OPINION:
President Biden’s son of crackhead and deadbeat repute has discreetly settled his legal indiscretions with “a slap on the wrist” from the U.S. judicial system. But other allegations of foreign grift and bribery that Hunter shares with his father and other family members are cause for continued public disquietude.
Americans mustn’t be appeased while those accusations remain unexamined. Justice abridged is still justice denied.
Hunter Biden faces two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay federal taxes on annual income of $1.5 million in 2017 and 2018, and a felony charge of possessing a firearm as an illegal-drug user, according to a notice filed by U.S. Attorney David Weiss in U.S. District Court in Delaware. Strikingly, the criminal charges and the defendant’s guilty plea, which came to light Tuesday, have been settled in one fell swoop.
The handy arrangement suggests a special deal seldom available to the average citizen, and it will likely spare the first son jail time and the president the taint of guilt by association.
Still, the Justice Department’s sudden move to wrap up its five-year investigation of the younger Biden at this precise moment cannot be reasonably viewed apart from association with jarring news events of recent weeks.
Timing, as they say, is everything. On June 9, the FBI surrendered to congressional Republicans a whistleblower’s statement alleging a $5 million Biden bribery scheme.
Like the interlocking gears of a well-made watch, the move meshed with the Biden Justice Department’s unprecedented, 37-count indictment of political adversary and former President Donald Trump for allegedly violating the Espionage Act of 1917 with his retention of classified documents.
Days later, Republican Sen. Charles Grassley revealed that redacted portions of the whistleblower’s statement alleged a Ukrainian national who purportedly paid the Biden bribe possessed 17 recordings of phone conversations capturing the president’s alleged involvement.
With his aides on tenterhooks, the elder Biden responded to his purported legal jeopardy last week in characteristic style, with a smirk and a hasty retreat from the inquiring press.
Now the president’s judicial authorities have concluded their reluctant hunt into Hunter’s tax and gun transgressions, tying up charges and pleas in one prearranged package. Assuredly, the president’s Democratic allies hope the Delaware deal will ease the public’s suspicions, which threaten to roil the country from sea to shining sea, regarding “the big guy” in the White House.
As for congressional Republicans, they reckon that Hunter’s plea agreement validates their conviction that there is one standard of justice for Democrats and one standard of justice for Donald Trump.
“Hunter Biden is getting away with a slap on the wrist when growing evidence uncovered by the House Oversight Committee reveals the Bidens engaged in a pattern of corruption, influence peddling, and possibly bribery,” Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said on Twitter.
While Mr. Biden deserves the presumption of innocence, the congressional inquiry into allegations that he, Hunter and other Bidens accepted money from foreign actors to leverage U.S. policy requires a full, fair and rapid investigation. The slow-walking of Hunter’s tax and gun investigation shouldn’t be repeated in the handling of much more serious allegations against his father.
Justice must not be abridged.
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