by Margot Cleveland at the Federalist
In 2018, the feds launched an investigation into Hunter Biden, which the son of the now-president publicly disclosed in December 2020, following his father’s election. On Tuesday, news broke that Hunter Biden had agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax counts and had entered a pretrial diversion agreement on a separate firearms count, unleashing outrage from the right over the absence of any money-laundering or bribery counts. But even worse is the U.S. attorney’s failure to file these charges against the Biden son in 2019, which suggests shielding Joe Biden from scandal is the operative principle of the Department of Justice and FBI.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware filed criminal charges against Hunter, simultaneously notifying the federal court that prosecutors had entered into a plea agreement with the president’s son on two misdemeanor tax offenses and had agreed to pretrial diversion on a felony firearms offense.
The two tax misdemeanor charges spanned only a page-and-a-half and alleged in count one that the president’s son, during the 2017 calendar year, received taxable income exceeding $1.5 million and willfully failed to pay income taxes on that amount in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7203. Count two mirrored count one but charged Hunter with failing to pay the income taxes due on his 2018 calendar year earnings.
Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss filed separate information charging Hunter with violating 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(g)(3) and 924(a)(2), for knowingly possessing a firearm, “knowing that he was an unlawful user of and addicted to a controlled substance…” Sources say, however, that under the pretrial diversion agreement, Hunter Biden will not plead guilty to that felony gun charge, with prosecutors instead dismissing the count “if he remains drug-free and doesn’t commit additional crimes for two years.”