Today, a federal jury in Wilmington, Delaware, found that the president’s son, Hunter Biden, violated the law when he lied about his drug use on a gun store firearms form to obtain a revolver, speed loader, and ammunition in October of 2018.
This was not a particularly close case. Evidence showed, among many other things, that Biden was texting his drug dealer the day before he bought the gun. The upshot, however, is that Hunter Biden becomes the first son of a United States president to become a felon in the history of the country. For much of the national news media, Hunter Biden’s trial and conviction is proof that the justice system is fair and impartial. Therefore, we should conclude that Donald Trump’s prosecutions are legitimate.
It’s fine to imprison the leading presidential frontrunner on a novel and untested legal theory, they say, because the current president’s son could potentially go to jail for crimes he obviously committed.
A columnist for The Daily Beast, for example, wrote:
Hunter Biden’s trial … shows that Trump’s principal assertion—that he is being unfairly targeted by Joe Biden—doesn’t hold water.
CNN, meanwhile, ran this headline:
Hunter Biden trial shows America’s justice system isn’t so rigged after all.
In order to come to a conclusion like this, you have to ignore the circumstances of how this trial came about, as well as the many crimes Hunter Biden has not been charged with — and, thanks to the DOJ, will never be charged with. Under Joe Biden, the federal government, very simply, did not want to bring this case. And when their hand was forced by two IRS whistleblowers, the federal government did everything they possibly could to protect Joe Biden and to sabotage more serious foreign corruption and tax evasion charges.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
As the New York Times reported last year, the lead prosecutor on the case, David Weiss, “appeared willing to forgo any prosecution of Mr. Biden at all, and his office came close to agreeing to end the investigation without requiring a guilty plea on any charges. But the correspondence reveals that his position, relayed through his staff, changed in the spring, around the time a pair of I.R.S. officials on the case accused the Justice Department of hamstringing the investigation.”
One of those whistleblowers, Gary Shapley, alleged in an affidavit that:
But the criminal tax investigation of Hunter Biden, led by the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware, has been handled differently than any investigation I’ve ever been a part of for the past 14 years of my IRS service. … At every stage decisions were made that had the effect of benefiting the subject.
Shapely also stated:
Investigators assigned to this investigation were obstructed from seeing all the available evidence. It is unknown if all the evidence in [Hunter’s] laptop was reviewed by agents or by prosecutors.
The testimony of Shapley and another whistleblower caused major, unexpected problems for Joe Biden’s DOJ. Their plan to bury the Hunter Biden case entirely was no longer viable.
First of all, the whistleblowers revealed that Merrick Garland may have lied when he told Congress that the DOJ wasn’t interfering in the Hunter Biden investigation. That had to be resolved immediately.
Secondly, and more importantly, the whistleblowers helped establish a direct link between Hunter Biden’s criminal activity and Joe Biden’s actions.
Here’s one recent interview, for example:
Two IRS whistleblowers who investigated Hunter Biden and say they were stopped from following the trail leading to his dad tell their story tomorrow on Full Measure. pic.twitter.com/hLOnUVJKtI
— Sharyl Attkisson 🕵️♂️💼🥋 (@SharylAttkisson) June 8, 2024
Confronted with statements like this from whistleblowers, the DOJ had no choice but to bring some kind of charge against Hunter Biden. So they settled on a plan: They would bring a prosecution, and then immediately seek out a plea deal. This deal, as the DOJ envisioned it, would grant Hunter Biden immunity from prosecution for unrelated felonies he may have committed — including potential violations of FARA, or the Foreign Agents Registration Act, relating to his overseas business operations. That’s the law that was essentially never prosecuted until the DOJ decided to use it to target Trump aides, including Paul Manafort.
In exchange for accepting this plea deal granting him total immunity, Hunter Biden would suffer no actual punishment whatsoever. The deal was too over-the-top, though, which is why it collapsed late last year when a federal judge refused to sign off. The DOJ admitted in court that they couldn’t think of a similar sweetheart deal ever being offered in the history of federal prosecutions.
So the DOJ was back at square one — but not entirely. Their strategy to absolve Hunter Biden completely may have failed, but their plan to insulate Joe Biden from scrutiny appears to have succeeded.
As Shapely stated in his affidavit, the sabotaged investigative process into Hunter Biden:
… meant no charges would ever be brought in the District of Columbia, where the statute of limitations on the 2014 and ’15 [tax] charges would eventually expire. The years in question included foreign income from [Ukrainian oil company] Burisma and a scheme to evade his income taxes through a partnership with a convicted felon. There were also potential FARA issues relating to 2014 and 2015. The purposeful exclusion of the 2014 and 2015 years sanitized the most substantive criminal conduct and concealed material facts.
In other words, the government let the statute of limitations on the most serious potential charges — the ones involving Hunter Biden’s time working at a high-paying, no-show job at a Ukrainian oil company — expire on purpose. And those potential charges aren’t simply significant because of their impact on Hunter Biden. They’re significant because, as you may remember, Joe Biden once publicly bragged about getting Ukraine’s top prosecutor fired. This was the prosecutor who, coincidentally enough, was investigating Burisma at the time. Watch:
That’s Joe Biden admitting that, when he was vice president, the U.S. threatened to withhold funding to Ukraine until Ukraine fired its own top prosecutor. You can choose to believe that Joe Biden is just really passionate about ending corruption in eastern Europe or it might be that Joe Biden wanted to take the heat off the corruption that his own family was engaging in.
We’ll probably never have the evidence of any such corruption now, though — because as Shapely said,
There is no mechanism available to collect the tax owed by Hunter Biden for 2014 other than in a voluntary fashion.
This is the ultimate goal of the Hunter Biden prosecution. The DOJ isn’t concerned about this gun case. Their real objective has been to slow-roll their work as much as possible, so that the more serious charges expire. And it’s very clear, as the whistleblower said, that there’s a viable reason to investigate not only Hunter Biden for potential FARA violations, but also his father.
Congressional Republicans, for example, have released a July 2017 WhatsApp message in which Hunter Biden appears to threaten a Chinese business associate by mentioning his father. According to court documents, Hunter Biden wrote:
I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. … Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. … And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. … I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.
So that’s a conversation that strongly suggests that Joe Biden was directly involved with his son’s foreign business dealings with a Chinese private equity fund closely tied to the Chinese Communist Party — and that he’d leverage his influence to secure payouts.
These are the kinds of investigative threads that the DOJ has been working to bury since they obtained Hunter Biden’s laptop all the way back in December of 2019 — as part of an investigation dating back to 2018.
These investigations haven’t taken so long because they’re particularly complicated. They’ve gone on for so long because the federal government has been trying to run out the clock. First they denied that the laptop was even real, then they slow-walked the investigation into its contents. And when two IRS whistleblowers disrupted their plan, they selected the pettiest charges imaginable so that they can obscure the real crimes they desperately don’t want to investigate.
Hunter Biden was convicted today for only one reason — so that Joe Biden won’t ever be investigated.
