The unpardonable hypocrisy of Republicans regarding Hunter Biden's pardon

Imagine the outrage among MAGA cultists if a Biden-appointed judge had dismissed the cases against Hunter Biden on the grounds that the appointment of and funding for the special counsel investigating him was unconstitutional.

Imagine the reaction among Second Amendment gun rights advocates if the Department of Justice brought felony cases against right-wing gun owners who happened to be illegal drug users even if they had not committed any other crime.

And imagine the outcry among Republicans if the federal government stepped up enforcement against rich Americans, prosecuting them for tax law violations even if they had paid any past-due taxes with interest and penalties.

That’s why it’s rank hypocrisy for Republicans to express outrage over President Joe Biden’s pardon for his son Hunter. And Democratic politicians shouldn't pile on by criticizing the pardon.

In pardoning his son, President Biden spared Hunter the possibility of serving significant prison time and facing further retribution from the incoming Trump administration.

Hunter Biden had been convicted on federal gun charges in Delaware and had pleaded guilty to nine tax-related charges, including three felonies, in California. The president’s son had been scheduled to face sentencing on Dec. 12 for the gun-related charges, and on Dec. 16 for the tax charges by Trump-appointed judges. 

Let’s remember what Special Counsel David Weiss, said on June 17, 2024, when a federal jury in Delaware convicted Hunter Biden on two counts of lying on a form submitted to a federal firearms dealer about his addiction or use of crack cocaine; and possessing a firearm while a user or addict.

Weiss, in a statement, said:

“No one in this country is above the law. Everyone must be accountable for their actions, even this defendant. However, Hunter Biden should be no more accountable than any other citizen convicted of the same conduct."

But Donald Trump has not been held accountable for his actions.

In 2018, Weiss, a Republican whom Trump had nominated to be U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware, began investigating Hunter Biden’s business and tax affairs, particularly relating to his service on the board of directors of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Weiss was allowed to remain in his U.S. Attorney position by the Biden administration to continue his investigation of the president’s son. And then in June 2023, in a plea deal with Weiss’ prosecutors, Biden agreed to plead guilty to a pair of misdemeanors over his failure to pay taxes on income received in 2017 and 2018, and in exchange prosecutors would recommend probation. The deal also called for him to enter into a pretrial diversion agreement that would enable him to avoid prosecution on one felony gun charge.

That would have been a reasonable end to the years-long probe. Trump dismissed the plea deal as “a mere traffic ticket” in a post on his Truth Social platform. House Republicans sought to intervene in the case to block the plea deal, claiming Hunter Biden had received preferential treatment from the Department of Justice.

The plea deal unraveled at a July 2023 hearing under scrutiny by U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika, also a Trump appointee, The following month, Attorney General Merrick Garland agreed to Weiss’ request that he be appointed special counsel. Biden was indicted on the gun charges in September 2023 and the tax-related charges in December 2023.

Let’s take a closer look at the GOP’s hypocrisy when it comes to Hunter Biden’s case.

THE SPECIAL COUNSEL

On July 15, 2024, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the Mar-a=Lago classified documents case against Trump, ruling that Garland’s appointment of special counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutional because he had not been appointed by the president or confirmed by Congress. 

Trump welcomed the ruling by his favorite judge in a Truth Social post, calling it “just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts,” referring to the three other state and federal criminal cases brought against him.

The Mar-a-Lago documents case had been considered the strongest of the criminal cases brought against Trump, who was charged with mishandling top secret documents and obstruction of justice. Conviction in such cases usually results in a stiff prison sentence.

Cannon’s dismissal of the case deviated from previous court rulings that found that the Attorney General is statutorily authorized to appoint a special counsel, including an appellate court decision in May 2024 on a pre-trial motion in Hunter Biden’s case upholding the validity of Weiss’ appointment.

But Cannon repeatedly quoted from a concurring opinion issued just two weeks earlier by Justice Clarence Thomas in the Supreme Court case ruling granting Trump partial immunity in the case brought by Smith related to efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Thomas raised questions about whether Garland had violated the Constitution when he appointed Smith as special counsel.

Just days after Trump’s case was dismissed, Hunter Biden’s defense, citing Cannon and Thomas, once again challenged the validity of special counsel Weiss’ cases against the president’s son.

Biden’s defense asked Noreika to toss out his conviction on the gun charges. NBC News quoted from the filing:

“The Attorney General relied upon the exact same authority to appoint the Special Counsel in both the Trump and Biden matters, and both appointments are invalid for the same reason.”

In a separate filing regarding the California tax charges, a case being heard by U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi, a Trump appointee, Biden demanded the same treatment as Trump, whose classified documents case was dismissed.

A day before President Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden’s legal team released a 52-page report titled: “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden," arguing that he was prosecuted for crimes that an ordinary citizen would not have been.

The Washington Post wrote:

The lawyers also argue that Weiss was improperly designated as special counsel, and that their initial plea agreement with Weiss is still in force.

After President Biden issued the pardon for his son, Noreika dismissed the gun case. In California, Scarsi said he would dismiss the tax case once the pardon is formally received.

THE GUN CASE  

In his pardon, President Biden said that his son “was being selectively, and unfairly prosecuted.” As relates to the gun charges, the president added: “Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form.”

Hunter Biden’s legal team, in their 52-page report, compiled the number of cases in Delaware in which someone was prosecuted for similar misstatements on a gun-purchase form. The Washington Post wrote:

On one of the charges, 19 such cases have been prosecuted — but in every other instance the defendant was also charged with drug trafficking, possessed multiple firearms or had prior felony convictions. Hunter’s was the only case, the attorneys wrote, that did not include those aggravating factors.

Reason, a website linked to a libertarian think tank, looked at the broader picture, pointing to the  the haphazard, wildly uneven enforcement of the gun laws that Hunter Biden violated.”

 Survey data suggest that millions of American gun owners are illegal drug users, meaning they are guilty of the same felony that Hunter Biden committed by possessing a firearm. ... Almost none of those potential defendants ever face prosecution: From FY 2008 through FY 2017, for example, federal prosecutors filed an annual average of just 133 charges under Section 922(g)(3).

Such cases are rarely prosecuted because the government generally does not know which drug users are gun owners or vice versa.

But Biden gave lurid details about his drug addiction in his 2021 memoir “Beautiful Things.” That revelation helped Weiss bring the gun case against Biden.

But what's ironic is that conservative gun rights advocates believe that the gun-drugs law used in Biden's case is unconstitutional.

A ruling by Justice Thomas opened the door to such a constitutional challenge. In June 2022, in the case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Supreme Court struck down a century-old New York law requiring state residents to have “proper cause” to carry a handgun. Thomas wrote in the 6-3 majority decision that gun prohibitions must be grounded in history “consistent with our tradition of gun regulation.”

That resulted in Second Amendment groups around the country challenging gun regulations. One such case, United States v. Daniels, dealt with the gun law Biden was charged with violating.

The case began with an April 2022 traffic stop in Mississippi when Patrick Daniels Jr. was pulled over for driving without a license plate. A search of his car revealed several marijuana cigarette butts along with a loaded 9mm pistol and a semi-automatic rifle. Daniels was not given a drug test at the time of the stop, but admitted to smoking pot on a regular basis.

Daniels was convicted in July 2022 of violating Section 922(g)(3), and sentenced to nearly four years in prison. Daniels claimed his conviction violated his right to bear arms in an appeal by his federal public defenders to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation’s most conservative appellate court. Among those filing amicus briefs supporting the appeal were such conservative gun rights groups as the Firearms Policy Coalition, the Gun Owners of America and the Second Amendment Foundation.

In August 2023, the appellate court reversed Daniel’s conviction and ruled that a ban on gun possession for users of illegal drugs violated the Second Amendment, but said their decision only applied to Daniels’ case,

In the ruling, Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, a Reagan appointee, found that the government did not pass the Bruen ruling's new test for gun restrictions.

“In short, our history and tradition may support some limits on an intoxicated person’s right to carry a weapon, but it does not justify disarming a sober citizen based exclusively on his past drug usage,” Smith  wrote for the panel.

In October 2023, the DOJ filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to review the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in the Daniels case, citing conflicting rulings by other federal appellate courts upholding the constitutionality of the gun-drugs law.

Biden’s attorneys raised the Daniels case in a pre-trial motion seeking to have his case dismissed on Second Amendment grounds, but in May 2024 Noreika denied the request. 

And so you had the Democratic president’s son ending up on the same side as conservative gun rights group in seeking to overturn a law defended by his father’s DOJ.

The DOJ agreed that before ruling on the Daniels case, the Supreme Court should first deal with another case, U.S. v Rahimi, that came from the conservative New Orleans-based 5th circuit.  

In the Rahimi case, the 5th Circuit, citing Bruen, declared unconstitutional  a law that bars Americans who are the subject of domestic violence restraining orders from owning guns.

In June 2024, the Supreme Court, reversed the 5th Circuit ruling and upheld the law banning domestic abusers from owning guns. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the 8-1 majority (with Thomas dissenting) that some courts have misunderstood what the high court intended in recent decisions expanding gun rights.

"Since the founding, our Nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms," Roberts wrote.

In July, the Supreme Court asked the 5th Circuit to review the Daniels case again taking into consideration the Rahimi ruling. That review is still pending.

The hypocrisy of the GOP was epitomized in an opinion piece in the conservative Washington Examiner which began by stating:

President  Joe Biden got one thing right when he announced his unforgivable pardon for his son Hunter Biden for gun-related crimes. The federal statute at issue is poorly written and inconsistently applied. Congress should amend it.

THE TAX CASE

Hunter Biden was accused by Weiss in a nine-count indictment of failing to pay $1.4 million in taxes from 2016 to 2020. The indictment alleged that Biden earned millions of dollars from foreign entities in Ukraine, Romania and China and “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle at the same time he chose not to pay his taxes." The indictment listed hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments on various women, clothing and accessories and adult entertainment.

In his pardon announcement, President Biden wrote:

Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given non-criminal resolutions. It is clear that Hunter was treated differently.

But Trump has managed to avoid criminal tax charges despite questionable financial transactions. He's been shielded by an army of accountants and lawyers.

The Trump Organization was found guilty in a Manhattan court in January 2023 on criminal charges of running a 13-year tax fraud scheme in which the company  illegally reduced the tax it paid on executive pay by awarding top managers “off the books” perks. The Trump Organization was fined $1.6 million.

Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg pleaded guilty to 15 felonies related to the tax fraud scheme and served nearly four months in the Rikers Island prison. But Trump was never charged in the case.

In September 2023, Judge Arthur Engoron, ruling in a civil lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, found that Trump  and his company deceived banks, insurers and others by massively overvaluing his assets and exaggerating his net worth on paperwork used in making deals and securing financing. The case resulted in a $454 million civil fraud judgment against the former president. 

And in May 2024, The New York Times and ProPublica jointly reported that an Internal Revenue Service inquiry found that Trump had used a dubious accounting maneuver, in effect writing off the same losses twice, to claim improper tax breaks from his troubled Chicago tower. Trump could face a tax bill of more than $100 million if he ends up losing what’s likely to be a yearslong audit battle.

The Times wrote that “across his business career, Mr. Trump has often used what experts described as highly aggressive — and at times, legally suspect — accounting maneuvers to avoid paying taxes.”

Republican lawmakers have long been working to decrease funding earmarked for the IRS’ ability to conduct audits of complex business arrangements and wealthy Americans such as Trump.

And now Trump has proposed replacing IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, whose term expires in 2027, with former Missouri Rep. Billy Long, who repeatedly sponsored legislation to dismantle the IRS.

The progressive website Common Dreams quoted Democratic Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia as saying that replacing Werfel, who had enhanced enforcement targeting wealthy tax evaders, would be “a terrible mistake.” Beyer said Werfel's removal would be "giving a green light to wealthy tax cheats to evade their fair share of the tax burden."

A recent poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that only about 2 in 10 Americans approve of President Biden’s decision to pardon his son after earlier promising he would do no such thing.

But some Democratic politicians have criticized the pardon and ended up playing into the hands of hypocritical Republicans.

But not Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, who told CNN that he had urged President Biden to pardon his son.

“We all know that but for the fact that he was Joe Biden’s son, he would never have been taken through these gyrations. ... He seemed to be a bit reticent about it but I emphasized the fact that we as fathers have obligations to our children.

“Now if Hunter had gone through a process like everybody else had gone through, I would not have this feeling.”