The Hunter Biden indictment shames the Democratic elites

Christmas has come a few weeks early for me this year, with the news that the US president’s party-hardy son, Hunter Biden, has been indicted on multiple tax offences. I have been following the Hunter Biden saga since early 2020, when I learned that Hunter in 2013 had accompanied his then vice-president father on a trip to China on Air Force Two, and while there he had conducted his own business meetings on the taxpayers’ dime.

Not being a big fan of outrageous nepotism, in my opinion this was an unforgivable political offence committed against hard-working, heavily taxed Americans. It turned me from an Obama and Biden supporter to a person who will never vote for a Democrat again, even if the candidate was Gandhi, St Francis of Assisi and Martin Luther King Jr rolled into one.

Turns out, the (alleged) crimes of Hunter Biden were far more serious than that one flight to Beijing. The ‘laptop from hell’ story in October 2020 made a pretty convincing case for that. I even perused the contents of the site that made Hunter’s personal photo album public, and it did not endear him to me at all. It would be fair to say that there is no human alive currently who I think less of than Hunter Biden.

According to the 56-page, nine-count indictment, filed on Thursday in the US District Court in central California, Hunter ‘“earned handsomely” while serving on the boards of a Ukrainian industrial conglomerate and a Chinese private-equity fund’. He now faces three felony tax offences and six misdemeanour offences, which could result in up to 17 years in prison.

Matters of taxation are normally quite dry, but this indictment is a doozy. Even I was surprised by just how flagrant, how brazen, how bizarrely out-of-control the (alleged) fraud that he committed was. It’s like something dreamed up in a Hollywood writer’s room.

CNN has laid out the charges in stark detail, with special counsel David Weiss and his team claiming Hunter engaged in:

‘[A] four year-scheme in which they say he chose not to pay at least 1.4million dollars in self-assessed federal taxes… They also accuse him of trying to evade the assessment of taxes for 2018 when he filed false returns… He subverted the payroll and tax-withholding process of his own company by withdrawing millions outside of that process. They also accuse him of spending millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills… In 2018, he stopped paying his outstanding and overdue taxes for the tax year 2015, and wilfully failed to pay his 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 taxes on time, despite, they say, having access to funds to pay some or all of these taxes.’

Even then, CNN left out many of the best bits. As Zero Hedge has reported, the indictment also claims that Hunter ‘had $1,664,004 in “ATM / Cash Withdrawals”, spent $683,212 in payments to “various women” (a new euphemism for hookers, apparently) and $188,960 on “adult entertainment”’.

The site also quotes from Hunter’s sob-story memoir, in which he wrote of consorting with ‘thieves, junkies, petty dealers and over-the-hill strippers’. Imagine being an unemployed, toothless dead-beat dad with major daddy issues and having the nerve to call a hard-working lady of the night ‘over-the-hill’. Oh, to have the confidence of the crackhead son of a Democratic president.

The indictment also states that Hunter ‘falsely claimed money paid to women he had personal relationships with as wages, reducing his tax burden’. And in what must be the most devastatingly understated claim in legal history, it lists a payment of $1,500 ‘to an exotic dancer, at a strip club. The defendant described the payment in the Venmo transaction as for “artwork”. The exotic dancer had not sold him any artwork.’

In other words, son of a US president and a graduate of Yale Law School Hunter Biden did not think that he had any of the same duties and obligations as every single other American citizen. I guess they don’t teach that at Yale.

Perhaps these indictments might actually lead to some justice, which for rich Democrats has been in short supply lately. But even if Hunter is convicted, many American liberals will continue to cling to the fallacy that somehow Orange Man is worse. While these latest legal woes do not reflect this, there is evidence that Hunter was (allegedly) running interference for his decrepit old man, who at the very least had known about Hunter’s dodgy foreign business associates for years. Allegedly.

It has never failed to amaze me that, for a demographic so concerned with white privilege and racial bias in criminal justice, so many Democrats have given Hunter a pass on his many misdeeds. From an early cocaine bust in a seaside town to getting kicked out of the Navy Reserves for testing positive for cocaine to leaving a crack pipe inside a rental car, Hunter has for decades been the epitome of rich white boy privilege – and has never done any time for any of it. All this for a man whose father authored the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which vastly expanded the punishments meted out to drug users who did not have a daddy in government. Joe Biden made a career of locking up black men for using drugs. Hunter, on the other hand, got to play businessman in Ukraine and now pretends to be a reformed man and serious artist.

Even if they result in convictions and prison time, the indictments filed against Hunter won’t have even begun to address the disparities in how he has been treated versus how most Americans would be treated in similar circumstances.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.