by Roger Kimball
So we finally have a serious indictment of Hunter Biden. Well, half-serious. After having been stiffed by lawyers for Biden fils, special counsel David Weiss removed one glove, checked the statute of limitations clock and the north-by-northwest breezes of public sentiment, and decided that he had better slip in a valid indictment or two, ones with some semblance of teeth or at least dentures, before time ran out on all of them.
Back in August, I wrote in this space about “the sweetheart deal to end all sweetheart deals” that Weiss offered Hunter. Weiss was, I noted, “supposed to be prosecuting the case. In fact,” I continued,
it would be closer to the truth to say he was burying it. The full measure of sugar he shoveled into the deal is something that became known only accidentally thanks to an attentive judge. The world knew that Hunter was escaping any jail time for his tax and felony gun crimes. We discovered that the deal also immunized Hunter against future indictment only because Judge Maryellen Noreika, who presided in the case, actually read the deal and had the gumption to say “Hey, what’s this?
It was embarrassing all around but, as William Hazlitt once observed, “those who lack delicacy hold us in their power.” Do you think that the cadaverous apparatchik Merrick Garland, Weiss’s boss, gives a hoot about “embarrassing” revelations? He’s way beyond all that. You cannot shame a man who is shameless (an observation that prompts me to note again the linguistic curiosity that “shameful” and “shameless” are nearly synonyms in English).
Weiss slow-walked his “investigation” into felony gun charges and charges of tax fraud against Hunter Biden for some five years. Ding! That sound you heard a while ago was the bell signifying that the statue of limitations was now passed on some of the most serious charges. There are still some felonies on the charge sheet, along with a generous handful of misdemeanors. All told, Hunter could be looking at 17 years in the slammer.
“Could be.”
But don’t worry. Even though Hunter has been whining that “critics” have been trying to “kill” him and “undermine” his father’s presidency, take heart. Hunter need not check in to be measured for a new orange suit just yet. And as for undermining his father’s presidency, everyone, from David “the Prick” Axelrod to Charlamagne Tha God understands that Biden’s greatest, perhaps his only, area of competency is incompetency. There, he reigns supreme. If there is undermining going on, then it is Biden himself who is the “onlie begetter.”
Am I saying that Hunter will escape jail time for a litany of tax fraud and tax evasion that would have landed any ordinary mortal in jail for years? I think the chances are slender to anorectic that he will serve much if any time. Why? Well, for one thing his father is President of the United States. Joe Biden, as you may have noticed, has not tried out for the roles of Junius Brutus or Manlius Torquatus. Not for him the high-minded if severe dedication to the law over merely personal interest. My assessment: Joe would pardon Hunter in a flash were he actually convicted.
But I do not believe that Joe’s behavior would be dictated by paternal solicitude alone. On the contrary, if I am right, a large dollop of self-interest would be operating as well. As has been pointed out by several observers, the 56-page indictment handed up against Hunter is long on salacious detail. There are lots of drugs and hookers and kindred extravagances minuted in that extraordinary document. There are also many allegations of Hunter’s quite parsimonious attitude when it comes to paying taxes, or even filing the returns. Do you still itemize on your tax return? If so you will want to avoid Hunter’s accountant. You are not, repeat not, allowed to deduct hundreds of thousands of dollars for strippers, sex clubs, etc. You probably already knew that. Pass it on. It’s news you can use.
If the indictments against Hunter are full-to-brimming with detail, there are nevertheless some things missing. Perhaps the great hole is the name “Joe Biden.” Joe’s brother Jim makes a cameo appearance. But “the Big Guy,” “Mr. 10 percent,” is nowhere to be found. He is conspicuous by his absence, however. There is a lot of money sloshing around in these indictments. Where did it all go? It wasn’t just Bubbles and Tiffany and Zah-Zah who were beneficiaries of the pelf. What we get a glimpse of here is not just a spectacle of personal licentiousness and deviance on the part of Hunter Biden. This was also part and parcel of what Rudy Giuliani called “the Biden Crime Family.”
Jonathan Turley is right. Not withstanding the salacious charges itemized in Weiss’s indictment, the truth is that the document is “a marvel of evasion.” How so? Mostly because Weiss’s sock puppet indictment now conceals what his “inexplicable” behavior in allowing the more serious charges against Hunter—huge payments to Hunter from from the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, for example—could have shown had not they been rendered moot by the passing of the statute of limitations. Weiss has never explained why he allowed that to happen. And the eunuch, lap-dog press has not pressed the issue. “Recent testimony from IRS whistleblowers,” Turley notes, “suggests that wasn’t an accident.”
Investigators were stonewalled, they claimed, and the Justice Department was previously moving to reject any charges against Hunter Biden.
Exploring those earlier Ukrainian payments opens up questions about Hunter’s influence peddling and would have highlighted the conflict in his father’s extraordinary move to force the Ukrainians to fire a prosecutor investigating Burisma by holding back a billion dollars in aid for the country.
I think there are a couple of things going on in the background. One thing is that Biden père is getting a little nervous that his son-of-a-gun-number-one-son might just toss him under the bus should the the DOJ pursue its case against Hunter with even moderate ferocity. Hunter does not seem like the sort of chap to take the fall, even to save dear-old-dad.
The other thing playing out in the background, I suspect, is brought to us courtesy of the people who really run the country, i.e., Barack Obama’s minions in the DOJ, State Department, and other nooks and crannies of the Deep State. Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. That’s what the mysterious hand wrote on the wall at Belshazzar’s fateful feast. The puppeteers running Joe Biden can interpret the signs as well as the next soothsayer. Biden is history. If I were writing the screenplay for a new version of “The Godfather,” I think I would include an offer Joe couldn’t refuse. Drop out of the race for president at a time we appoint, and we’ll find a way to drop or subsume or sweep under the carpet the charges against Hunter. Persist, and we will, too, with the possibility of a severed horse’s head amongst the bed clothes in the form of revelations about you, J. Biden of Scranton, PA. What would follow then would be the glare of press curiosity about Joe’s role in all those financial transactions, and you know where that leads.
That’s speculation, of course. But if you have been paying attention, you know that it is not mere speculation.
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Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine’s Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art’s Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee).
Photo “Hunter Biden” by Ben Stanfield. CC BY-SA 2.0.
