Posted on Friday, December 6, 2024

|

by Outside Contributor

|

2 Comments

|

Print

President Joe Biden is right about one thing. Hunter Biden has always been “treated differently.”

If Hunter had a different last name, he would never have been able to launch a career in corrupt influence-peddling or launder millions through his “art” or write a self-serving memoir about crack-fueled whoremongering or dump a gun next to a high school without any real consequences.

If Hunter’s last name weren’t “Biden,” special counsel David Weiss would never have let him get away with failing to register as a foreign agent or avoid paying millions in taxes that flowed from his foreign arrangements. If your name isn’t Biden, don’t try writing off your hookers and crack as tax deductions.

If Hunter had been treated like anyone else, the Justice Department wouldn’t have tried to give him blanket immunity not only on gun and tax charges but on a slew of uninvestigated potential offenses, including bribery and corruption.

If it hadn’t been for a principled judge named Maryellen Noreika, asking the government’s so-called prosecutors if they could provide a single precedent in which immunity was offered to a person for “crimes in a different case” (they could not), Hunter Biden would have walked last year. The DOJ was trying to pardon Hunter Biden long before Donald Trump won the presidency.

Then again, if it weren’t for the congressional testimony of Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, it’s highly unlikely Hunter Biden would have ever been charged even with those two piddling misdemeanor counts.

Because for four years, Merrick Garland and the DOJ acted as the Praetorian Guard of the Biden crime syndicate, doing everything possible to keep Hunter Biden out of a courtroom and then dragging their feet to ensure that the statute of limitations on the most serious potential crimes ran out.

Yes, Joe Biden lied on numerous occasions about never having discussed the family business with his son. Joe Biden also lied when he told the country he would never pardon his son. But the pardon letter itself is also a lie.

Like the president, many media outlets framed Joe Biden’s pardon as shielding Hunter Biden from specific gun and tax charges when it is a pardon for all federal crimes committed over the past decade, which includes the times Joe Biden was the vice president and president.

Any genuine investigation into the family’s $17 million foreign influence-peddling business would necessitate deposing the president of the United States and compelling him to answer numerous difficult queries about his connections to disreputable authoritarian regimes. Being a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” will only get you so far.

Hunter Biden’s laptop, despite censorious efforts of the press and social media platforms, was real and spectacular. It was filled with messages referencing his father’s role in securing the money and taking cuts from the business, not to mention the witnesses who said that the “Big Guy” had a part in that outfit or the checks referring to Joe Biden.

If Hunter Biden hadn’t been treated differently by the government, he would have had to answer for the 20-plus shell companies he helped set up with his uncle James Biden.

Indeed, the pardon’s decade-plus time frame is tremendously convenient, considering it coincides with Hunter Biden first pulling in $50,000-$83,000 per month as a board member of Burisma in 2014, just as his father was forging policy in that country for the Obama administration.

The pardon extends to 2015, when Hunter Biden received emails from a Ukrainian businessman thanking him for the chance to meet with Joe Biden when the latter was vice president.

It extends to 2017, when we have an email proposing an equity breakdown of a venture with Chicom energy concerns, which included the line, “10 held by H for the big guy?” It is the same year Hunter Biden threatened his Chinese partner Raymond Zhao with the words, “I am sitting here with my father.” Even the Obama administration was worried about Biden Inc.

The pardon also extends to 2019, when Hunter Biden received two wire transfers totaling $260,000 from Beijing with the president’s Delaware home listed as the beneficiary address. The “perception of access” can be quite lucrative.

As always, many of the president’s defenders leaned into emotional appeals regarding the older Biden. Any loving father would have pardoned his once-addicted son – a privileged, middle-aged, Yale-educated lawyer and international lobbyist who is constantly being portrayed as a child. One could argue that a good father would never have enabled his drug-addicted son to engage in influence trading. But what is certain is that a patriot would never have put the country or his family in this position.

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books – the most recent, “The Rise of Blue Anon,” available now. His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post and numerous other publications. Follow him on X @davidharsanyi.

COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.