OPINION:
President Biden has six months before he leaves office, and one of his legacies is that he was able to avoid involvement in prominent criminal trials involving his son and a big donor.
Take the prosecution of one of the biggest American fraudsters in history. Sam Bankman-Fried was a top-10 donor to Mr. Biden in 2020, shoveling over $11 million to aligned super PACs (political action committees). The assumption is that the $11 million — tapped from his crypto-money exchange FTX and his Alameda Research hedge fund — was stolen from investors, all or in part.
The Department of Justice charged Bankman-Fried with fraud and money laundering. Tucked inside the indictment sat one count of making unlawful political contributions and defrauding the Federal Election Commission, which oversees the campaign donation industry.
The indictment says Bankman-Fried conspired to make contributions directly to campaigns in the names of others.
To prove this count, the U.S. attorney in New York would have to call witnesses to testify about how Bankman-Fried money ended up with shadow donors. The testimony would surely spur national news and commentary on how Bankman-Fried, a historic fraudster, was one of the largest donors to the Biden campaign, on the same top-10 list as Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg LP) and George Soros (Democracy PAC), according to the research group OpenSecrets.
The testimony, however, never happened.
A few months before the October trial, the Justice Department dropped the charge because, they said, the Bahamas, from where Bankman-Fried was extradited, did not list campaign finance crimes on extradition papers.
Thus, there has been no Biden-related testimony or media chatter about the Biden-Bankman-Fried financial alliance. In late 2022, the White House refused to say if the Biden campaign would return any of Bankman-Fried’s cash. Convicted at trial, Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to repay $11 billion to clients.
Next, let’s look at the indictment of Mr. Biden’s son Hunter on tax evasion charges.
Amid Hunter’s hunt for foreign cash while his dad was vice president, no setting drew more suspicion than Ukraine.
In 2014, then-President Barack Obama named then-Vice President Joe Biden as the new super-diplomat for Ukraine in the aftermath of Russian leader Vladimir Putin gobbling up Crimea. This meant nothing happened vis-a-vis Ukraine and the United States unless the VP gave the OK.
Days later, guess who showed up on the board of Ukraine’s largest natural gas producer at $1 million a year: son Hunter Biden. His business partner Devon Archer got a seat too. That’s $2 million a year for guys who like to dump money in shell companies and look for investments.
In an instant, Ukraine emerged as the birthplace of the “Biden crime family,” as conservatives dub it. Before 2014, Hunter’s foreign financial maneuvers had stayed mostly in the background.
Mykola Zlochevsky, owner of the natural gas giant Burisma, was constantly under state scrutiny on suspicion of bribery and money laundering. Right as Hunter took his board seat, a Zlochevsky aide asked Hunter to use his “influence” to stop the investigations, according to an email contained in the chock-full laptop Hunter abandoned at a Wilmington, Delaware, repair shop in 2019.
Thus, any testimony at Hunter’s tax trial, scheduled to start in September in Los Angeles, would surely touch on such lucrative influence peddling in that critical year — VP Biden arrives in Ukraine, and presto, Hunter becomes a board member. But it won’t.
Gary Shapley, IRS criminal investigator turned whistleblower, testified to the House Oversight Committee that his agency unanimously recommended that Hunter be charged for the 2014 tax year by failing to report at least $400,000 in Burisma income, requiring $125,000 in taxes. But the Justice Department slow-walked the case until the November 2022 statute of limitations ran out on 2014 taxes, he said.
The indictment brought by the U.S. attorney in Delaware in December 2023 does not charge Hunter with 2014 Burisma income.
“So he has in his pocket $125,000 of money that should have gone to the federal government as taxes,” said Rep. Mike Turner, Ohio Republican.
Here is another way President Biden might be spared any mention.
Hunter wants to keep his dad’s name out of proceedings or, as his court motion from Abbe Lowell and his other attorneys reads, “to exclude references to alleged improper political influence and/or corruption.”
The motion asked District Judge Mark C. Scarsi, a Trump appointee, to block any allegation that Hunter Biden “received direct compensation from any foreign state, received compensation for actions taken by his father or any related alleged corruption.”
“For years, Mr. Biden has been the target of politically motivated attacks and conspiracy theories related to the allegations above. These baseless claims are the subject of widespread dissemination and discussion among a certain portion of the electorate, frequent media attention, and congressional inquiries,” the Hunter court filing stated.
This is a reference to an ongoing impeachment inquiry by House Republicans, who alleged that Hunter led a sophisticated influence-peddling operation based on his dad’s being vice president. Republicans have produced bank records that show Hunter raked in over $24 million from foreign nationals in Ukraine, Russia, Romania and China and that some proceeds found their way to Joe Biden, such as a “loan repayment” of $200,000 from his brother James Biden.
If President Biden is set to pardon Hunter, the clemency likely will not happen until after the November election, meaning the September tax trial will proceed.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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