OPINION:
If nothing else, Hunter Biden has a career ahead of him as a reality TV star. The saga of the president’s son is no work of fiction, but rather the stuff of tragicomedy — both alarming and a little humorous.
Hunter’s travails leave little doubt that the Democratic establishment has refashioned justice to protect its investment in the Bidens. As further evidence of their influence peddling emerges, Americans can only be awed and appalled at the party’s unbreakable grip on “justice.”
On Wednesday, two IRS whistleblowers revealed 53-year-old Hunter’s legal shenanigans and officialdom’s efforts to conceal the trail leading back to his 80-year-old father. According to their testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, the Bidens took in millions from foreign actors in China, Ukraine, Romania and elsewhere for no apparent reason other than to cement ties with the politically powerful patriarch Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.
Joseph Ziegler, a self-identified gay Democrat and 13-year IRS agent, came forward to detail the five-year investigation of the younger Biden’s tax troubles. He pointed an accusing finger at the Justice Department for slow-walking and undermining the process.
Once the work was complete, investigators and prosecutors agreed that Hunter should be charged with four felonies, but the top brass decided otherwise. They discarded Justice Department guidelines and authorized two much less serious misdemeanor charges.
Hunter Biden, Mr. Ziegler declared, “should have been charged with a tax felony, and not only the tax misdemeanor charge.”
Supervising IRS agent Gary Shapley related how prosecutors did everything they could to block an investigation of criminal activity discovered on Hunter’s infamous laptop and nix questions related to his father, aka “the big guy.” A plan to search for evidence at a residence belonging to President Biden was scrapped, owing to “optics.”
It is hard not to marvel at Hunter’s alleged tax avoidance schemes: In 2014, according to the IRS whistleblowers, the younger Biden raked in nearly $667,000 as a board member of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm.
Rather than declare the income, Hunter purportedly forwarded $400,000 to a Chinese company run by an associate. The firm then lent the money to Hunter. Voila — no income to declare, no tax to pay.
The IRS investigators weren’t amused by the juvenile antics. As Mr. Shapley previously testified, “You can’t loan yourself your own income.”
If you’re Hunter Biden, though, apparently you can: Officials at Justice allowed the statute of limitations to expire on his 2014 tax obligations, so he never paid the $125,000 he would have owed. Other creative tax-saving strategies included writing off airline tickets for prostitutes as business expenses.
Straight-faced committee Democrats, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, painted Justice Department interference as routine jostling between prosecutors and investigators. In so many words, the IRS agents’ response: Um, no. Lending yourself your income is not a legal tax-saving strategy, and the level of interference meant to protect a politically favored defendant was like nothing they had witnessed before.
The Hunter tragicomedy is less entertaining when the tales of Biden graft are compared with the ordeals of Republican Donald Trump, who faces charges in multiple jurisdictions that give new meaning to the adjective “trumped-up.” Democrats’ breathtaking dominion over what passes for justice these days is something Americans never could have imagined.
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