Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal was rejected on Wednesday by Federal Judge Maryellen Norieka, who found major inconsistencies between how the prosecution and the defense had framed the agreement. The ensuing coverage contained a lot of theatrical head-scratching, as well as routine mentions that Norieka was appointed by former President Trump.
In fact, the TV news media can hardly even mention about Hunter Biden’s failed plea agreement without making really, really sure that absolutely everyone knows that the judge who tossed it was appointed by Trump. Just look at them go:
During the 2 p.m. ET hour of CNN News Central on Wednesday, CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen pretended to be baffled by Norieka’s misgivings with the deal: “I think everyone is scratching their head a little bit.”
He then called Norieka’s partiality into question on the grounds that she was appointed by Trump:
This is the kind of issue where you ask — and we’ve seen this with a number of Trump-appointed judges. We saw this with Judge Aileen Cannon in her initial rulings on the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. Is this out of the ordinary?
However, CNN senior legal correspondent Evan Perez pushed back:
Look, the judge was raising, I think, some very legitimate, basic concerns. She started pulling at a thread and, you know, who knew that the entire robe would come falling down, right? Just from pulling that one thread.
Of course, Perez also noted no less than three times that day that Norieka was “a Trump appointee, by the way.”
The following morning on NBC’s Today, Capitol Hill correspondent Ryan Nobles offered this dour exposition:
Hunter Biden was hoping his legal problems were coming to an end. But a judge in a Delaware courtroom had other plans. Maryellen Norieka, a Trump-appointed Federal Judge, refused to accept the plea agreement agreed to by federal prosecutors and Biden’s lawyers.
There are already plenty of quality legal analyses out there explaining the concerns raised by Norieka. It’d be great if the liberal TV news networks would bother sharing some of those perspectives with their viewers.