Faced with charges of tax evasion and the possibility of a federal felony gun possession charge as a drug user, Hunter Biden got off easy. The presidential son will plead guilty to misdemeanor tax offenses and then avoid prosecution on the gun charge entirely, provided he abides by whatever promises of good behavior that the judge imposes.
That's the sort of bargain any defendant the feds have dead to rights, as they do with Hunter, would consider a gift. That's especially so when you consider it is entirely possible that he might well have been distributing drugs as well as taking them at the time he lied on a federal form to obtain a firearm. As Right on Crime's Brett Tolman pointed out, 94.2 percent of federal firearm convictions in 2022 involved at least some prison time with the median sentence being 39 months.
That the federal prosecutor in Delaware was appointed by a Republican doesn't make it smell any sweeter, and not just because a president's son ought to be treated the same way most violators are handled, not given a slap on the wrist. The real problem is that Hunter Biden is the focus of a disturbing trail of evidence about corruption that is, even in the most generous reading, highly suspicious. The President's son received millions of dollars in payments from foreign entities during the time his father was vice president.
Hunter got busy doing deals with entities connected to the Chinese Communist Party and placed the money in a suspiciously large number of limited liability companies with multiple family members outside of the president among the beneficiaries. Hunter's appointment to the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisima, despite his lack of any expertise on the topic, was an obvious effort to influence his father, whom President Barack Obama had made his administration's point man on Ukraine.
The Burisma connection has always seemed fishy due to President Biden's boasts about threatening to withhold U.S. aid to Ukraine if a prosecutor investigating that company wasn't fired. Even if that was innocent, the head of Burisma is now linked to allegations of an attempt to bribe the Biden family, evidence for which is allegedly to be found on tapes of conversations with them.
Hunter's business dealings might be technically legal, but he was peddling influence, something that is clearly corrupt.
The worst part of all of this is the way the DOJ is protecting the President. If such allegations were leveled against anyone else involved in the kind of criminality Hunter was routinely engaged in, the Department of Justice would be using them as leverage to get to the bottom of his family's questionable activities. Anyone else would be squeezed to reveal all about his shady dealings. Yet Hunter was simply... let off.
Set aside the way Democrats have been targeting former President Donald Trump for prosecution on anything they can pin on him. The DOJ's decision to go easy on Hunter Biden just after Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) announced that he's aware that the FBI has documents concerning tapes of conversations related to the bribery allegations, is outrageous. Every American should be furious at this blatant double standard.
The DOJ gave Hunter Biden VIP service that average citizens never get, and it looks bad. But even worse is the fact that no one in the federal justice system seems interested in getting to the bottom of the Biden family corruption allegations.
This is one more blow to the DOJ's credibility, which was already eroded by its role in the Russia collusion hoax plot against Trump. At this point no one should be surprised if those Americans not already committed to Biden's re-election no longer believe anything coming from the DOJ that works for him.
If the President cared about justice being done, this wouldn't be happening. But in an administration determined to let the President's son off the hook and to shut down this case the way their Big Tech and media allies shut down discussion of the Hunter laptop story in 2020, justice seems to be the last thing they are interested in.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org and a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
