Hunter Biden Indictment Was Long Overdue

National Review Online

Friday, December 08, 2023

 

Back in June, when it first emerged that, after years of inexcusable delay, Delaware U.S. attorney David Weiss had schemed to bury the criminal case against Hunter Biden, we argued that the Biden Justice Department’s gamesmanship on behalf of the president’s son was indefensible.

 

Fortunately, the court thought so, too. Under the sweetheart deal, the younger Biden was to settle a yearslong pattern of felony tax evasion, derived from millions of dollars in income, by merely pleading guilty to two misdemeanor charges, with no jail time and with felony gun charges disappearing entirely. When Judge Maryellen Noreika posed a few basic questions about the scope of the arrangement, however, the deal imploded.

 

And now Hunter Biden has been indicted twice. The latest came Thursday evening in California: nine tax charges, including three felonies. This comes on the heels of the felony gun charges for which Hunter was indicted in September, arising out of his lying on required forms about his illegal narcotics use in order to obtain a firearm (which he then lost near a school — though it was fortunately found without incident).

 

The tax case is of the most consequence. The 56-page indictment makes for salacious reading: the president’s ne’er-do-well son spending astronomical sums on escorts, cars, lavish dwellings and vacations, countless other luxuries, and drugs — anything, it seems, other than his taxes (well, that and his child-support arrears). Weiss devotes so much energy to how Hunter spent his millions, and to how he denied Uncle Sam’s collectors their “fair share” of those millions, one can easily forget that what matters — in terms of the national interest — is how those millions were generated.

 

The name Joe Biden does not appear in the charging document, but the president hovers over everything. Weiss takes pains to point out that Hunter is “a Georgetown- and Yale-educated lawyer, lobbyist, consultant, and businessperson,” but he and his associates — including his uncle Jim, the president’s brother — raked in millions in overseas transfers from agents of corrupt and anti-American regimes because they were selling access to Joe Biden’s political influence, an endeavor that partners euphemistically describe as marketing the “Biden Brand.”

 

As the indictment’s extensive factual recitation elucidates, Hunter’s tax avoidance cannot be explained without describing his income streams, and that cannot be done without recounting the sleazy schemes and shifty characters the public has become more familiar with in the last year — e.g., Burisma, the corrupt Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter sat while his father, the then-vice president, pressured Kyiv to fire the prosecutor investigating the company; CEFC, an arm of the Communist Chinese regime posing as an energy conglomerate while it brought (bought, actually) the Bidens into the service of Xi Jinping’s extortionate “Belt and Road” program; a scheme to lobby on behalf of a corrupt Romanian businessman for a cool million bucks; and even the Hollywood lawyer and Biden donor Kevin Morris, who appears out of nowhere in 2020 to pay Hunter’s millions in back-taxes.

 

Joe Biden has involvement in each of these episodes. Weiss tries to keep him out of the narrative, but it’s impossible. He explains, for example, that Hunter was paid a million dollars a year by Burisma beginning in 2014, but that his salary in this sinecure was suddenly slashed in half in March 2017. The prosecutor doesn’t fill in the blank, but we can: Once Joe Biden was no longer vice president, Hunter lost much of his value. The income streams did not owe to the drug-addled Hunter’s business savvy; the “business” was Joe Biden’s political muscle, and its fortunes waxed and waned accordingly.

 

Regarding that, Weiss and his Biden Justice Department masters, especially Attorney General Merrick Garland, have much to answer for. Because Weiss dragged his feet, the statute of limitations lapsed on charges arising out of the 2014–2016 time frame, when Joe Biden was vice president. The indictment myopically focuses on Hunter’s spending habits and tax avoidance; there is no apparent consideration of such potential charges as bribery, money laundering, and failure to register as a foreign agent. Before trying to bury the case with the plea deal, Weiss tried to make it disappear with no charges at all — after telling investigators frustrated by the special treatment for the president’s son that he was being blocked by Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys (in the districts with venue over tax charges) and by the Justice Department. Weiss’s subordinate expressly instructed agents not to pursue leads or lines of questioning that would implicate President Biden. The prosecutor had IRS agents removed from the investigation, after five years of work, when he learned they were documenting his directives and commentary.

 

The two indictments against Hunter Biden have been brought only after Weiss was shamed by the judge’s questions about the plea deal, by the agents’ whistleblower disclosures about the investigative irregularities, and by the methodical work of House Republicans, who have so far established a staggering $24 million was transferred to various Biden family members and associates from foreign sources between 2014 and 2019 — with no apparent asset, other than access to Joe Biden, coming back in return.

 

Meantime, everything the White House has represented about the probe has been proved dishonest: The president, who implausibly claimed never to have even discussed business with Hunter, was deeply involved in the business through meetings, phone calls, pseudonymous emails, and other contacts; Hunter’s laptop was real, not Russian disinformation; Hunter made millions, not no money at all, in partnerships with agents of China; and so on.

 

Naturally, Hunter’s lawyers are wailing that he is now the subject of a witch hunt — charged in cases that should have been disposed of by the plea and only because his name is Biden. We suspect this is posturing, given that the president’s son has been subpoenaed by the House for a closed-door deposition next week; his lawyers are setting the stage for him to decline to testify. That’s a reasonable position for anyone facing prosecution to take. Nevertheless, the lawyers have it exactly backwards: If Hunter’s name weren’t Biden, he’d have faced felony prosecution years ago.