The outrage isn’t over the fact that President Joe Biden’s son Hunter got a comparatively light sentence for paying his 2017 and 2018 taxes late — late meaning after Dad got elected president — when he earned more than $1.5 million annually. Or that Biden the Younger is poised to plead guilty to a gun charge that will result in probation when most drug offenders would have been charged with a hard-time felony.
The outrage is because the president’s son was never arrested and thrown in jail for so much as a night for a reckless streak that culminated when he was speeding through so high on cocaine that he was “smoking, swerving” and scattering drugs all over his rental car, as he wrote in his memoir, Beautiful Things.
As a senator, Joe Biden was the force behind draconian federal drug laws that put nonviolent drug offenders behind bars for decades, even life without parole. When it came to punishing young Black men involved in the drug trade, Biden was ruthless. But when his son was doing the same crimes, he was clueless — as if his son’s epic self-destruction presented no threat to others.
So it’s no wonder Biden was willfully blind about his son’s money-grubbing contract work for Ukrainian and Chinese concerns.
As the New York Times reported, Hunter Biden “lacked any experience in Ukraine and just months earlier had been discharged from the Navy Reserve for testing positive for cocaine.”
Let me note: I am not a big believer in throwing drug users behind bars. But authorities stumbled upon the Yale Law graduate flagrantly breaking the law repeatedly. And the consequences? Crickets.
The president’s reactions are troubling as well. “My son has done nothing wrong,” Biden claims.
When you think about it, before “the big guy” announced his candidacy, someone in the Biden campaign camp should have made sure that the younger Biden paid his taxes. If only as a matter of form.
If anyone dared speak up, it was to no avail. Hunter didn’t pony up the more than $200,000 in overdue taxes until 2021.
That is arrogance.
Former President Donald Trump’s fans gleefully point to the double standard — slimmed-down charges for Biden’s son with no notice of his failure to register as a foreign lobbyist, while Trump is facing charges on 37 counts from the Biden Department of Justice.
They don’t get it. There’s no win here.
If the feds had gone easy on Trump, that wouldn’t make it OK for Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice to slow walk a pared-down prosecution when a Biden cashes in.
Garland has made a point of telling the press that he pretty much removed himself from the Biden probe. That’s D.C. these days — law men bragging that they’re not leading the charge.
I watch Garland’s corrupt approach to crime, and I thank the stars and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell for making sure Garland never got close to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Debra J. Saunders is a fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership. Contact her at dsaunders@discovery.org.
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