While presidents have been deposed in criminal matters, impeached and pardoned, and their family members entangled in legal scrapes before, never has the criminal courtroom taken center stage in a presidential election like this.
“It’s so unusual that we lack the terminology to express how unusual it is,” said presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky, author of the upcoming book, “Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic.”
The two criminal cases are completely different. One involves the former president who is running to get back into the White House. He's accused of falsifying business records to hide an illegal scheme to influence the 2016 election. The other case is about a private citizen—the current president's son—who is facing charges of lying on a federal gun-purchase form when he said he wasn't using drugs.
Politically, though, there's some obvious overlap. Both men say they're being persecuted by overzealous prosecutors and unfairly targeted for political gain. And both sides are trying to use highly personal and potentially embarrassing witness testimony about their adversaries, with Republicans trying to use Hunter Biden as a sort of target by proxy for the president himself.
