If Only Because of Hunter, if Joe Biden Cared at all About American Democracy, He Would have the Decency Not to Run for Reelection
“In June 2016 I began doubting the inevitable triumph of a Hillary Clinton campaign strategy of ‘Ha, ha, you’re stuck with me because Trump is awful.’ Here we go again.” —Holman Jenkins, “Only Biden Can Reelect Trump” ~ Wall Street Journal
“Democrats act as if Biden is a once-in-a-generation political talent when he’s an 80-year-old man whose foremost political achievement is beating an unpopular incumbent in the midst of a pandemic with a basement campaign.” —Rich Lowry, “Biden is Trump’s Best Friend” ~ National Review
There is more than one persuasive reason, for which Joe Biden should not run for reelection: such as his age-related mental unfitness; the fact that if he were to die in office, the abominably incompetent Kamala Harris would have to be his substitute; and glaringly that he’s perhaps the one Democratic candidate who possibly can’t beat the likely Republican nominee, Trump, in a rematch of 2020. However, if only because of the scandalous fiasco involving his son Hunter, for the good of the country, if Joe Biden had any true regard for the national interest, then he would have the civic decency to step down and resign his candidacy for a second presidential term.
Let’s first go over the tangled mess in which Hunter—and to the extent that his son reflects on him, Joe—Biden is implicated, because unless you read The Wall Street Journal or National Review, shamefully you’re likely to get only the most shallow reporting on it. A month ago Hunter’s lawyers cut a sweetheart deal with Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice, in which if he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor tax-evasion charges (failing to file $17 million in income taxes, a crime interestingly that DOJ’s tax manual states, should be prosecuted as a felony) in exchange not to get prosecuted for a felony gun charge (lying to purchase a firearm as a drug addict), where provisions for Hunter’s immunity were tucked into a pre-trial diversion agreement concerning the gun charge, where he wouldn’t be charged for a felony if he got treatment for his drug issues. As Eileen J O’Connor recounts in her Wall Street Journal op-ed, “You’d Go to Prison for What Hunter Biden Did,”
…for the six years 2014 through 2019, Mr. Biden failed to report or pay tax on perhaps $17.3 million he received from questionable sources. He filed returns several years late, and when he did file them, he claimed as business deductions the cost of his drug dealer’s hotel room, call girls, sex-club dues and his daughter’s tuition at Columbia University.
Noting that most people who commit these offenses go to prison for years, let alone get off without prosecution, O’Connor says that the Justice Department’s tax division had also authorized to prosecute Hunter for six felonies and five misdemeanors. However, when the Delaware attorney general, David Weiss, went to the Garland Justice Department about prosecuting Hunter in DC, he was blocked. Then Weiss was left to permit the statute of limitations to expire. Even though as O’Connor writes,
For the government to permit the statute of limitations to expire is unheard of. When a taxpayer refuses a government request to extend the statute of limitations, the government goes ahead and brings the charges.
And Garland said that if Weiss let the statute of limitations expire, and DC wasn’t his jurisdiction, then it wasn’t Garland’s business to intervene to extend the statute. But it certainly was!!
And it gets shadier. Two IRS agents, Joseph Ziegler and Gary Shapley investigating Hunter Biden’s foreign business deals, claim the Garland Justice Department stymied their investigation in several ways—slow-walking it, blocking interviews of Biden family members who had received millions in foreign payments, and failing to issue search warrants after probable cause had already been found. Joseph Ziegler characterizes the DOJ’s actions towards the IRS as “obstruction,” recollecting in his own Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Hunter Biden Whistleblower: a Special Counsel Case for Hunter Biden,”
Things reached a breaking point when Gary Shapley and I were sidelined after a disagreement with U.S. Attorney David Weiss. Four assigned prosecutors and Mr. Weiss had agreed to recommend the approval of misdemeanor and felony charges for 2017-19 before Mr. Weiss ultimately claimed he wasn’t the deciding person on whether to file charges. When Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in the District of Columbia and the Central District of California declined the case after only a brief review, and refused to allow Mr. Shapley or me to brief them on our findings, I knew I had to blow the whistle.
And last week the sweetheart plea deal blew up in court, betraying the shoddy basis on which it was contrived. When Judge Maryellen Noreika, supposed to rubberstamp the deal, flummoxed that the provisions for immunity weren’t stated in the plea agreement, asked DOJ basically, so am I to understand that Hunter gets complete immunity from prosecution? DOJ, put on the spot, having to save face, admitted no, forced to declare there was still an ongoing investigation into whether or not Hunter’s tax crimes were actually felonies (an investigation remember, that DOJ blocked, according to the IRS whistleblowers). Then Hunter’s lawyers reacted by saying more or less, Hey! I thought we got complete immunity! So in the aftermath, farcically Hunter is temporarily pleading not guilty, while the court adjourns until the prosecution and defense can come to a more reasonable, equitable understanding that a judge can approve in good conscience.
The question that remains, given the evidence that DOJ is protecting Hunter for some reason, what the hell is it? I think the answer is that, not because Hunter is the president’s son, but that Joe Biden was likely, or even only possibly, involved in his son’s business. As a former business associate of Hunter’s, Devon Archer, testified before the House Oversight Committee the other day, Joe Biden joined his son twenty times on business calls. Archer also said that Hunter exploited the Biden (i.e. his father’s) “brand” in cutting his business deals. For example, when one of the companies with which Hunter was in business, Burisma, was being investigated by a Ukrainian prosecutor for corruption, a Burisma executive instructed Hunter to “call DC.” Archer also divulged that Joe Biden had coffee with Hunter’s business partner Jonathan Li, head of a Chinese energy company and wrote a college rec letter for Li’s daughter.
This is not a slam dunk (yet) that Joe Biden committed a crime, however it’s damning in light of Biden’s statement that he had no knowledge of Hunter’s business. In a statement, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Republican James Comer pointed out that Biden lied, observing, “it begs the question of what else he is hiding from the American people.” Since these revelations surfaced, it’s notable that White House Press Secretary has gone from saying that Joe knew nothing about to saying he had no involvement in Hunter’s commerce.
Now without recourse to what happens with Hunter’s plea deal, and whether or not he is in violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act as the Wall Street Journal editorial board alleges, and whatever may be the extent of Joe Biden’s involvement, the unsightly nature of the scandal alone will inevitably have more than a little bearing on Joe Biden’s already inauspicious reelection prospects, especially the further Republicans on the Oversight Committee probe into the extent of Joe Biden’s centrality to it.
Jason Willick writes in the Washington Post, “Why the Hunter Biden Plea Fiasco Will be a Drag on Democrats,”
But even if none of the “Biden family business” allegations stick, the collapse of Hunter Biden’s plea deal in open court punctures the Biden administration’s sanctimony about an independent Justice Department. “We have said we wanted to restore the independence of the Department of Justice. That is what you’re seeing,” the White House press secretary said in January, after classified documents were found on Biden properties. (By the way, has anyone heard anything from Robert K. Hur, the special counsel appointed seven months ago to investigate that case?)
Voters might cynically expect a president’s son to get a slap on the wrist. But Garland’s Justice Department is asking a lot. It has made its supposed independence from politics its central pitch. At the same time — in what may be the most fateful decision of the 2024 presidential campaign — it is prosecuting the Biden administration’s leading opponent. The Hunter Biden saga will give Republican politicians a way to attack that prosecution without trying to defend Trump’s indefensible behavior.
Indeed the Hunter Biden situation casts the Trump indictments in a bad light, when there was already legitimate suspicion of a two tiered justice system, between the failure to prosecute Hillary Clinton for exchanging classified information over a private email server, and the bombshell revelations of the Durham Report that the FBI broke all their own rules of procedure and lied to obtain a warrant to investigate Trump for ties to the Kremlin to absolutely no avail. And you might also add, the government-sponsored tech companies’ suppression of vaccine and lockdown skepticism, and more importantly, for our purposes, the censorship of the New York Post story on the Hunter Biden laptop.
Moreover I’m inclined to think that if DOJ is going easy on Hunter Biden to protect Joe Biden, the principal reason for protecting Joe is to preserve the integrity of the Trump indictment, as before the Hunter Biden stuff came to light, DOJ was already intent to the utmost on prosecuting Trump’s crimes (as they should be; indeed anyone who wants Trump to be held accountable for his crimes should be mortified that DOJ is going soft on Hunter Biden). Daniel Henninger in his recent more philosophical op-ed on the rule of law in the Journal, “Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, and the Rule of Law,” points out that,
However overwhelming the Trump Jan. 6 indictment, the recent Hunter developments are as important for the integrity of the law. You can call Hunter, Burisma, China and the “big guy” pedestrian influence-peddling, but in the context of a former president’s legal problems, the Hunter plea bargain has become more than that. It is a public test of legal equity for the government that put these Trump indictments in motion.
What I am saying is, DOJ realizes the same thing but perversely interprets this truth differently— because Trump defied the rule of law, for our institutions to work, Hunter (namely Joe) can’t be seen to do wrong. If say, it were to be found that Joe Biden was no less guilty than Trump, then it would play into Trump’s lies that Biden is not a legitimate president etc., and corrupt DOJ’s prosecution of Trump’s criminal turpitude. I’m afraid this is a typical case of where our institutional elites are mistakenly presuming that people are more simple-minded than they are, and now they’re defensively acting to bolster and protect their threatened credibility, or that of the institutions in which they work, that is by attempting to shield the public from the increasingly evident corruption of the Biden family.
This Justice Department, befitting Joe Biden’s laughable posture as a great unifier, has in its own profoundly misguided institutional self-interest to draw the starkest permissible line in the sand between absolute right and absolute wrong, such that if Trump is in the wrong, Biden has to be in the right— and conversely if Trump were in the right, then Biden would have to be in the wrong. There cannot be a situation where either Trump and Biden are both right, or both wrong, insofar as that would endanger “our democracy” by rendering “justice” obscure… In the Trump era, such nuance would defy the rule of law, which in practice is applied in a one-sided fashion. Such is the sanctimoniously moralistic mentality I think one has reason tentatively to conclude is afoot in the Biden DOJ. Insofar as most of the people in government and the public who revile Trump like to identify themselves as the moral center, though it offends decency, it garners publicity or clout to ingragiate oneself with the Resistance against Trump and MAGA. And increasingly that’s all authority seems to be nowadays—clout, scolding, and self-righteous bromides— not the cold application of principles for the sake of disinterested justice and following the facts wherever the hell they lead.
In this context, it’s noteworthy that Garland did not appoint a special counsel to oversee the Hunter Biden probe, despite the endemic conflicts of interest, although he did when it came to Trump. And some critics suggest Garland can save some lost impartiality by appointing one now. Like the IRS whistleblower Joseph Ziegler quoted above argues in WSJ, or John Yoo and John Shu in National Review, “The Case for a Special Counsel to Investigate the Bidens,”
argue,
Enough of a conflict of interest exists for Garland to appoint a special counsel. Indeed, investigating a president’s son along with the president’s siblings and other family members, plus perhaps even the president himself, is a conflict of interest so obvious that it barely requires stating. Hunter’s failed sweetheart plea deal in and of itself demonstrates that the DOJ gave Hunter preferential treatment. The DOJ’s weakness in the plea deal shows that it cannot overcome the conflict of interest on its own.
But I agree with my friend Thomas Gregg
that to appoint a special counsel would make no difference at this stage—in fact it would make DOJ’s preferential treatment of the president’s son look even shadier— Gregg who also has the foresight to say in his latest Substack post, “Equal Justice Really?”All this is a gift from on high—or from precincts below—to President Biden’s probable 2024 opponent, former President Trump. The familiar MAGA charge that there exists in America a two-tier justice system, one for progressive elites and another for everybody else, has just been given a substantial boost. Literally no other American would have been offered the plea deal that the DOJ just offered to Hunter Biden. And no Republican president so close to such shady dealings would be receiving a pass from the mainstream, which is to say the Democratic/progressive, media. It’s almost comical to see the lengths to which outlets like CBS and the New York Times have gone to unsee the sordid details of this burgeoning scandal. Even now they’re barely covering it.
The excuse for all this moral corruption is a claim, never voiced but well understood, is that even a decrepit, incompetent, stupid and corrupt old man like Joe Biden is preferable to a monster of evil like Donald Trump. I might agree with that claim if Biden really were the only alternative to Trump. But that surely is not the case. (Ironically, Trump supporters make the same dubious claim on his behalf: that he’s the only alternative to Biden.) There are other people in the Democratic Party who could step in if Biden bowed out—or was forced out. I can only surmise that Democrats fear ditching Biden because they agree with him that nobody else could beat Trump. Six months ago, that looked plausible. Now it doesn’t. The most recent New York Times/Siena College poll has Biden and Trump tied at 43% each. That’s dangerous territory for an incumbent dogged by an ugly scandal and stuck with a 39% approval rating. And that’s against Trump. Where would Biden be against some other Republican, say, Tim Scott?
Indeed, the damage to the principle of equal justice in America has already been done. And now we have only to await the the consequences come 2024, which if Biden runs again, I’m afraid would put the public trust in American institutions to a test the Republic cannot sustain.
I’m not sure who from the Democratic party should run for president in his stead—they’re almost all socialists—but for the rule of law and equal justice’s sake, and just as important, preventing Donald Trump from getting elected again— almost anyone would be better than Joe Biden.
He should have the decency to step down before everything Hunter-related gets uglier.
— Jay
Great piece, and not just because you quoted me. The 2024 election is shaping up to be a disaster of "Titanic" or "Hindenburg" proportions. Once the dust settles, I wouldn't be surprised to find more people than ever accepting Trump's 2020 stolen election narrative. There's an old saying about mobilizing Beelzebub to drive out the Devil. That's our situation now: The current corrupt president is striving to destroy the previous corrupt president, a procedure that Democrats and progressives market with the label "defending our democracy."