Rightwing claims that Joe Biden’s surviving son is getting special treatment because of his father’s position don’t make sense. If you think about it, and not very much, it seems obvious his dad would be better off with him in a secure facility under responsible adult supervision.
Hunter Biden, like Hillary Clinton, hasn’t been charged with any crime, although it’s practically a leadpipe cinch he’s guiltier than she is. Of something.
He’s being investigated by U.S. Attorney David Weiss of Delaware, who was appointed by Trump, but is a straight shooter. Weiss is a career federal prosecutor with a record clean of political shenanigans, and Delaware’s two Democratic senators have no problem with him.
If Hunter is indicted, The Hill says (here), it’ll be for one (or more) of three things:
Possessing a firearm while addicted to a controlled substance. This is a “weak accusation” that will be “hard to make out,” because it would require prosecutors to nail down “when and how long” he had the gun, then prove he was addicted at the time,” and “how addicted” he was. All this gives rise to “the kind of reasonable doubt that [makes] prosecutors pause.”
Violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). It’s a given that Hunter never registered. But was he ever a foreign agent? Or just an overpaid Ukrainian gas company director? Was what he did for them, if anything, “political activity or lobbying?” And even if this grift leads to formal charges, The Hill notes, “Normally, FARA violations merit only a slap on the wrist.”
Tax fraud and money laundering. This can be serious, and Hunter paid over $1 million of back taxes in 2021, which isn’t chickenfeed. I once had a barber who went to prison for evading much less (you don’t owe that kind of taxes by cutting hair). He continually ranted to his customers about how high his taxes were; it turned out he hadn’t been paying any, or filing returns (i.e., a typical rightwing blowhard hypocrite).
But was it really tax evasion, or just how Hunter prioritized paying his bills? There’s ample evidence he lived beyond his means and his finances were in a chaotic state. When CNN looked into this, their reporters found an email from his assistant (bookkeeper? masseuse?) that said, “I’m trying to figure out what to do about [your] bills.” CNN says, “She listed a series of payments Biden owed, including health insurance, a car payment and her salary.” Hunter instructed her, “Pay the health care. Pay the Porsche,” which gives you an idea of what he considered important and how he prioritized his financial obligations. The Hill says “no one knows whether Weiss is considering tax charges against him. Time will tell,” but he did eventually cough up; and at the end of the day, the IRS wants the money, not the task of feeding peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches to prisoners.
The speculation about money laundering arises from “the recent sales of Hunter’s artwork to anonymous purchasers, the details of which being at this moment unknown.” Work by famous artists can sells for big sums to rich art connoisseurs after the world runs out of mansions and yachts to spend stolen money on. The connection between “famous” and “art” is often tenuous, with emphasis on “famous.” (Who pays big money for work by unknown artists?) I’m not sure what kind of art Hunter does; I assume it’s something along the lines of post-kindergarten freehand scribbling (see artist’s impression below). It’s well known that bad people frequently use art to erase the provenance of dirty money, when not enough bitcoins are available. But The Hill doesn’t say anything more about this, and I have no idea whether Prosecutor Weiss is looking at this, or what he sees if he is (think Rorschach blobs).
What about the laptop? It’s useless as evidence. By now, it resembles a computer that’s been passed around in middle school. There’s just no way of knowing who planted the porn images on it. The Hill says roughly 22,000 of the 129,000 emails on it are authentic, but which ones? The Hill summed up the New York Post‘s laptop exposé as follows: “Giuliani gave them [the emails] to the New York Post, and said he offered three hard drives to the FBI, but the agency refused to accept them. Turns out that portable hard drive had something added to it both before and after the New York Post’s original story.”
The laptop is about politics, not crime. Sprung on the public 3 weeks before the 2020 election, it was supposed to be an “October surprise.” But October surprises have a spotty track record. Lyndon Johnson’s October 1968 bombing halt of North Vietnam didn’t get Hubert Humphrey into the White House, and Hunter’s laptop didn’t keep Trump in the White House. (But unlike LBJ and Humphrey, Trump had backup plans (fake electors, violent insurrection, seizing voting machines, military coups, etc. — but those didn’t work either.) The laptop is a nothingburger.
The Hill also goes into the crimes Trump might get charged with, but I have to go pick up my wife’s groceries. The lingering, unanswered question is: Did Trump sell his art, too, or just stolen classified national security documents?
