Hunter Biden: Justice or Witch Hunt?
Photo by acaben, CC BY-SA 2.0
By now, it is no longer breaking news that Hunter Biden has pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor tax and gun crimes. The reactions run the gamut from cheering that a Biden is being shown to be a criminal to anger that he got off lightly to disgust that a president’s child is being persecuted by the political opposition. What is the real truth?
For starters, I’m not going to say that Hunter should be off-limits. The president’s son has had a troubled life and could be a poster boy for why illegal drugs are bad. If Hunter has committed crimes, and he has now admitted that he has, he deserves to be punished.
Having said that, it is a bit gross and devoid of class, not to mention basic human decency, to use Hunter and the Biden family’s misfortune to attack his father politically. I’m not sure that is a smart strategy since there are a lot of American families who have a drug-addicted black sheep like Hunter. Many of those families know and understand that one problem child does not implicate the entire family.
The meat of Hunter’s deal is that he will plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges for failing to pay taxes in 2017 and 2018. CBS News reports that he had earned more than $1.5 million each year but did not pay taxes. He has since paid the taxes owed plus additional fines.
The gun charge is a felony but will be part of a pre-trial diversion. Hunter reportedly illegally possessed a Colt Cobra .38 Special revolver for 11 days in 2018. Hunter’s possession of the gun was illegal because he was an “unlawful user of and addicted to a controlled substance.” The press release and legal documents detailing the charges and deal are available online.
The pre-trial diversion program (PTD) is for certain nonviolent offenders. The Justice Department website notes that “Individuals who successfully complete a PTD program may qualify for a range of case outcomes, including the declination of charges, dismissal or reduction of charges, or a more favorable recommendation at sentencing.” On the other hand, “unsuccessful participants may be charged or, for participants who have already been charged, may be returned to or remain in the traditional criminal justice process.”
The deal has come under scrutiny with some Republicans saying that Hunter got special treatment because of his father. On the other hand, many conservatives, from Erick Erickson to the legal eagles at Advisory Opinions, acknowledge that such deals from nonviolent first offenders are not rare.
And Hunter’s gun crime was one of possession, not use. The guidelines for the pre-trial diversion program stipulate that even brandishing a weapon would be disqualifying for the program.
Maybe the DOJ shouldn’t rely on plea deals and pre-trial diversions, but without those tools, we would need a lot more prisons. There are pros and cons to both strategies, but the bottom line is that such deals are not unusual.
Those who make allegations about a sweetheart deal also must grapple with the fact that the federal prosecutor in the Hunter case was a Trump appointee. David Weiss, the US attorney for Delaware, was appointed to the post by Donald Trump in 2018. Weiss has apparently been investigating Hunter for as long as he has been on the job.
After about five years of investigation, the only federal crimes that Weiss apparently came up with are the two tax crimes and the gun possession charge. If there were other charges, we would probably know about them because the DOJ often throws the book at defendants in an indictment.
To be fair, there is another Biden investigation pending. Aside from the special counsel looking into President Biden’s handling of classified information, the House Republicans are still investigating the Biden family finances. The question is whether congressional committees can uncover anything that a US attorney couldn’t find in a five-year probe. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
And what about Donald Trump? Some people wonder why Biden gets a deal but Donald Trump is indicted and faces a criminal trial. That’s an easy one.
For months, as the Trump investigation progressed, Donald Trump’s lawyers said he was not interested in a plea deal. As recently as a couple of weeks ago, Trump was still refusing to consider a deal unless, as Newsweek reports, he was given one “where they pay me some damages.”
Suffice it to say that the DOJ does not pay damages to criminal defendants. If that is going to be Trump’s position, then he is going to trial and very possibly going to jail.
I do think that Trump could probably get a plea deal, even at this late date. Prosecutors and justices would likely acknowledge that if Trump would plead guilty, avoiding the trial of a hot-headed demagogue who happens to be a former president would be best for the country. Nevertheless, I don’t think that Trump will be able to admit his guilt.
Finally, I have a theory that Hunter might actually have gotten a more severe punishment because of his relationship to the president. Consider this: It took a five-year investigation to come up with the three charges that were part of the deal. If Hunter had not been the president’s son, would he have attracted enough attention to have investigators find his crimes?
For example, with respect to the gun crime, Erick Erickson described the circumstances that led to the charge:
A gun belonging to Hunter Biden was tossed in a garbage can across from a high school when his then-girlfriend found it in his car. When the gun was found, authorities investigated its origin and found that Hunter Biden had lied on a background check form claiming he was not addicted to drugs while he publically admitted otherwise.
If Erickson’s version of events is accurate, Hunter didn’t get into trouble for having his gun in a trashcan, he got into trouble for making public statements (not unlike another famous lawbreaker in the news) acknowledging that he was a drug addict while stating on the purchase forms that he was not. Personally, I don’t think it’s likely that anyone would have investigated the matter closely enough to find the discrepancy if his last name had not put him under a magnifying glass.
The same is true of the taxes. The IRS didn’t discover that he had illegally failed to pay taxes even though the failure to file returns was several years ago. That includes the years when Trump appointees ran the agency. Would Hunter’s crimes have been uncovered before the statute of limitations ran out if his father had not run for president? We have no way of knowing, but I’m skeptical.
Some might say that Hunter was the victim of a witch hunt targeting the Bidens. But sometimes, witch hunts do uncover real crimes. When that happens, the perpetrators should be prepared to pay for their actions.
We will never know for sure if Hunter would have gotten into legal trouble if his family hadn’t been involved in politics, but we do know that he does not contest his guilt. Agreeing to the plea deal and admitting guilt was a smart move. For that, like many other defendants, he gets leniency. Maybe others should learn from his example.
How dare you bring facts and common sense into this?Report
I don’t see a sweet heart deal.
As far as special investigation, maybe… but he’s hardly the first person to describe his criminal acts on social media and then discover that the powers that be are listening.
He used his fame to sell a book. Running into problems because he detailed his criminal activity seems more a self inflicted problem than something his Dad’s political adversaries did.Report
Hunter Biden was a drug addict, and while I don’t want to suggest it’s a good thing for drug addicts to own guns, I do want to point out what a restriction of the Second amendment it is to attempt to bar _all_ users of unlawful substances, and in fact there’s a court case about that right now:
https://www.cato.org/blog/when-unlawful-user-controlled-substance-prohibited-having-gun
It is also worth pointing out that, thanks to various jurisdictions deciding to make trans healthcare essentially illegal, more and more people in those jurisdictions (in addition to people who had already decided to not jump through the hoops placed in their way) are doing DIY HRT, and thus are illegally using control substances, AKA using estrogen or testosterone without a prescription.
As we inextricably slide into fascism targeting trans people, which this site has decided not to notice whatsoever, you can be very sure that at some point we will have trans people who get guns to defend themselves and when discovered with them are charged with lying on their gun application because they are unlawful users of controlled substances.
Just pointing out that’s going to happen.Report
This kind of reminds me of how squishy conservatives feel about abortion.
“Do you want abortion to be illegal?”
“Of course!”
“So you want women who conspire to get an abortion to be arrested?”
“HOW DARE YOU?!?”
Hey, it’s one thing to want gun laws to communicate a sentiment. But if you have laws on the books that you don’t want enforced, what the heck are you doing?Report
…I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about?
How does this remind you of that?Report
Do you want this law on the books?
I assume you do.
Do you want this law enforced?
If the answer is not “yes” but some variant of “it’s complicated”, what the heck are you doing?Report
…do I want _what_ law on the books? The one we’re talking about?
NO. I DO NOT WANT THAT LAW. I have literally no idea how you got that from what I said.
Despite the fact that I do not like guns and would rather they be mostly banned, and I do not agree with the current interpretation of the second amendment, I also do not want weird unconstitutional fifth-admendment-violating laws on the books that forbid something that is _supposedly_ a constitutional right.Report
Oh, my goodness! Excellent!
Believe it or not, I’ve argued with people (on this very board) who have called for house-to-house searches for firearms.
This struck me as *NUTS* and likely to result in far more people dead than the status quo (and that’s without getting into 4th Amendment issues of searches and warrants or whatnot).
I apologize for thinking that you were that crazy.Report
Literally none of that has anything to do with what I am talking about. And also…you realize it would pretty easy to get warrants to search houses of people who are known to possess guns, right? The threshold is not super-high for search warrants, and would be pretty easy to meet.
Maybe we could stop operating in this weird universe where you think you have to score points, and address instead the point I made of ‘Demanding people assert under oath that they are not currently doing illegal things to exercise their constitutional rights, and charge them with a crime if they did not confess to crimes they are doing’ is actually pretty screwed up as a concept, and presents a rather obvious way to restrict rights.Report
It had to do with laws that are on the books.
Seriously, in the past when I’ve argued about Gun Control, my position has been “you want to repeal the 2nd Amendment” and the counter-argument is usually something to the effect of “nobody is arguing that the 2nd should be repealed… we just want reasonable restrictions similar to the ones dealing with full auto” or similar.
And, generally, any law that is already on the books is seen as a reasonable restriction.
And also…you realize it would pretty easy to get warrants to search houses of people who are known to possess guns, right?
The argument wasn’t that we should get warrants for houses that had registered their guns. The argument was for house-to-house searches for guns.Report
The “house to house searches for guns” is every bit as absurd as “house to house searches for unregistered automobiles”.
Yes, both things can and do and should happen, but normal people know why this is a silly line of argument.Report
See, Dave? I’m not making this up!Report
Hey, Jaybird, instead of talking about _hypothetical_ constitutional violations that a) require some pretty politically unlikely things to happen, and b) don’t need to happen at all because, duh, warrants are easy to get, so it’s basically you just inventing a scenario where the US government behaves unconstitutionally for no reason…
…how about you address the actual constitutional violation here where Hunter Biden was required to either testify against himself and admit to crimes…or not be able to exercise his constitutional right to own a firearm. (A thing you supposedly care about.) And was literally criminally charged with that?Report
Well, we operate under a system that says that there can be reasonable restrictions on the 2nd Amendment like the ones for fully automatic machine guns.
Hell, Biden was talking about stabilizing braces just the other day.
While *I* agree with you that stuff like stabilizing braces are obviously unconstitutional, what’s obvious to me ain’t obvious to others.
I mean, have you ever read Wickard? Unbelievable!
Anyway, I agree. But we don’t operate in that system. We operate in the system that gave us the 1934 National Firearms Act which, I understand, is still operative.Report
Jaybird, we are not talking about possible non-absoluteness interpretation of the second amendment. We are talking about the government violating the _fifth_ amendment, requiring people to testify against themselves, in order for people to exercise their second amendment rights _at all_.
And see, I don’t care about the second amendment. I literally wish it didn’t exist, and don’t believe it has been interpreted correctly. But what I do care about is the idea the government can demand coerced statements, so people can be barred from exercising them based on their answer, is allowable _at all_. Because there’s no logical reason that can only apply to the second amendment.
What if to vote you had to sign a statement attesting you’d never committed a felony? Not that you’d ever been _convicted_ of one, but that you had never committed one?
Hell, what if to get _any_ constitutional rights, they simply required you to list all the crimes you had committed? Under threat of perjury.
Wait, I just thought of a better one: What if to get a right to due process, you had to assert, under threat of perjury, that you were not guilty of the crime you were charged with?
There’s no obvious threshold here, and it renders the fifth amendment completely null and void.Report
You acknowledge that the 2nd Amendment isn’t absolute, then you express incredulity that the 5th isn’t?
How do you feel about Citizens United?Report
The fifth amendment _is_ absolute.
In fact, it’s the amendment that ‘wins’ over other amendments. You don’t weigh it against competing interests, and decide that, in some circumstances, people might have to compromise on due process to preserve some other constitutional protection.
For example, when weighing ‘free speech’ vs ‘due process’, …it’s free speech that folds, not due process. (Just ask judges who restrict speech on current cases.) Or freedom of assembly…you’re part of a jury, suddenly you don’t have freedom of assembly, because due process is more important.
The fifth amendment is basically the amendment that trumps all the others, because without due process, you can’t even demand your rights under the government.
And while the other clauses of the fifth are debatable under what exactly ‘due process’ or ‘just compensation’ are,and whether or not the government correctly gave it to someone, we’ve never had the slightest confusion about whether or not ‘nor shall be compelled to be a witness against himself’ applies to making a sworn statement under oath.Report
You know, the anti-tax guys say the exact same thing.
Believe it or not, the gummint is unmoved.
For what it’s worth, *I* agree with something vaguely adjacent to your position. I think it’s great that you hold it and I hope you vote accordingly come November of next year.
I will as well.Report
The government has a perfect right to compel information (Via the due process of law.) when said information is _not_ part of a crime. Or even compel it when it is, as long as they give immunity.
And people do indeed have the right to complain when information compelled by the IRS _would_ produce evidence of criminal activity. That’s why you can (And must) report illegal income to the IRS, but they can’t make you explain what crimes it came from. Because requiring that would be unconstitutional.
Where the anti-tax guys screw up is that they think income tax counts as punishing for a crime, and thus they can avoid testifying about that to avoid being ‘punished’ with taxes. But…taxes are not criminal cases. That is not even vaguely the same concept under the law.Report
The complaints that I’ve seen involve the whole signature itself.
“UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY” and then you sign.Report
David has said he prefers his freestyling nonsense, so I won’t direct this to him. However because it pains me to see sovereign citizen level legal discussion on this blog I want to throw this out there.
If anyone is actually interested in this question, to the extent there might be something to it, it would be that the form 4473 or at least parts of it (i.e. the ATF form you sign when buying a firearm from an FFL) fail the test SCOTUS laid out in Bruen. Such a holding would seem to contradict dicta in Heller and at minimum the Kavanaugh/Roberts concurrence in Bruen itself, but I guess anything is possible. Some courts have called into question the constitutionality of laws prohibiting people with
certain misdemeanors from owning firearms. Given the kinds of crimes in question with respect to Hunter Biden specifically, maybe there is some kind of angle to that effect. If so, it has nothing to do with the 5th amendment stuff being thrown around in this thread.
Additionally, the idea that signing an affidavit you are providing to an an FFL at the voluntary purchase of a firearm to comply with a seemingly constitutional law constitutes compelled self incrimination if you are later caught lying on the form? I’d certainly welcome Burt or someone else to correct me but I do not think there is any authority out there supporting such a position. The holes in it are too numerous to list in a comment.Report
Hey, I’m a fan of Emanations from Penumbras.
But I’m not going to pretend that that position is obvious to the point where anybody (including the gummint) disagreeing with it is being dishonest.
My problem with Roe is that the court asserted a Right to Privacy and then immediately forgot it for freakin everything else.Report
I’m sympathetic to your general disposition towards penumbras, and all else being equal towards erring in the direction of an expansive view of individual liberty.
What I would caution against when it comes to the thornier questions of constitutional law is mixing and matching questions that aren’t necessarily connected, especially in a way that is agnostic towards established precedents on the particular issues being mixed and matched. Law can be a ponderous business, but not for no reason.Report
Friggin’ wickard, man.
How much easier would privacy be if that guy was allowed to feed his horse?Report
The courts and the left and even libertarians keep circling around the concept that is _actually_ called ‘bodily autonomy’, but all large political actors refuses to build or accept any sort of coherent theory of that. So we end up with really dumb jerry-rigged nonsense all leaning against each other in haphazard ways.
Like…in what universe do people have the right to commit crimes _privately_? That is clearly not a framing that makes sense.
Likewise, the libertarians frame these things as ‘victimless crimes’, which is…not a good way to frame it either. _All_ crimes are asserted to have victims by the people who make laws. Legislatures just…lie about victims or end up painting ‘all of society’ as the victim. ‘Victimless’ is not a workable principle to demand rights under.
So I have a question for you here, Jaybird. I’ve sorta written half an essay on this, about how everyone keeps doing weird loops and diversions around a pretty basic concept, because they get ideological blinders on or approach things from absurd directions, when the concept already exists and is pretty well defined. And it should _should_ be pretty well understand as a political concept in this country but somehow isn’t.
I’ve considered finishing this essay up and trying to submit it here. Interested? (I’m asking less to see if the site will consider it, which I know it will, and more to make me go ‘Oh, I actually have to finish this now’.)Report
Dude, I’d love to read it!
And then we can discuss whether people should be allowed to intervene when you wish to drink alcohol due to it easily falling under the umbrella of “victimless crime”!
Now, you may say “Jaybird, don’t be absurd. Nobody would argue that alcohol shouldn’t be legal.”
And I would look forward to that argument. And other adjacent ones.Report
Hunter Biden _had not been convicted of a misdemeanor_. Or anything at all.
Lying on the form is not self-incrimination.
Telling the truth on the form is self-incrimination.Report
This is pretty specious reasoning. People waive their 5th amendment rights all the time. It’s like saying someone who confesses to a crime has had their 1st Amendment rights violated by being punished for whatever the crime was.Report
… you think the government demanding that you waive a constitutional rights to exercise a different constitutional right is the same as someone choosing to waive a constitutional right just because they want to?Report
It’s a trade off people can make, yes. You also have the right to testify in your own defense which inherently involves a waiver of your right not to testify against yourself.Report
I’m…not even going to talk with you anymore, because this conversation is extremely dumb and you’re either not paying attention or not particularly smart.
Hopefully the government will never implement the ‘Please pick either the right to vote or the right to free speech’ that you apparently think it can offer.Report
Hey no need to get butt hurt. Lots of people are clueless when it comes to legal analysis. I just thought I’d try help ground this way off the rails thread, but feel free to resume your exercise in free association. Just don’t mistake it for anything cogent.Report
Exercising common sense.Report
Some of you must wonder when I became pro second amendment, and I’m not actually, but I do think if we are going to treat that as a serious constitutional right, you actually need a pretty serious threshold from taking it away from people, not people exercising their own bodily autonomy by putting chemicals into it.
Of course, the actual people pretending this is a right are entirely on board with making sure the wrong sort of people can’t execute such right, as evidenced by every police shooting justified by ‘I thought he had a gun!’. But I thought I’d at least point out the hypocrisy.Report
And while I don’t actually think gun ownership is or at least should be a right, I still have to point out that requiring someone to answer a yes/no question about their own _criminal activity_, and then only giving them a constitutional right if they answer a certain way, and charging them when the crime if they lie, appears to be a violation of the fifth amendment as a premise. They are literally forced to testify against themselves (and charged with a crime if they lie) if they want to use this constitutional right.
People who commit crimes still have literally every constitutional right, to remove a constitutional right from someone they have to be _convicted_ of a crime. Yet we require people to self-report a specific crime, one that the government may not even have knowledge of, in violation of their fifth amendment, or we will take a different constitutional right away from them.
This is extremely hard to justify, constitutionally. This is because in the real world no one actually thinks gun ownership is a true constitutional right, they think it’s a privilege that certain white people get, but it’s actually incredibly hypocritical when you look at it like it is a right.Report
You’re probably right about that self reporting breaking the 5th. That hits the radar as something the Supremes will slap down eventually.Report
No, it won’t, because the courts and the entire right-wing infrastructure that pretends gun rights are absolute…are perfectly happy with with denying guns to undesirables, like drug users and trans people.
And that’s the case that will hit the courts. Someone that the right doesn’t like. So they will be entirely on board with the idea that such people shouldn’t have guns.
As far as I’m concerned, the people who assert the second amendment provides an individual right to possess firearms clearly do not actually believe this, because if they did, not only would this specific thing be different, but the whole ‘Police justify shooting Black people by claiming they thought that person had a gun’ would basically result in the police station being burned to the ground by the right. And yet, here we are.
Gun rights have _always_ been about the right for _very specific_ people to have guns. And no one else.Report
The TSA, drunken driving checkpoints, and free speech zones all speak to the malleability of the Constitution in the hands of the Supreme Court.Report
I’m not sure I’d pick illegal steroid use as a hill to die on as far as “rights” go. Steroid abuse is seriously linked to increased aggression and violence. For that matter the illegal drug trade is strongly linked to violence.Report
I haven’t actually mentioned steroid _abuse_. The law doesn’t mention _abuse_ at all, just use and addiction:
Guns are banned for someone: 18 U.S. Code § 922 (1)(g)(3) who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 802));
The law, interestingly, does not even define what an illegal ‘user’ is, which is what the lawsuit I pointed out is over. Because asserting that someone who has, at one point in the past, used something, would not generally be considered to make them a ‘user’ of that thing.
And if people are forced to assert under penalty of perjury that they are not ‘users’, there really needs to be a very very clear definition of what exactly that means, something that can be objectively determined by the person signing the form.
‘addicted to’ is also pretty vague, along with the problem that addicts often do not think they’re addicts, and thus are not technically lying.
Everything else in that list is very objective, like ‘has a specific type of court order’ or ‘has been convicted for a certain type of crime’ or ‘intends to do a specific thing with the gun’. But it’s just this vague handwave of ‘drug user’.Report
“… which this site has decided not to notice whatsoever…”
The deep irony here is that, to the very best of my knowledge, Jay’s partner uses they/them pronouns. And yet…Report
Wow, what a dick move. Did you ask Jay’s partner for permission to use that bit of personal info in your juvenile attempt to score points against him in an internet argument? I’m guessing not.Report
I’m fairly certain they’ve made that known here when they were a community member. Call me a dick if you must but I’m not the one quote-Tweeting accounts that vilify my partner.Report
I didn’t say “private”, I said “personal”. You’re using Maribou as a weapon. It’s manipulative and rude.Report
It’s all good. Thanks, though.
But it’s all good.Report
I have to confess, my comment wasn’t really in defense of you or Maribou, it was in defense of a halfway reasonable level of discourse here. So no thanks necessary. 🙂Report