It’s hard to defend hush money payments to a porn star that almost certainly had an impact on the 2016 election, so the Republicans aren’t really trying. Instead, they are arguing that the legal violations are too insignficant, and too remote in time, to warrant the prosecution of a former president. In effect, they maintain that something like the “high crimes and misdemeanors” standards for impeachment in the Constitution should be applied to criminal actions against Trump for the years before he took office.
If you accept the validity of the argument, shouldn’t it also apply to Hunter Biden? How did his grifting during the Obama years represent an ongoing threat to the republic?