Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host Sarah Isger joined by Steve Hayes, Mike Warren and

Drumroll. David French is back to join us this week because we have some things to talk about.

So we have the Hunter Biden plea deal hearing that was supposed to be not particularly newsworthy

and turned out to be a hot mess train crash. So we'll talk about that. We obviously have to talk

about the Ron DeSantis GOP field heading into 2024 and maybe some UFOs which is a new addition

to this podcast. But nevertheless was really dominating some of the news yesterday and everyone

wants to know what does David French think are the little green men popping up tomorrow.

The answer is yes, they're coming.

All right, let's dive in. I'll do a little table setting on the Hunter Biden thing just to back

everyone up for a second. So Hunter Biden was charged by the Department of Justice with two

misdemeanor tax evasion charges which he had agreed to plead guilty to in exchange for

probation. He was also charged with a felony gun possession because at the time he purchased the

gun he was a user of illegal substances. For that he had agreed to a pretrial diversion program

which would mean that if he completed basically two years of probation in advance that it's wiped

clean. It's as if the charges didn't happen. You don't have a felony on your record. And that's

important to a lot of people because if you're a felon you can't serve on a jury. You can't own a

gun. There's all sorts of rights that you lose. And so to not be a convicted felon is generally

speaking a good thing. There was a lot of hand ringing on the right over whether this was a sweet

heart deal. And David you and I talked about this a little and I'll just give sort of my rough

overview which is it depends how you look at it. Most people are never charged with tax evasion

for doing what Hunter Biden did and definitely most people who are drug users aren't charged with

illegal possession of a gun. But so in that sense he's actually treated less favorably. But

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