"First of all, my son has done nothing wrong," President Joe Biden told MSNBC last month. It was but one of a litany of such statements from Biden, who has behaved as if any question from the press about his son’s criminal activity—and there haven’t been many—is an affront, an indignity, and an insult to the office.
Well, he lied.
The younger Biden owed more than $1 million in taxes over several years, and over $200,000 for the years in which he struck the plea deal. Even then, his celebrity lawyer pal didn't fork over the money to the federal government on his behalf until the Department of Justice started investigating him. He also copped to owning a gun while he was coked up, and lying about it when he bought the firearm in 2018. That’s a felony, but Hunter is getting off with a slap on the wri—uh, probation and enrollment in a "diversion program."
Democrats, very much including Biden, love to talk about the two systems of justice in this country: one for the rich and well-connected, the other for racial minorities and the poor. When it came to his son, apart from lying to the American people, Biden’s statements about Hunter Biden’s innocence constituted presidential interference with the Justice Department probe.
So we’ll wait for the left to cry foul over this and the fact that the presidential son got off with a slap on the wrist for crimes that would have landed others behind bars.
The rank bullshit that has emanated from the White House on related issues is secondary but not unimportant. It wasn’t even a year ago that Biden signed the inaptly named Inflation Reduction Act into law. In the weeks beforehand, we heard endless jawboning from administration officials about why the additional $80 billion the law is now funneling to the IRS, much of it for increased enforcement, was necessary to hold the powerful to account.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, for one, pointed to "typically very high-net worth, high-income individuals and businesses that have opaque sources of income that are not paying the taxes that are due."
The message sent by the Biden administration on Tuesday was clear: enforcement and prison for thee–but not in a million years for our president’s drug-addled, tax cheat son.