Will Hunter Biden's legal fate hurt his father's re-election?
Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich has more on the political reactions to the new Hunter Biden indictment filed out of California on 'Special Report.'
In the hit movie "Network," fictional broadcaster Howard Beale has what he calls a cleansing moment of clarity when he skewers his own profession by admitting to a national audience, "You’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell."
That confessional has always resonated because it reflects the disdain that many Americans have for the real mainstream media. Polling data proves it. The distrust is richly deserved because reporters are notorious for slanting their coverage through deliberate deceptions, misdirections, outright lies and coverups. Even worse, their collective incompetence compounds the public’s scorn.
In the age of President Joe Biden, journalists have become his dedicated foot soldiers and public apologists. No amount of dissembling is discouraged. They merrily contort evidence, mangle facts and twist the law into a pretzel to excuse documented acts of wrongdoing by the president and his greedy family. Beale put it more bluntly — they lie like hell.
The moment Hunter Biden was indicted for tax crimes by a California grand jury, journalists scoffed at the case by insisting that it is unconnected to Joe Biden. This is true only insofar as the president himself is not named or charged. But his dirty fingerprints are all over the tens of millions of dollars in overseas cash that flowed into Hunter-controlled shell companies and bank accounts.
Evidence may tie President Biden and his son Hunter to influence peddling. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
The tax crimes arose from Hunter’s corrupt influence-peddling schemes, and the evidence is compelling that his father actively aided and abetted those schemes. Documents, testimony, White House logs, photographs, emails and text messages implicate him. He spoke repeatedly by phone with Hunter’s clients, met personally with his son’s overseas partners and even attended their meetings.
Joe was the "Biden brand," which meant selling access to him and promises of influence. He was in on it. Devon Archer, Hunter’s former partner, told congressional investigators that the then-vice president operated as "defense leverage" and sent "the right signals" to foreign clients who forked over millions of dollars. Joe was the "key component of the value," added Archer, who detailed how the elder Biden willingly participated.
Secrecy was a critical feature embedded in the schemes. Hunter’s laptop, which was authenticated by the FBI long ago, contains an email warning to an associate, "Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u (sic) are face to face, I know u (sic) know that but they are paranoid." Indeed, they were. To avoid detection, they used code names for him, like "the Big Guy" and "Celtic."
Is it any wonder that Joe used fake identities or pseudonyms to communicate? The National Archives confirmed there are over 82,000 pages of such private emails. Some of them are messages to Hunter and his partners. But don’t count on reading them anytime soon. Notwithstanding transparency laws, NARA is as opaque as a brick wall and just as obstinate. It may be years before the agency is forced to cough them all up.
A courtroom sketch depicts Hunter Biden in a federal courtroom in Wilmington, Delaware on July 26. (William J. Hennessy, Jr.)
When he campaigned for president in 2020, Joe Biden denied ever speaking with his son about his business dealings and insisted that he had no knowledge of any foreign transactions. Archer called that "categorically false." So did another Hunter associate, Tony Bobulinski, who has demanded that Joe "stop lying" about it.
But President Biden is now stuck with his own ingrained lies. As recently as Dec. 6, he doubled down on his long-standing denials of ever interacting with his son’s foreign clients by stating, "I did not. And it’s just a bunch of lies. They’re lies!" Perhaps a glance at some of the photos and records might refresh his recollection —such as it is.
Only an insensate person could possibly accept the rank garbage that Joe is peddling. Voters certainly aren’t buying it. An Associated Press poll found that nearly 70% believe he acted either illegally or unethically. I’d like to meet the clueless 30% who think he did "nothing wrong" … and check their pulse.
Selling access to a public office holder and/or promises of influence in exchange for money is described plainly in the criminal codes as bribery. If not a co-conspirator, Joe Biden was a witting accessory. Despite his obvious lies that he knew nothing about his son’s corrupt deals with foreign interests, the record is replete with evidence to the contrary.
In the face of overwhelming evidence, some in the media now reluctantly admit that Joe was involved. So, they’ve shifted to another canard that he committed no crimes because he never personally profited from any of the ill-gotten gains. That’s twaddle, because it is not how the law reads. Under 18 USC 201, it is still a crime if the payout was directed to "any other person or entity" instead of the office holder.
That statute was purposefully tailored to prosecute public officials who slyly funnel money to family members or into segregated accounts to avoid criminal culpability. And, of course, bribery is also an impeachable offense.
The infamous Burisma scandal is a classic example of a quid pro quo that the law forbids. By his own on-camera admission, Joe Biden engineered the termination of a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating the very company that was paying his son more than a million dollars a year to sit idly on its board.
The firing happened only after Hunter put his dad on the phone with the CEO of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky. The probe that threatened to destroy the business suddenly vanished overnight and the millions in cash continued to arrive in Hunter’s account. Archer conceded in his congressional testimony that Burisma was "able to survive … just because of the brand."
U.S. Attorney David Weiss has done his part to protect the Biden family. (Department of Justice)
None of this has been "debunked," as the media keeps schooling us. There is evidence that Joe Biden directly defied Obama administration policy when he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine unless the prosecutor was sacked. Moreover, a trusted FBI source informed the bureau that both Bidens were each paid an additional $5 million bribes from Zlochevsky. Whether that occurred remains under investigation.
What is conspicuously absent from the recent tax charges against Hunter Biden are the many other crimes that are self-evident. No money laundering or bribery or foreign lobbying crimes are alleged. There is nothing whatsoever about the Burisma shakedown involving Joe.
This is no accident. Biden’s Justice Department and U.S. Attorney David Weiss are still running a protection racket for the president. It’s alive and well. While the indictment focuses squarely on the overseas money that Hunter failed to pay taxes on, there isn’t the least bit of curiosity over how it was earned. It was attained corruptly with Joe Biden’s help. But Weiss won’t venture into that black hole.
No surprise there. This is the same U.S. attorney who never wanted to bring any charges at all, which is why he negotiated the ludicrous "sweetheart deal" for Hunter. Only when a federal judge in Delaware blew it up was Weiss forced to level the gun charges. Only when IRS whistleblowers produced damning evidence of crimes was he grudgingly compelled to file tax charges in California.
Make no mistake, Weiss was shamed into following the law. For that, he deserves zero credit and only our contempt.
No one should trust a prosecutor who runs an office that tipped off Hunter’s lawyers, scuttled legitimate search warrants, forbid any questions about Joe Biden’s complicity and deliberately allowed the statutes of limitations on the most serious crimes to expire. By protecting Hunter, Weiss was protecting the president. He’s still at it.
The latest charges against Hunter Biden are a searing indictment of a U.S. attorney bereft of integrity. They expose as crooked his earlier plea deal to allow the president’s son to skate entirely. It turned out to be exactly what the whistleblowers said it was — "preferential treatment." Hunter is not a victim, he’s a perpetrator.
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Abbe Lowell, Hunter’s contentious lawyer, absurdly claims that his client would never be charged if his "last name was anything other than Biden." That must come as quite a surprise to the thousands of tax cheats with different surnames who are prosecuted each year. Lowell must be a tax litigation novice. Or a novelist. Ironically, Joe Biden vowed to beef up the IRS so that more people — like his own son — could be prosecuted.
In the face of overwhelming evidence, some in the media now reluctantly admit that Joe was involved. So, they’ve shifted to another canard that he committed no crimes because he never personally profited from any of the ill-gotten gains. That’s twaddle, because it is not how the law reads. Under 18 USC 201, it is still a crime if the payout was directed to "any other person or entity" instead of the office holder.
The 56-page indictment also obliterates the persistent Democrat and media narrative by underscoring the many lies of Joe Biden. As law professor Jonathan Turley explained on Fox News, it’s abundantly clear that the president not only knew about his son’s deals, but he knew they were corrupt.
The usual suspects will still do Joe’s bidding, and they’ll enjoy welcome venues at MSNBC and CNN. The latter network indulged the incoherent rants of New York Democrat Rep. Dan Goldman who blamed Republicans for the criminal counts against Hunter, "which almost are never charged … and would be settled civilly." Really?
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Goldman, who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, sounds like he attended the Bugs Bunny School of Law instead of Stanford. In reality, roughly 65% of federal tax fraud offenders are sentenced to prison, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. There are countless people who have ended up behind bars for doing a lot less than the president’s son. The examples are well documented.
But CNN didn’t bother to correct Goldman’s erroneous statement, and only mildly challenged his outlandish remarks. Why would they? They’re content in their partisan arrogance, which only proves Howard Beale’s premise that members of the media "lie like hell."
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