House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., on Sunday defended President Biden’s past comment that his son, Hunter Biden, “did nothing wrong.” 

Jeffries’ remarks came a day before the scheduled beginning of jury selection in the federal gun case against Hunter – and just days after former President Trump, President Biden’s main election opponent, was convicted on 34 counts following the hush-money trial brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. 

“President Biden commented as a loving father, as I would hope any loving father would do. Hunter Biden, of course, is entitled, as was Donald Trump, to the presumption of innocence and to a trial by a jury of his peers,” Jeffries said during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And this Justice Department is going to proceed in that fashion, present the facts and the law and then we’ll all have to wait for a determination that is made by a jury as to Hunter Biden’s guilt or innocence.” 

In an interview with MSNBC in May 2023, President Biden insisted, “First of all, my son has done nothing wrong,” adding that “I trust him. I have faith in him.

HUNTER BIDEN’S CRIMINAL TRIAL ON FEDERAL GUN CHARGES BEGINS WITH JURY SELECTION

That was before what Republicans dubbed a “sweetheart deal” with prosecutors for Hunter to plead guilty on misdemeanor tax charges fell apart in Delaware during a dramatic hearing last summer before a Trump-appointed judge. In response, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed David Weiss, who had already been leading the investigation into Hunter’s gun case, as special counsel. 

TRUMP LAWYER SPARS WITH HOST OVER EX-BIDEN DOJ OFFICIAL TAPPED IN NEW YORK HUSH-MONEY CASE

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., conducts his weekly news conference in the Capitol Visitor Center on Thursday, May 23, 2024.  (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Hunter Biden, who spent the weekend with his father, has been charged with three felonies stemming from a 2018 firearm purchase when he was, according to his memoir, in the throes of a crack addiction. He has been accused of lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on the application used to screen firearms applicants when he said he was not a drug user, and illegally having the gun for 11 days.

He has pleaded not guilty and has argued he’s being unfairly targeted by the Justice Department. 

Hunter Biden during a state dinner in honor of Kenya’s president William Ruto at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, May 23, 2024.  (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Hunter Biden is also facing a separate trial in California in September on charges of failing to pay $1.4 million in taxes. He has also pleaded not guilty in that case. 

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Jeffries, meanwhile, also addressed Trump’s conviction. The Democratic leader said the guilty verdict against the former president was a “validation of the American judicial system,” when asked if the eight-year-old case would have been brought against anyone but the former president. 

“Donald Trump was entitled to the presumption of innocence, he received it,” he said. “This is America. This is not a system that is occupied by a monarch or a king or a dictator. We are a democracy. And in a democracy, no one is above the law.” 

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal were speaking to a crowd of business leaders in 2013 about creating their first company when the conversation seemed to go off script. Originally from South Africa, Kimbal said the brothers lacked lawful immigration status when they began the business in the U.S.

“In fact, when they did fund us, they realized that we were illegal immigrants,” Kimbal said, according to a recording of the interview from the Milken Institute Global Conference.

“I’d say it was a gray area,” Elon replied with a laugh.

Eleven years later, Elon was back at the Milken Institute last month in Beverly Hills, talking once again about immigration. This time, he described the southern border as a scene out of the zombie apocalypse and said the legal immigration process is long and “Kafkaesque.”

“I’m a big believer in immigration, but to have unvetted immigration at large scale is a recipe for disaster,” Musk said at the conference. “So I’m in favor of greatly expediting legal immigration but having a secure southern border.”

Musk, the most financially successful immigrant in the U.S. and the third-richest person in the world, has frequently repeated his view that it is difficult to immigrate to the U.S. legally but “trivial and fast” to enter illegally. What he leaves out: Seeking asylum is a legal right under national and international law, regardless of how a person arrives on U.S. soil.

But as the election year ramps up and Republicans make border security a major theme of their campaigns, Musk’s comments about immigration have grown increasingly extreme. The chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, who purchased the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) in 2022, has sometimes used his giant microphone to elevate racist conspiracies and spread misinformation about immigration law.

Musk’s business manager did not respond to a request for comment, nor did representatives for SpaceX and Tesla. X does not have a department that responds to news media inquiries.

While Musk’s views are clear, what’s murkier is his influence. Some see him as an influential opinion maker with the power to shape policy and sway voters, while others dismiss him as a social media bomb thrower mainly heard within a conservative echo chamber.

“If you haven’t heard it already, I’m sure you’re going to see members of Congress citing Elon Musk and pointing to his tweets, and that’s a scary concept,” said Rep. Nanette Diaz Barragán (D-San Pedro), who leads the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

She says she believes Musk is influential with her Republican colleagues who are “always looking for new anti-immigrant talking points.”

Polling shows immigration is a top issue for voters. For the third month in a row, it was named by respondents to an open-ended April Gallup poll as the most important problem facing the U.S.

The November election that’s shaping up as a rematch between President Biden and former President Trump will be the first presidential contest since Musk bought X — a site Trump had been banned from for inciting violence before Musk reinstated his account last year.

Musk used the platform to come to Trump’s defense last week after the former president was criminally convicted for falsifying records in a hush money scheme. “Great damage was done today to the public’s faith in the American legal system,” Musk wrote on X, calling Trump’s crime a “trivial matter.”

After meeting with Trump in March, Musk told former CNN anchor Don Lemon that he’s “leaning away” from Biden, but doesn’t plan to endorse Trump yet. He also said he won’t donate to any presidential campaign.

Campaign contribution records show Musk regularly donated to both Republicans and Democrats through 2020. That includes a handful of donations to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said his relationship with Musk dates back to his time as San Francisco mayor but that they’ve never discussed immigration.

“I think people have formed very strong opinions on this topic,” Newsom said. “I don’t know that he’s influencing that debate in a disproportionate way. Not one human being has ever said, ‘Hey, did you see Elon’s thing about immigration?’”

How Musk talks about immigration on X

Last year Musk visited the Eagle Pass, Texas, border, meeting with local politicians and law enforcement to get what he called an “unfiltered” view of the situation.

He also helped spread viral reports falsely claiming the Biden administration had “secretly” flown hundreds of thousands of migrants into the U.S. to reduce border arrivals.

“This administration is both importing voters and creating a national security threat from unvetted illegal immigrants,” Musk wrote March 5 on X. “It is highly probable that the groundwork is being laid for something far worse than 9/11.”

But the migrants in question fly commercial under a program created by the Biden administration, exercising the president’s authority to temporarily admit people for humanitarian reasons. The program allows up to 30,000 vetted people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela lawfully relocate to the U.S. each month and obtain work permits if they have a financial sponsor.

Contrary to Musk’s claim that the administration is looking for Democratic voters, those arriving under the program have no pathway to citizenship. The claim gives fuel to extremist ideologies such as great replacement theory, the racist conspiracy that there’s a plot to reduce the population of white people.

Earlier this year, Musk targeted a controversial bill in the California Legislature that would help immigrants with serious or violent felony convictions fight deportation using state funds. Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D-Los Angeles) pulled the bill after Republicans slammed it on social media, garnering the attention of Musk, who wrote about it on X: “When is enough enough?”

In February, shortly after a bipartisan group of senators released details of a border security bill that had gone through lengthy negotiations, Musk again echoed great replacement theory, writing on X: “The long-term goal of the so-called ‘Border Security’ bill is enabling illegals to vote! It will do the total opposite of securing the border.”

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) shot back.

“No, it’s not focused on trying to be able to get more illegals to vote,” Lankford said on CNN. “That’s absurd.”

Musk’s immigration journey

There’s a particular irony in Musk attacking the program that allows limited arrivals for humanitarian reasons while simultaneously saying he favors legal immigration, said Ahilan Arulanantham, a lawyer, professor and co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA. The program offers would-be migrants a lawful pathway to reach the U.S. and reduced arrivals at the border from the beneficiary countries.

“That shows a very deep confusion about a fairly basic point about immigration law and the way the policy works,” Arulanantham said. Musk’s lack of criticism of a similar program for Ukrainians illustrates the undercurrent of racism accompanying attacks on the program for Latin American migrants, he added.

Musk amplifying false claims is counterproductive to rational immigration policy, Arulanantham said.

“Every voice adds to the pile, and the louder the voice, the marginally greater the addition to the pile,” Arulanantham said. “He is a very loud voice.”

David Kaye, a UC Irvine law professor who studies platform moderation, said Musk’s promotion of misleading or false statements, including those about immigrants, is concerning because he can influence conversations on X in a way no one else can.

“There’s already a pretty robust kind of alarmist approach to immigration, so Musk might only add a little bit of fuel to a pretty big fire,” Kaye said. “But the fact is he’s got a ton of followers. To the extent he promotes disinformation, I think that’s a cause for concern for the United States having fair and fact-driven debates over immigration.”

Musk’s own immigration story is described in the biography “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson. Musk left South Africa in 1989 for Canada, where his mother had relatives, Isaacson wrote. While in college he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania and, after graduating, enrolled at Stanford but immediately requested a deferral.

He and his brother Kimbal had invented an interactive network directory service, like a precursor to Google Maps.

Just before pitching the idea to a venture company, Kimbal was stopped by U.S. border officials at the airport on his way back from a trip to Toronto “who looked in his luggage and saw the pitch deck, business cards and other documents for the company. Because he did not have a U.S. work visa, they wouldn’t let him board the plane,” Isaacson writes in the book. So a friend picked him up and drove him into the U.S. after telling another border agent that they were seeing the David Letterman show.

After finalizing the investment, the firm found immigration lawyers to help the Musk brothers get work visas, according to Isaacson.

Once Musk married his first wife, he became eligible for U.S. citizenship, and took the oath in 2002 at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds.

Musk’s recent commentary on immigration and other political issues appears to be a reversal from his views a decade ago, said Nu Wexler, who has worked in policy communications at tech companies and for congressional Democrats.

Wexler recalled when Musk left Fwd.us, the political action organization spearheaded by Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg in 2013 to advocate for immigration reform. Musk left because Fwd.us backed conservative lawmakers who wanted immigration reform but supported oil drilling and other policies that went against Musk’s environmental priorities.

“I agreed to support Fwd.us because there is a genuine need to reform immigration. However, this should not be done at the expense of other important causes,” Musk told the news site AllThingsD at the time.

When Zuckerberg created Fwd.us, it made smart business sense for tech executives to make the business case for immigration reform, Wexler said. Now, immigration is a more divisive issue and executives on the left are less willing to dive into politics.

“At some point he decided that being the main character was helpful personal branding,” Wexler said of Musk. “I don’t know if he’s going to change minds on immigration, although he might be able to fire up the base.”

Alex Conant, a GOP consultant and partner at the public affairs firm Firehouse Strategies, said Musk’s influence could grow if Trump wins the election. If an immigration bill were to take shape at that point, Musk’s endorsement or rejection could shape the debate, he said.

“That’s the sort of scenario where all the sudden he might have some power,” he said.

There appears to be growing evidence for that possibility. Trump and Musk have discussed a possible advisory role for the billionaire, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. If Trump reclaims the White House, Musk could provide formal input on border security policies.

Times staff writer Taryn Luna contributed to this report.

The unprecedented criminal conviction of former President Trump has opened a dark chapter in the history of America’s criminal justice system, according to several legal experts.

A New York jury on Thursday pronounced Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in what prosecutors called a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election. Trump is now the first former president to ever be convicted of a crime. He is scheduled to be sentenced on July 11 and may be sent to prison. 

Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz is among those who have called the facts of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump an “absolute joke.” He warned on Friday that if Trump can’t get justice in New York through the appeal process, it’ll be open season for Republican prosecutors to target Democrats in deep-red districts.

“This is the beginning of a war of weaponization of the criminal justice system,” Dershowtz said on “Mornings with Maria” on FOX Business. “The legal system failed. Our system of checks and balances, which is the great contribution that the American Constitution made, failed yesterday.” 

TRUMP NY SENTENCING TO BE 4 DAYS BEFORE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION

Trump’s critics would call that dire warning hyperbole, at best, or at worst, dangerous. They argue that Trump’s historic conviction, however irregular the charges, was delivered by a jury of his peers in a court of law where Trump was presumed innocent until proven guilty. 

“This was a conviction by a jury of Americans who listened to the evidence and made their decision,” said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in comments to the New York Times. “When you undermine courts the way that elections have already been undermined, there is no peaceful way to settle differences.”

Trump and many of his supporters say otherwise: That this was the product of a blatantly political prosecution brought by Bragg, a Democrat who campaigned on a pledge to “get Trump,” presided over by Judge Juan Merchan — who previously donated $35 to an anti-Trump political committee — and located in a county where only 12% of residents eligible to be jurors voted for Trump in 2020. 

“The whole thing was rigged from day one — from the venue to the judge,” Trump told Fox News Digital’s Brooke Singman in an exclusive interview after the verdict came down. He maintains his innocence and has accused President Biden and the Democratic Party of attempting to harm his presidential campaign through the legal system. 

TRUMP GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS IN NEW YORK CRIMINAL TRIAL

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg speaks after the guilty verdict in former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial over charges that he falsified business records to conceal money paid to silence porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016, at a press conference in New York, on May 30, 2024. (REUTERS/Brendan McDermid)

“We couldn’t get a fair trial,” he said. “It’s a sad day for New York and a sad day for the country.” 

Bragg has denied any political motives in his successful prosecution of Trump and said his office “did our job,” which was “to follow the facts and the law without fear or favor.” 

“The only voice that matters is the voice of the jury. And the jury has spoken,” Bragg said Thursday evening. 

But Staten Island criminal defense attorney Louis Gelmorino said Bragg and other Democratic officials who made campaign promises to prosecute Trump should never have been allowed to move their cases forward. 

“Letitia James, Fani Willis and Alvin Bragg all campaigned on the fact that they were going to get Trump. They all got elected and they all went right after Trump. And they all should’ve been recused, everyone in their offices, should’ve been recused because of the statements they made on the campaign trail,” said Gelormino, referencing New York Attorney General Letitia James and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Atlanta. 

I WAS INSIDE THE COURT WHEN THE JUDGE CLOSED THE TRUMP TRIAL, WHAT I SAW SHOCKED ME: ALAN DERSHOWITZ

Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump reacts as the verdict is read in his criminal trial over charges that he falsified business records to conceal money paid to silence porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016, at Manhattan state court in New York City, on May 30, 2024 in this courtroom sketch.  (REUTERS/Jane Rosenberg)

James had called Trump a “con man” and “carnival barker” and promised to shine a “bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings” before she was elected in 2018. She led a successful prosecution of the Trump Organization for fraud by falsely inflating the value of its assets. Trump and his lawyers argued that he never told anyone to inflate the value of his assets and that, if there were discrepancies, no one was harmed. 

Willis brought charges against Trump and 14 co-defendants in an alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. After winning the Democratic primary for her office in March, she said “the train is coming” for Trump and his co-defendants.

“It’s quite obvious they are using the law to prevent Trump from running for office,” said Gelormino. He criticized Bragg’s prosecutorial decisions in New York, noting the district attorney has taken a soft approach towards violent crime while ferociously pursuing Trump.

“In Manhattan, you can deal a house full of drugs, and they’ll try, at best, not to prosecute or put you in a program. You can get arrested for all kinds of crimes in Manhattan, and they’ll try to reduce the sentence. But Bragg is really cracking down on white collar crime, and we see it every day while street crime, violent crime and drugs are let go. And he’s doing it because that’s not his constituency,” he said.

BIDEN URGES RESPECT FOR LEGAL SYSTEM AFTER TRUMP CONVICTION WHILE PUBLICLY FLOUTING SCOTUS RULINGS

David Gelman, a New Jersey-based a criminal defense attorney and a former deputy district attorney, said anyone who looks at how the Trump case was handled in New York and doesn’t think it was “weaponized” against Trump is “lying to themselves.” 

“This is the first time in New York an individual has ever been tried for this type of crime. Is it a coincidence that it happened to President Trump smack-dab in the middle of a presidential campaign where he is the front-runner?” he asked. “I think not.”

He noted that the Federal Elections Commission, Department of Justice, Southern District of New York and Bragg’s predecessor each declined to prosecute Trump previously because they thought there was not enough evidence of a crime. 

“The problem now is that this could be common where we prosecute our opponents to stop them from being elected,” he warned. “This makes us no better than countries like Russia or China.” 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.