Joe Biden Ought to Be Thrilled by the Prosecution of Hunter Biden, the ‘Wealthy Tax Cheat’

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

 

Axios reports on the toll that Hunter Biden’s shenanigans are taking on his father:

 

In private, no issue is more likely to anger or sadden President Biden than attacks on his son Hunter, according to people close to the president who have seen his moods shift when there’s bad news about Hunter.

 

That’s understandable. But this? This is not:

 

The 81-year-old president has suggested to close associates that if he hadn’t run in 2020, Hunter wouldn’t be facing criminal prosecutions or be the target of daily stories by conservative media — all while trying to stay sober and rebuild his life.

 

Really?

 

As ever, this smacks of the usual “Republicans pounce” framing, from which the press seems unable to escape. Axios suggests that Biden “has expressed guilt” because he sees his presidency as the reason for “the GOP’s focus on Hunter.” A casualty of this guilt, the outlet submits, is “President Biden’s relationship with his attorney general, Merrick Garland” which has become “strained” as a result of the suspicion that “Garland is trying in vain to satisfy bad-faith GOP critics.”

 

But this is nonsense. Here’s the BBC — hardly a bastion of GOP fervor — laying out what’s in the latest indictment against Hunter Biden:

 

Federal prosecutors have charged Hunter Biden with evading $1.4m (£1.1m) in tax payments, a second criminal case against the US president’s son.

 

The nine-count indictment also details a lavish spending spree including drugs and escorts over the same period, from 2016 to 2019.

 

Sounds bad. What are the details?

 

In a 56-page indictment filed in California, prosecutors allege he spent his money on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes”.

 

They say the president’s son “individually received more than $7 million in total gross income” between 2016 and 2020, but “willfully failed to pay his 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 taxes on time, despite having access to funds to pay some or all of these taxes”.

 

Okay. Perhaps there were some extenuating cir — oh, wait, no there weren’t:

 

In 2018, the defendant spent more than $1.8m, including hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash withdrawals, about $383,000 in payments to women and $151,000 on clothing.

 

Yet that same year, Hunter Biden texted his ex-wife that he could not make his alimony payment “due to insufficient funds”.

 

He meanwhile stayed at various luxury hotels, spent $10,000 “to purchase a membership in a sex club” and claimed that $1,248 cross country airline tickets for an exotic dancer were a business expense, according to the indictment.

 

Prosecutors note that he “had sufficient funds available… to pay some or all of his outstanding taxes when they were due”, but chose not to do so.

 

This is a bit of problem for Joe Biden, who has spent a good part of the last two years complaining that the IRS does not have the resources to go after “tax cheats.” This summer, the White House proudly touted Biden’s work in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, a 2022 bill that, among other things, gave nearly $80 billion extra dollars to the IRS. “One Year In,’ read its statement, “the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is strengthening enforcement against wealthy tax cheats and increasing recoveries from delinquent millionaires.”

 

And if the Republicans try to reduce that funding? President Biden has promised to veto it. In a statement issued in January of this year, the Biden administration made it clear that it “strongly opposes” any Republican-led attempts “to rescind certain balances made available to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)” that enable “the IRS to crack down on large corporations and high-income people who cheat on their taxes and evade the taxes that they owe under the law.” Such a move, Biden’s office confirmed, would serve as a “reckless” gift to “the rich,” that “protects wealthy tax cheats at the expense of honest, middle-class taxpayers.”

 

Which is to say that if it is true that, absent Joe’s presidency, Hunter Biden “wouldn’t be facing criminal prosecutions,” then surely Joe Biden is to blame? Or, rather, that Joe Biden is to thank? As the White House has made repeatedly clear, the dastardly Republicans who run the House of Representatives oppose increasing IRS funding. But President Biden, that great tribune of the working man, got it done anyway. The result of this achievement is that “high-income people who cheat on their taxes and evade the taxes that they owe under the law” can now be brought to justice.

 

High-income people such as . . . well, such as Hunter Biden. Per the indictment that Biden’s DOJ has brought against him, Hunter Biden “had sufficient funds available . . . to pay some or all of his outstanding taxes when they were due,” but he chose instead to spend millions of dollars on clothes, women, sex clubs, sports cars, luxury hotels and more. This, as President Biden likes to argue, represented a dagger into the hearts of the “ordinary, middle-class families that pay the taxes they owe.” Clearly, we have Joe Biden to thank for correcting the error.