The other charge, blatantly failing to pay millions of dollars in taxes, is routinely brought against people who are not political targets. That it’s true Hunter Biden was more likely to get caught than the average tax cheat is an indictment of the tax system. (It is also, ironically, an aspect of the system Joe Biden has set out to change by beefing up the IRS’s enforcement capacity.)
What the president fails to note in his self-pitying statement is that Hunter Biden for years engaged in legal but wildly inappropriate behavior by running a business based on selling the perception of access to his father. The only commodity Hunter had to offer oligarchs in Ukraine, China, and elsewhere was the belief, or hope, that he could put in a good word for them with his dad.
Joe Biden’s defense in these cases was that he did not actually give Hunter’s clients anything of value. There is no proof to the contrary, and extensive Republican efforts to dig up evidence that Joe shared in the profits from Hunter’s access-peddling business came up empty.
But Joe Biden’s defense of Hunter’s influence peddling by stressing its narrow legality merely serves to highlight the hypocrisy of his fatherly indulgence. The black letter of the law was a fence to protect Hunter from the consequences of his sleazy behavior. And when the law itself trapped him, he simply opened a door and walked through it—a door no average American could access.
