The unfolding drama between the Justice Department and Hunter Biden’s legal defense team brings to mind the line, “It’s a pity both sides can’t lose.”
Commentary
The unfolding drama between President Joe Biden’s Justice Department and Hunter Biden’s legal defense team brings to mind a line attributed to the late Henry Kissinger regarding the Iran–Iraq War: “It’s a pity both sides can’t lose.”
Unfortunately, recent developments suggest it’s the American people who will lose as the DOJ continues weaving a web of deceit, Hunter’s lawyers taunt and troll it, and the rule of law languishes amid the mockery of it.
On Dec. 7, Special Counsel David Weiss finally made good on his promise to bring
tax charges against the president’s adult son—a promise made months earlier following the collapse of the sham plea deal his office had hastily concocted with Hunter’s lawyers, in a bid to blunt IRS whistleblower claims the DOJ had
tanked the case, that would have shelved such charges.
The DOJ hit Hunter with a nine-count indictment in the Central District of California, including three felonies and six misdemeanors, covering serious offenses such as tax evasion and fraud. If convicted, the president’s adult son could face 17 years behind bars.
Yet despite its gravity, the indictment should be seen as one more ruse, in a Hunter Biden “case”
full of them, that aims to obstruct justice in service of politics—namely, protecting the Bidens and the Justice Department that has covered up for them.
Hunter’s alleged unpaid and obfuscated income tax bills are of secondary importance to the alleged ill-gotten income that generated those bills—the poisonous fruit of the Bidens’ alleged scheme to arguably sell out America to foreign firms and figures, tied to adversarial and/or corrupt regimes, for tens of millions of dollars and launder the “profits” through nearly two-dozen shell companies down even to one of the president’s grandkids.
Yet to read the indictment, the Justice Department seems curiously incurious about relevant questions like these: Where did the money come from? What did the Biden family do to “earn” it? Why did it labor so hard to hide the loot? What was Joe Biden’s involvement in these dealings? To what extent did they impact policy up to the present?
Congressional investigators have
unearthed answers to many of these questions, none of them good. They point to Biden family “business” with the Chinese, Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Romanians, and others that compromises our national security and foreign policy by the appearance of conflict alone, and that Joe Biden has repeatedly lied about his knowledge of and connection to the “business.”
The Justice Department strenuously avoids going there in the indictment. Instead, it distracts with lurid details about how Hunter Biden blew hundreds of thousands of dollars on prostitutes and porn that he deducted as business expenses. An inquisitive DOJ, incidentally, might want to know how Hunter’s foreign “business associates” may have leveraged his depraved conduct, and why they were so keen to pay millions to such a mess of figure in the first place.
Most importantly, Hunter remains unindicted for the gravest alleged crimes with a nexus to the president: serving as an unregistered foreign agent, money laundering, and bribery.
This is in part because the California indictment doesn’t cover the years when the most corrupting and allegedly criminal behavior occurred with respect to Ukraine and Burisma—prosecutors having let lapse the statutes of limitation associated with those offenses—but also because prosecutors are clearly still protecting the Bidens.
That DOJ omits the president’s name from the indictment; this, despite the fact Hunter’s entire “job” was trading on that name, Hunter & Co.’s sole asset, further illustrates this point.
The California indictment aims to create the appearance prosecutors got religion and are now vigorously pursuing justice, while they continue to shirk that duty.
Like the plea deal they had slapped together giving Hunter a global immunity get-out-of-jail-free card to try and make the sordid scandal of the Bidens’ alleged crimes and the Justice Department’s cover-up go away, this indictment is another inadvertent admission of guilt.
Ironically, Hunter Biden’s lawyers are planning to make a similar argument to get the DOJ off their client’s case. That is, they intend to claim the DOJ is engaged in a charade to clear the president’s son of all charges.
Four days after Special Counsel Weiss issued the California indictment, and three days before he would defy impeachment investigators by refusing to sit for a transcribed interview, back in Delaware, Hunter’s lawyers filed a
series of motions aimed at getting the felony gun charges brought there, in the immediate wake of the collapsed plea deal, dismissed.
They telegraphed a similar coming offensive in California that could well cause the DOJ to twist itself in knots defending a contrived mess of its own making.
First, consistent with a narrative they have long been seeding in the media, Hunter’s
lawyers are arguing their client is the victim of a “selective and vindictive prosecution.” No, really. Their contention is that the very Joe Biden Justice Department that slow-walked and systematically obstructed the investigation into the Biden family, and then refused to prosecute Hunter, let alone any other Biden, despite having developed evidence of myriad obvious chargeable offenses—right up until the point IRS investigators blew the whistle on it all—want you to believe Hunter Biden is the victim of a witch hunt. The Joe Biden DOJ, according to Hunter’s attorneys, has been weaponized by House Republicans who—in violation of the separation of powers—are forcing it to prosecute the president’s son.
As absurd as this argument is, Hunter’s lawyers have put prosecutors in an awkward position. They can’t admit they were being political in protecting the Bidens before. They would also never say they were shamed into bringing charges because IRS whistleblowers accused them of sabotaging the case, or because Republicans pressured them to do so. How will AG Garland’s
mop-up man finesse his way out of this?
Second, Hunter’s team is claiming that—as conservative critics noted at the time Mr. Weiss was so appointed—the special counsel is illegitimate because he was appointed in violation of DOJ regulations. What’s more, Hunter’s lawyers argue, Congress hasn’t appropriated funds for Mr. Weiss’s investigation or prosecution. Therefore, they say, the indictment “should be dismissed as without proper authority to have been sought and brought.”
Though the Justice Department would likely argue that other special counsels have come from within government, despite regulations to the contrary, Hunter’s lawyers are hanging an absurdity around the neck of the Justice Department that it may only work itself out of with great embarrassment.
AG Garland picked the fox to guard the henhouse—the least independent candidate imaginable—to preside over the Hunter Biden case, in Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who had allegedly tanked the case. It will no doubt be to prosecutors’ chagrin to have to defend this appointment.
Third, more in the theater of the absurd, Hunter’s team is maintaining, as it has since August, that the “sweeping immunity” provision central to the collapsed plea deal—inserted into a diversion agreement for which he arguably should have been
ineligible—remains in effect. This, it
argues, nullifies not only the three charges in the Delaware gun case, but also bars the DOJ from bringing “any plausible charge ... including the recently filed tax charges in California.”
When presented with this argument back in August, prosecutors contended that the diversion agreement was withdrawn, never went into effect, and was non-binding, as the court never signed off on it. Hunter’s lawyers, the DOJ said, took
words out of context during the hearing in which the deal died in a dishonest attempt to breathe life into it.
It isn’t clear how Hunter’s team will win on this count, but it surely seems like they’re teeing this argument up for a try in California as well, so they must see some merit to it.
Last but not least, and perhaps most laughably, Hunter’s team wants to get the gun charges kicked by making an originalist argument in favor of his Second Amendment rights, relying in part on the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 2022 New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen case that Joe Biden himself
said he was “deeply disappointed” in.
The joke here is on us.
The Biden DOJ has made a mockery of justice by trying to cover up for the Bidens, then cover up for that cover-up with a sham plea deal to paper over its subterfuge, then grant Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, of all people, special counsel authority we were told he was never supposed to need, to bring charges that still represent an extension of the cover-up for the Bidens; and most importantly while enabling Mr. Weiss to control the ultimate narrative about the case by crafting a final report wherein he can whitewash his office’s misconduct.
The timeline, a comprehensive version of which I have assembled at
RealClearInvestigations, tells the tale of this beyond-merited aspect of the House’s impeachment inquiry.
Hunter’s pugnacious lawyers, who threatened prosecutors with “career suicide” as they considered bringing charges months earlier, and have sought to attack the IRS whistleblowers, are exploiting conditions the DOJ created by its own chicanery.
A pox on every house.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
