Hunter Biden gets ‘slap on the wrist’ no-jail plea deal thanks to daddy’s DOJ on tax evasion, gun-lying charges
WASHINGTON — First son Hunter Biden’s likely probation-only plea deal copping to two misdemeanor tax crimes and one gun crime is being called a “slap on the wrist” compared to substantial prison sentences imposed in similar cases.
The 53-year-old’s lawyer Chris Clark said Tuesday morning that “it is my understanding that the five-year investigation into Hunter is resolved” after the surprisingly light charges were announced by the office of Delaware US Attorney David Weiss — drawing outrage from critics who noted the harsh treatment of others by prosecutors.
Weiss’ office said its investigation into the Biden scion is “ongoing” without saying what elements remain unsettled.
“If DOJ treated Hunter Biden like the thousands of no-names who get prosecuted he would be looking at decades in federal prison. Yes, I said decades,” tweeted former Utah US Attorney Brett Tolman, who worked in the Bush and Obama administrations from 2006 to 2009.
In addition to misdemeanor charges for missing tax-filing deadlines and a felony charge for possessing a gun while abusing drugs, which will be expunged after two years of probation, Weiss’ office didn’t charge President Biden’s son with money laundering or working as an unregistered lobbyist under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, despite evidence that strongly suggests he did so.
“DOJ is violating its own internal policies on this case. The Ashcroft Memo requires they charge the ‘highest provable offense’ and seek consistent sentences with other cases brought by DOJ,” wrote Tolman, who is now executive director of Right on Crime, a conservative criminal justice reform group.
“This prosecution is an absolute laughable joke. Thousands have been sent to prison for long terms for the same charges.”
Hunter reportedly paid off about $2 million in back taxes last year on largely foreign-sourced income — earned through dealings in which his father allegedly partook.
In his plea deal, he admitted only to not filing timely tax returns in 2017 and 2018, as well as lying about his drug use on a gun purchase form in October 2018.
The precise amount of taxes that the first son failed to pay was not specified, with charging documents only putting the amount above $100,000 each year on at least $3 million in total income.
It’s unclear why the first son was not charged with working as an unregistered foreign agent after the evidence on his abandoned laptop showed he helped foreign associates meet US officials, including his then-vice president father and various other Obama-Biden administration figures.
While no case is a direct parallel, many cases have key elements in common and resulted in the defendant being sent to prison.
In a similar gun-charge case, rapper Kodak Black, then 22 years old, was sentenced in 2019 to 46 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to providing an incorrect Social Security number on a federal gun purchase form in order to buy three guns from a Miami-area shop.
Black had a criminal record that would have disqualified him from buying the weapons.
Federal tax fraud cases of similar scale also have resulted in long sentences.
“Jersey Shore” star Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino was sentenced in 2018 to eight months in federal prison for failing to pay $2.3 million in taxes over five years. His older brother, Marc Sorrentino, was sentenced to 24 months for keeping $8.9 million for himself. Both Sorrentinos admitted to single counts in their indictment (tax evasion and preparing a false return, respectively).
In 2008, actor Wesley Snipes was convicted by a jury of three misdemeanor counts of failing to file tax returns worth a total of $15 million. He was sentenced to three years in prison, despite being acquitted of felony charges of conspiracy to defraud the government and filing a false claim.
Former President Donald Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen, who later became a critic of the 45th president, was sentenced in 2018 to three years in federal prison in a case that dealt primarily with tax fraud.
Cohen owed $1.3 million in taxes from 2012 to 2016, admitted to misleading a bank to get a $500,000 loan, and pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations for paying hush money to women on Trump’s behalf, though Trump was never federally charged and argued Cohen did so as a favor to prosecutors.
Former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg in January was sentenced to five months in prison in New York on charges for not paying about $2 million in taxes on non-salary compensation such as work-provided cars and tuition for relatives.
The 75-year-old was released from Rikers Island in April after serving about four months.
The lack of FARA charges, meanwhile, precludes another potentially lengthy stint behind bars.
Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort, then 69, was sentenced in 2018 to 60 months in prison specifically for violating FARA by repping a Ukrainian political party without first registering with the Justice Department.
The indictment against Hunter Biden came about two months after Hunter’s legal team met with federal prosecutors in what was widely seen as a sign the probe was coming to an end — and about a month after the IRS mysteriously purged the investigative team that worked on the case, allegedly on Justice Department orders after the supervisory agent contacted Congress to allege a cover-up featuring “preferential treatment” and false testimony by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Weiss, whose office led the case, is a Trump administration holdover but was recommended to his post by Delaware’s two Democratic senators, who are both close Biden allies.
“For critics, this is going to reinforce the view of a two-tiered system. The majority of Americans polled believe that the indictment of Donald Trump [for allegedly mishandling classified records] was politically motivated and constitutes election interference. That shows you the level of distrust that the public has with the Department of Justice,” said George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley in a Tuesday Fox News interview.
Turley last year predicted a possible “controlled demolition” of the Hunter Biden scandal through which the case was settled without implicating the president in any wrongdoing — despite Hunter writing in emails retrieved from the laptop that he had to give “half” of his income to his father.
“When it came to Trump, they rolled out a B-52. And this is going to look like a crop duster,” Turley said Tuesday. “You have the son of the president who’s at the center of one of the greatest influence-peddling scandals in history — and that’s saying a lot in Washington, DC — and he’s going to walk away with a couple of misdemeanors and a gun charge that they can likely be expunged.”
Outrage over the plea deal poured in from largely Republican critics.
“This is so corrupt,” tweeted Robert Henneke, former Texas assistant attorney general and executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “Every other crime committed by Hunter Biden will get swept up in this sham of a plea bargain.”
“The Biden Justice Department reached a sweetheart deal with Hunter Biden. Hunter will get no jail time for being the bagman for Joe Biden’s vast foreign corruption,” tweeted Mike Davis, a former Senate Judiciary Committee aide and Supreme Court clerk who now leads the Article 3 Project. “The Biden Justice Department will continue to bury evidence the President of the United States is compromised.”
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton tweeted, “The Department of Justice is irredeemably corrupt, as the latest news about the sweetheart plea deal for Hunter Biden shows.”
Communications from Hunter’s laptop and additional corroboration, including photos and witness statements, indicate that President Biden interacted with Hunter’s associates from China, Mexico, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Russia.
House Republicans are investigating a 2020 informant file that accuses Joe and Hunter Biden of each accepting $5 million bribes to serve the interests of Ukrainian gas firm Burisma Holdings owner Mykola Zlochevsky.
“Hunter Biden is getting away with a slap on the wrist when growing evidence uncovered by the House Oversight Committee reveals the Bidens engaged in a pattern of corruption, influence peddling, and possibly bribery,” said House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.).
GOP Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (NY) said the plea deal came across as “a form of election meddling” when put side by side with the Trump indictment.
“The Department of Justice is illegally doing Joe Biden’s political bidding protecting his son and yet targeting incessantly Donald Trump, his leading political opponent,” she told The Post on Tuesday.
But Democrats said that the plea deal showed the Justice Department is proudly independent. Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said, “This development reflects the Justice Department’s continued institutional independence in following the evidence of actual crimes and enforcing the rule of law even in the face of constant criticism and heckling by my GOP colleagues who think that the system of justice should only follow their partisan wishes.”
The indictment against Hunter Biden was unsealed exactly one week after Trump was arraigned in federal court in Miami on 37 criminal counts related to his concealment of classified records after he left office.
Trump, 77, faces a statutory maximum of 400 years in prison, though he’d likely face a shorter actual sentence if convicted.
President Biden can pardon his son at any time, but it’s common for chief executives to wait until they’re about to leave office to grant clemency to their relatives.
