Even on its own terms related to tax evasion and a gun purchase, the Justice Department’s plea deal for presidential son Hunter Biden is so lenient as to be a travesty. If the plea deal represents tacit exoneration on all other possible charges, as Biden’s lawyer indicated, then it’s not just a travesty but a hint of massive Justice Department corruption.
First consider the plea deal’s public terms. Let’s set aside the reasonable argument that one of the two gun-related charges against Biden, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3), should be adjudged unconstitutional — because the Supreme Court keeps dodging the issue. Unless and until the Supreme Court does its job, the Justice Department should follow the American Bar Association guidelines for prosecutors, which in Standard 3-4.4 says that prosecutors should avoid “unwarranted disparate treatment of similarly situated persons.” The department has miserably failed that standard.
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That 922(g)(3) charge, which prohibits gun possession by someone who uses illicit drugs, can carry up to a 10-year prison sentence. The second gun charge, which involves lying on a federal firearms background check (18 U.S.C. § 924(a)(2)), not only can carry up to a separate 10-year sentence but is prosecuted more than three-fifths of the times that federal agents received legal “referrals” for it.
Hunter Biden’s case involved serious violations of both statutory provisions, both because he signed the form in flagrantly willful disregard of the law and because his drug use — “smoking crack every 15 minutes,” he said — was of exactly the extreme degree that makes firearm possession supremely dangerous.
Yet with not one but two major violations, and with him being obviously guilty of two tax evasion charges as well (for which he will receive mere probation), Hunter Biden will avoid the prosecution that three-fifths of such cases receive for only one offense. The stench of favoritism is nearly suffocating.
For comparison, take just one case about which I’ve written numerous times. A county commissioner in Mobile, Alabama, was facing a state (not federal) murder rap in 2010 for what later turned out, unmistakably, to be suicide by his adulterous paramour. As far as federal law was concerned, though, that separate state allegation was immaterial. Unlike Hunter Biden, Stephen Nodine faced no other federal charges. Unlike the president’s son, Nodine was not a major violator of narcotics laws. Instead, he admitted to smoking one joint of marijuana on a beach in Florida while he owned, unloaded in his house 90 minutes away in Alabama, a handgun never even suspected of being used in any crime. Just as the younger Biden did, Nodine chose not to fight what was a very mild and technical violation of 922(g)(3), but without any hint of a 924(a)(2) violation (or of federal tax dodges).
Nodine was an eight-year Army vet with the highest nuclear-biological-chemical clearance available, entrusted (literally, physically) with security for U.S. nuclear arms in Germany. He had no other federal offenses on record. Hunter Biden, by contrast, was discharged due to drug violations from a part-time public affairs position with the Navy Reserve. Did Nodine, like Biden, receive a “Pretrial Diversion Agreement” merely requiring that he remain sober for two years and otherwise face no consequences? Nope. Instead, the Justice Department arranged to sentence Nodine to 15 months in a federal prison.
Apart from the other 298 people prosecuted for what earned Biden no official charge, the Biden-Nodine comparison is a screaming example of “unwarranted disparate treatment.”
That’s just on the gun charges, plural. Biden also faces no prison time for failing to pay (until caught) $1.2 million in federal taxes, money that he instead used for hard drugs and high-priced, possibly illegally trafficked international hookers. (The authorities filed no charges for his abundant cocaine use and seem uninterested in the Russian escort ring.)
Meanwhile, the gun, drug, and tax charges (not to mention the potential human trafficking) are the least of Hunter Biden’s potential offenses. As former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy and others have amply detailed, Hunter’s multimillion-dollar international influence peddling is almost surely “corruption” of a kind that “requires willful blindness not to notice.” At least one federal agent stands reliably accused of improperly blocking investigations into Hunter Biden, and several whistleblowers allege high-level interference and potential perjury by IRS and Justice Department officials in order to save Biden’s legal skin.
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If this plea deal means federal agents are dropping all other investigations into Hunter Biden, it might be the worst case of illicit Justice Department favoritism in modern memory.
This reeks. It must not stand.