoundrels—podcasters and congressmen, alike—howled about a double-standard and lashed out at the agreement. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy condemned the multi-year investigation, conducted by a Donald Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney, David Weiss, as “a sweetheart deal.” Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee that’s conducting an investigation into the Biden family’s business dealings, called it a “slap on the wrist” and vowed to move forward with his inquiry regardless of the Justice Department’s conclusion.

One of the dumber talking points came from the ex-con Rod Blagojevich, a lapsed Democrat-turned-Trumper, who asked on Twitter why the actor Wesley Snipes went to federal prison for tax crimes but not Hunter. He must have hoped no one would bother to actually Google the Snipes case to compare. (Shocker: Snipes’ tax crimes were far worse.)

Biden even kept Weiss on as U.S. Attorney when he came into office, an extremely rare move for a new president, to avoid the appearance of interfering with his son’s case. That fact didn’t satisfy Republicans, and no fact really would—short of someone like Jenna Ellis or Rudy Giulini being appointed to prosecute.

But moving the goalposts is not a new phenomenon for this generation of Republicans, at least not since 2016, when whataboutism emerged as the defining characteristic of partisan discourse. The Snipes comparison gave away the Republican game. It should be obvious at this point that the opposition party wouldn’t be satisfied with a trial for Hunter, or a perp walk in handcuffs, or a long prison sentence, or even death by firing squad. The only thing that matters to Republicans here is finding a way to get some kind of Hunter splatter to stick to his father and tarnish his re-election campaign in 2024.

The tax and gun case might be reaching its conclusion, but it’s hardly the only thing worth talking about when it comes to Hunter and his overseas business dealings. By last week’s end, the Hunter news cycle had reached a new crescendo, with articles flying around social media and cable news, a mix of accusations, innuendo, piecemeal facts, leaks from House committees and a suspicious 2017 WhatsApp message from Hunter to a Chinese businessman demanding money while invoking his father. “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,” Hunter said. Importantly, no evidence has surfaced proving that President Biden acted improperly or took any official action because of his family’s business affairs. And Hunter, a hustler, was deep in his drug phase at the time, so it’s entirely possible he was inflating (or inventing) his father’s knowledge of the deal in question.

There may not be a smoking gun, but the question remains: Will any of this actually damage Biden politically? Questions about Hunter and his dad conspiring to grift have percolated for years, flaring memorably during the 2020 campaign when the scandalous contents of Hunter’s laptop burst into public view. That story was waved off by many in the mainstream press, and questions about Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine or China never seemed to stick to Biden, who has always deftly pivoted to the pain of being the father of an addict.

Since then, the mainstream press has started to cover the Hunter story with more seriousness. The topic, until last week, had still mostly been confined to the Murdoch media and places like Steve Bannon’s podcast and Charlie Kirk’s Twitter feed. But the Hunter plea deal itself, which ironically attempted to quell the scandal, has instead legitimized it and forced the mainstream press to take obligatory note. White House reporters last Friday were peppering Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre with questions about Hunter, including even the esteemed Peter Baker of the Times. “It’s a reasonable question to ask,” Baker asked about that WhatsApp message. “The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?”

When I saw the White House briefing, I was reminded of maybe the finest book about how the press covered the 2016 campaign, Network Propaganda, which detailed how right-wing innuendo about Hillary Clinton wormed its way from right-wing Internet fever swamps into mainstream political coverage, making questions about Clinton’s private email server fair game and tarring her with the whiff of lies and corruption as Trump was running to “drain the swamp.”

The strategy helped to damage Clinton, who had always faced questions about her trustworthiness. Biden, though, doesn’t have the same baggage. His approval rating might be in the toilet, and his age is a real concern in every poll and focus group, but Biden has never faced fundamental questions about his honesty. Voters continue to think he’s a decent man, despite the Republican harangues.

When I was asking Democrats about the Hunter story last week, a former Obama adviser, not a Biden loyalist, told me, “Joe Biden waiting until he was 75 to become corrupt seems off.” A more appropriate age to grift might be, say, your late thirties, when Jared Kushner and Donald Jr. started plotting plans to fatten their bank accounts by the millions with Trump in the White House. Biden’s saving grace, for all his gaffes and Irish temper, has always been that he’s clean as a whistle. It’s one reason Obama vetted and picked him as Vice President. There’s never been an odor of scandal around him.

That’s one reason the sexual assault accusation levied against him by Tara Reade never stuck during the 2020 race. No one in Washington had ever heard a whisper about the guy being a creep. And the idea of him secretly laundering his power and influence through his crack-addicted son to make millions, the dominant story on Fox News these days? It isn’t landing with normies. A Reuters/Ipsos poll last week found that a majority of Americans—including a majority of independents—think Hunter’s problems are his own and not related to the president. Nor do independent voters think that Hunter is receiving favorable treatment by law enforcement because of his father, the poll found.

For clues as to whether Republicans will fully embrace the Biden crime narrative in 2024, people should look not to the House, but to the Senate—where Republicans remain in the minority because their Trumpy nominees in last year’s midterms embraced Very Online conspiracies and MAGA rage instead of issues that actually matter to voters, like, well, the cost of eggs. So far, Senate Republicans don’t seem as enthused about the preoccupations of their angrier House colleagues, whether it’s the topic of Hunter, or impeaching Merrick Garland or Biden. While McCarthy and Comer and Jim Jordan were raging about a corrupt justice system and looking for new scalps, senior senators, like John Thune, were defending the U.S. Attorney’s office and generally avoiding the topic when asked by reporters. Lisa Murkowski, another Republican senator who likes winning elections with the help of swing voters, had an even more telling response when asked for her take on the Hunter scandal. “I don’t have any reaction, ask me about something else,” she said.