A President’s son is charged, a President himself continues to lie, the media remains half asleep, and where it ends, no one knows

Three years ago The New York Times, CNN, and others pretended there was nothing out of the ordinary with Hunter receiving millions of dollars without providing any work product or paying any taxes. Now, he faces serious jail time. Whether or not this reaches the President himself remains to be seen.

Last week, the President’s son, Hunter, was charged by Special Counsel David Weiss for the second time after a previous indictment earlier this year on gun related offenses.  This time around it was taxes, some $1.4 million owed to the government that was only paid long after the investigation began.  The indictment – which includes three felonies and six misdemeanors that could carry up to 17 years in prison – alleges that Hunter “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills” including “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature.”  Considering it was widely believed Hunter would avoid any and all felony charges under a sweetheart plea agreement last summer, this can only be described as a stunning turn of events.  Rather than walking free, the President’s son faces serious jail time and the President himself faces the daunting prospect of a potentially salacious trial during an election year, when the last thing any politician in his position needs is more controversy surrounding them.  Though the President isn’t named in the indictment and the charges, at least at this point, have nothing to do with his personal involvement in his son’s business dealing, even friendly outlets were quick to point out the obvious political implications.  As CNN described it, “President Joe Biden is confronting the prospect of his son Hunter facing an embarrassing legal ordeal next year amid a host of other political obstacles in a possible rematch with Donald Trump.  The additional criminal charges brought by the Justice Department against Hunter Biden on Thursday, though expected, nonetheless amounted to a reminder of the personal strain the president will face as he gears up for the coming campaign…Prosecutors’ portrait of Hunter Biden’s unbridled vice – funded, in part, by leveraging the Biden family name – presents a deeply problematic image at a moment when Republicans are searching for ways to damage the president politically.”

Perhaps more problematic is how we reached this point in the first place.  CNN claimed the charges were “expected,” but that doesn’t capture close to the whole truth of this saga.  If justice delayed is justice denied as the old saying goes, a cynic cannot help but wonder how five plus years of investigation into reasonably straightforward crimes was set to end with a suspicious plea deal that was ultimately rejected by a judge who described it as like nothing he’d ever seen before.  The failure of the plea deal after pressure from whistleblowers prompted the appointment of a special counsel, which was near magically followed by actual indictments with real jail time.  None of this was expected last summer, forget last year.  Given the facts of the case have not changed, why was there ever a plea deal in the first place, especially if these crimes are as salacious as described?  Oddly, Hunter’s attorneys are insisting he’s only being charged now because of his last name.  “Based on the facts and the law, if Hunter’s last name was anything other than Biden, the charges in Delaware, and now California, would not have been brought,” attorney Abbe Lowell said in a statement Thursday after the indictment.  There might well be some truth to this, if you hinge the entire statement on the use of the word “now,” as in if his last name wasn’t Biden, he’d have been charged long ago considering the length of the investigation and the easily provable nature of the underlying crimes.  It’s another spin on CNN’s “expected,” after all expectations have been repeatedly defied. Conservative commentators have also taken issue with the timing, believing it amounts to yet another attempt to shield the President himself from scrutiny about this involvement.  As The New York Post’s Miranda Devine put it, “The reason the president has gone unmentioned after a five-year investigation into Hunter’s role in the family influence-peddling racket is that the DOJ, like most of the media, corruptly protected him.  As IRS whistleblowers Joseph Ziegler and Gary Shapley keep telling Congress, every investigative avenue that led to Joe Biden was blocked.”

Some believe these indictments are only meant to serve as yet another block, this time of the unfolding impeachment inquiry before Congress.  Hunter was subpoenaed to testify tomorrow before a House Committee about his father’s involvement in the overseas businesses that funded his lavish lifestyle, but it is difficult to see how that proceeds amid a potential criminal trial.  Only two things are certain at this point.  First, no one has even tried to explain the actions of the Department of Justice over the past five years or bothered to respond in detail to the allegations of the whistleblowers.  Special Counsel Weiss, his boss, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and others tell us repeatedly that the investigation has been conducted without political interference and with no political objectives in mind, but completely fail to address how that could possibly be the case after the length of the inquiry, the collapse of the plea deal, and the seeming rush for new indictments.  Why all the back and forth, if not politics, are they admitting to outright incompetence?  Is the entire Department of Justice incapable of bringing basic charges against a man they describe as an out of control drug addict?  These facts alone would be reason for concern, especially when the whistleblowers allege that political interference occurred throughout the investigation.  Ms. Devine summarized their key points, which have never really been responded to, as follows.  “The FBI FD 1023 alleging Joe was bribed $5 million by Ukraine was kept from investigators,” “Investigators were refused access to Hunter’s laptop that the FBI had been given in December 2019 by Delaware computer repairer John Paul Mac Isaac,” “A search warrant for a cottage on Joe’s Delaware estate was denied, “A plan to search Hunter’s storage unit was leaked to his lawyers,” “Questions about the ‘big guy’ were not allowed in interviews with witnesses,” “Interviews with Biden family members were banned,” “Joe’s presidential transition team was tipped off in December 2020 that Shapley and an FBI agent were in California to interview Hunter the next morning (and thus they never did),” and “The statute of limitations was allowed to expire on the potentially most serious charges from 2014 and 2015, involving payments from Ukraine which could have ensnared Joe.”

The second thing that is certain:  The President himself will continue to lie about these matters, even when everyone knows he is doing so.  The day before the indictment, he repeated yet again that he had no involvement in his son’s business dealings.  When asked about the public perception that he acted illegally or unethically, President Biden claimed unequivocally, “I’m not going to comment on that. I did not, and it’s just a bunch of lies.”  He was asked again, and responded, “I did not – they’re lies,” appearing somewhat peeved he was confronted question in the first place.  Apparently, the President believes it’s still 2020 when all of this was some Russian PsyOp and volumes of evidence about these dealings has not emerged for public scrutiny.  Even CNN no longer believes the hard denial, commenting that “witness testimony has revealed the president has had various interactions with his son’s business partners. The majority of these claims stem from a business associate of the president’s son, Devon Archer, who testified to the House Oversight Committee earlier this year that there were ‘maybe 20 times’ when Joe Biden was placed on speakerphone during meetings with his and Hunter Biden’s business partners. However, Archer said ‘nothing’ of importance was ever discussed during those calls.  There were also dinners that Joe Biden attended with Hunter Biden and some of his foreign business associates at Cafe Milano in Washington, though Archer testified that business was not discussed during the meals, telling lawmakers, ‘We ate, and kind of talked about the world, I guess, and the weather, and then everybody left.’”  Thus, the goal post has been substantially relocated from no knowledge to “no evidence that Joe Biden benefited from his son’s foreign business dealings, [though] his surface-level interactions that overlapped with his son’s business activities continue to provide fuel to his political opponents.”  Does anyone truly believe Hunter arranged private dinners with his Vice President father to talk about the “weather?”  Is there a meteorologist in the family no one has ever heard of?  It’s hard to say which claim is more bizarre, dinner with the VP discussing nothing or a Department of Justice so late on getting their homework done, they failed to file charges that could easily have been filed and do not feel the need to explain it.

Either way, CNN isn’t saying.  Instead, they’re busy pretending that a 70 something year old man helping his son rake in millions in shady deals provides absolutely no benefit to the man himself.  The average person, of course, who generally views their children’s success as their own, isn’t buying it for obvious reasons.  In the meantime, no one – and I mean no one – knows where this ends.  Conservatives remain convinced the Department of Justice is too corrupt to be trusted and I tend to agree, except no one expected these indictments either a mere six months ago and it’s difficult to see how everyone can continue denying the obvious now that Republicans in Congress have established the President Biden received payments directly from his son’s companies, and at least $240,000 from his brother for “loan repayments.”  Liberals continue to insist that President Biden did absolutely nothing wrong, simply allowing his son to behave badly or perhaps granting the “illusion” of access.  The truth is necessarily far more messy and complicated, especially considering the entire thing was once dismissed as Russian disinformation.  There are a couple of lessons to be drawn from how this has unfolded.  First, the initial draft of history is usually wrong, whether intentionally so as in this case or through honest mistakes.  Three years ago The New York Times, CNN, and others all pretended that there was nothing out of the ordinary with Hunter receiving millions of dollars from foreign governments and companies without providing any work product.  We know now that the FBI and the Department of Justice were already investigating these matters, but no major media outlet outside of The New York Post and Fox News dared touch the story, except to repeat the lie that it was probably fake.  Suddenly, however, everyone has discovered that President Biden isn’t quite as honest and forthright as they claimed and even should he not have done anything criminal, he still prefers to lie rather than reveal the truth.  The truth can take far longer than we would like to surface.  Second, the President is in deep political if not legal peril, both personally and professionally.  Even with a pliant media, he might not be able to win re-election and some are saying won’t make it past the convention.  Former President Trump appears to be the beneficiary of this decline, at least for though he is facing no shortage of indictments himself.  Third, the country as a whole continues to be on the losing end no matter what happens.  The President was sold under false pretenses, normalcy and decency were never on the agenda.  The media promulgated lies to make that so, and we’re all stuck with the fall out for at least another year if not longer.