Thoughts on the Hunter Biden Plea Deal

Biden's two-tiered justice system strikes again.

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Welp, the wait is finally over. At long last, Hunter Biden has been criminally charged by federal authorities…in the most minimal manner possible.

The president’s son has reached a negotiated deal to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors (no jail time), and pre-trial diversion on the slam dunk case that he violated federal firearms laws by possessing a gun while being “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance”—a charge that statutorily carries up to ten years in prison, and which derives from him lying on the form he submitted to obtain a gun that he then brandished on camera while high on drugs with a prostitute, before he subsequently “lost” the gun.¹ Ironically, the gun charge is punishable under legislation pushed through by then-senator Joe Biden to show how super serious Democrats are about gun crime.

These meager charges seem explicitly calculated to insulate Joe Biden and the rest of his family. Obviously the big takeaway is that nothing here implicates millions of dollars funneled through shell companies to the Bidens from sketchy characters associated with tyrannical foreign regimes. Today has to be a good day for the president, if only because he can rest easy knowing that the DOJ painlessly resolved the only other sources of leverage it had over Hunter.

Charles Cooke points out another way this deal appears to insulate Joe Biden: “It prevents his son’s lawyers from making a case in open court that would have been deeply embarrassing to his father’s political agenda.”

Politico reported earlier this month that…

[Hunter Biden’s] lawyers have already told Justice Department officials that, if their client is charged with the gun crime, they will challenge the law under the Second Amendment, according to a person familiar with the private discussions granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly. That could turn a case that is already fraught with political consequences into a high-profile showdown over the right to bear arms.

The dispute would come as the White House fights to tighten gun laws. And it could put conservative gun-rights enthusiasts, who typically criticize the Biden family, in unusual alignment with the president’s son.

Joe Biden has a long history of supporting not just stricter gun-control and drug-control laws, but stricter laws in the areas where guns and drugs intersect. It goes without saying that the president didn’t want to see his son’s lawyers arguing that, under the recent Bruen decision that Joe vocally opposes, all of those laws are unconstitutional.

Note the thinly veiled but powerful threat from Hunter’s lawyers, who “told Justice Department officials that, if their client is charged with the gun crime, they will challenge the law under the Second Amendment.” Cooke points out that under the American system of government, “the Hunter Biden case has ultimately been brought not by the DOJ, but by the authority vested in the president of the United States.” Per Article II of the Constitution, the prosecution would be most literally rendered as Biden v. Biden. Imagine the dilemma this would cause and the god-awful publicity.

Early last month, the president gave an interview on MSNBC in which he said, “My son has done nothing wrong.”² This was, of course, blatant interference during a time when the Justice Department and its assigned prosecutor³ were under significant pressure due to whistleblower allegations of political obstruction in the Hunter Biden probe and that the FBI was sitting on evidence that implicated the president in a bribery scheme (which turned out to be true).

This led to speculation that Hunter Biden would be given a “sweetheart plea deal” in which he’d admit guilt to a minor tax charge or two on top of giving a false statement on a federal firearms form in order to conceal his drug abuse. In the process, the part that really matters — the corrupt money laundering scheme involving the gross monetization of Joe Biden’s political influence — would be quietly swept under the rug. And that’s exactly what’s happened. The goal is to get the public to forget the real political scandal. It’s the equivalent of “ticketing the get-away driver after a bank hold up.”

It’s a little known fact that under Justice Department policy, even with a plea agreement, the government is supposed to seek a plea to the “most serious,” readily provable “offense that is consistent with the nature and full extent of the defendant’s conduct.” That’s not what happened here. Hunter Biden committed tax offenses that could have been charged as evasion, which is punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment for each count. To say nothing of the false statement made to acquire a gun, a ten-year felony.

As Ball of Collusion author Andrew McCarthy has highlighted, Biden apologists have tried to minimize that gun transaction as a “lie and try” case, which they argue is rarely prosecuted. But the reason it’s not often prosecuted is because of what you’d infer from the “try” part—the person lying to acquire a gun was caught, thereby failing to obtain one. Hunter Biden’s case, however, is different: he lied and succeeded. He got the gun. He then proceeded to film himself playing with it while cavorting with $5,000 Russian hookers. Not long after, he and his then-paramour — Hallie Biden, widow of his older brother — managed to “lose” the gun near a high school.

That’s the sort of gun case that gets charged by the Justice Department even if the suspect hasn’t also failed to pay $2 million in taxes and peddled his father’s political influence to enrich himself.⁴ And yet, rather than acknowledging the raging conflict of interest that comes with investigating the president’s son and appointing a special counsel, the DOJ is allowing Hunter Biden to skate with a probation sentence for the tax charges and diversion (essentially, no prosecution) on the gun felony that would almost certainly result in imprisonment for most Americans.

That’s why it’s misguided to compare Trump’s treatment to Hunter Biden’s. Compare it to any ordinary American who’d have the book thrown at him. Better yet, compare the Biden DOJ’s handling of Hunter’s case to how it has handled far lesser crimes.

A well-known Catholic activist named Mark Houck comes to mind.

In September of last year, Houck was arrested in front of his kids after the Biden DOJ ordered an FBI raid on his house for alleged violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE), which makes it a federal crime to “injure, intimidate, and interfere with anyone because that person is a provider of reproductive health care.”

Houck is the founder and president of The King’s Men, which “promotes healing for victims of pornography addiction and Christian virtues among men in the United States and Europe.” According to his wife, Ryan-Marie, he also drives two hours south to Philadelphia every Wednesday to sidewalk counsel for six to eight hours at two different abortion centers.

In October 2021, he was counseling when a pro-abortion protester threatened his son (12) and yelled obscenities at him, saying “crude … inappropriate and disgusting things,” like “your dad’s a fag.”

Houck shoved the man away and he fell back. Houck was never charged for it, though the man tried unsuccessfully to sue him, per journalist Greg Price. The FACE violation charge was thrown out last summer, but was somehow picked up by the DOJ, leading to a full-blown FBI raid.

Ryan-Marie explained that a team of 25 to 30 agents swarmed their property with around 15 vehicles at 7:05 AM, pounding on the door and demanding that it be opened. Her husband tried to calm them, saying, “Please, I’m going to open the door, but, please, my children are in the home. I have seven babies in the house.”

It didn’t work. Apparently, they stormed the house with rifles up and scared the hell out of the kids. When asked for a warrant, “they said that they were going to take him whether they had a warrant or not.” It was only after Ryan-Marie protested, saying “you can’t just come to a person’s house and kidnap them at gunpoint,” that they agreed to get the warrant for her from one of their vehicles.

Mark Houck was facing a maximum sentence of 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and fines of up to $350,000, just because of an altercation with some abortion activist (the case was finally dropped in February).

How can anyone possibly think that the FBI is justified in raiding the home of some harmless father of 7 for a minor altercation that occurred while he was sidewalk counseling? You’d think this guy were a human trafficker or child pornographer or something. The Biden administration actually assembled a grand jury, secured an indictment, and charged a man with a federal crime possibly carrying an 11-year sentence because he shoved another guy. Think about that.

This only makes sense if you apply a political lens, and it sure looks as though the White House and the Democratic Party are waging a concerted campaign on “pro-lifers.” The FBI has yet to make a single arrest in its “investigation” of the attacks on pro-life centers and churches following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. There have been dozens of such incidents. The Biden administration is even being sued for allegedly hiding information on these attacks.

Compare and contrast, folks. The charges against Hunter Biden reveal the Biden DOJ’s two-tiered system of justice. Marco Polo, a nonprofit research group exposing corruption and blackmail, scoured the Hunter Biden laptop and found proof of 140 business crimes, 191 sex crimes, and 128 drug crimes. And yet, the president’s son is walking away with a slap on the wrist.

1. Hallie Biden, Hunter’s then girlfriend and his late brother’s widow, illegally disposed of the handgun in a public trash can outside of a grocery store in Delaware less than two weeks after it was purchased.

2. For years there’s been much mockery on the Left of the notion that Hunter Biden was a worthy subject of federal investigation. It’s hard to sustain that posture now that there are guilty pleas.

3. Note that the federal prosecutor on the Hunter Biden case served as the right-hand man to a longtime Biden family crony.

4. The rapper Kodak Black had to serve 46 months in prison for the same gun charge. His lawyer isn’t happy.