Bowing to overwhelming evidence and political reality, Hunter Biden finally pleaded guilty to tax charges on the day his trial was to begin with jury selection in Los Angeles federal court.
Even now, already scheduled for sentencing for federal firearms felonies of which a Delaware jury found him guilty, the president’s 54-year-old son exhibited the haughty air of entitlement that has marked his adult life and disastrous choices.
The normal defendant who is caught red-handed negotiates a plea, admits guilt, and asks for mercy from the court. Not Hunter. As a throng of prospective jurors descended on the courthouse to begin the selection process, Biden’s lawyers took prosecutors and Judge Mark Scarsi aback: Biden announced that he was prepared to plead guilty to all charges, and to concede that prosecutors could prove their case, yet he would continue to maintain his innocence.
He thus invoked a rare process, known as an “Alford plea” after a 1970 Supreme Court case inapposite in Hunter’s case. Henry Alford insisted that he had not committed a murder but was permitted nonetheless to plead guilty to a lesser charge to avoid the likelihood of a death sentence if he were convicted at trial. In stark contrast, Biden was willing to plead guilty to all the charges — three felonies and six misdemeanors, aggregating to a potential 17-year prison term. He just wanted, for political purposes, to do so while persisting incomprehensibly in the claim that he had done nothing wrong.
Though he has performed shoddily in this yearslong affair, David Weiss, the Biden-Harris Justice Department’s designated special counsel, deserves credit for refusing to indulge this conceit.
In a case in which he had no defense, the privileged first son had forced prosecutors to prepare for trial, made witnesses travel across the country to testify, and — because of his notoriety — necessitated the summons of an unusually large pool of potential jurors and extraordinary security measures. A defendant always has a right to plead guilty to all the charges with the required concession that he is in fact guilty; but an Alford plea is an accommodation that should both be reserved for highly unusual situations (which this wasn’t) and require the prosecutor’s consent. Weiss’s prosecutors properly objected to Hunter’s gambit, advising the court that they were ready to prove every inch of their case.
This put Judge Scarsi in a bind. We believe it would have been best to deny Hunter’s Alford plea outright. Hunter was willing to plead guilty to all charges — unlike the usual defendant, who must negotiate a plea to cap his potential imprisonment — presumably because he expects to be pardoned, on both the gun and tax cases, and never spend a day in custody. We thus sympathize with the judge’s sense that it would be a waste to conduct a lengthy trial when the defendant was willing to end the matter with a guilty plea, albeit a murky one, and when the expensive proceedings would inevitably be nullified by a pardon. Nevertheless, if Scarsi had rebuffed him, the high likelihood is that Hunter would have caved and agreed to plead guilty without reservations.
That he was as guilty as the day is long was far from the only reason for Hunter’s desperation to avoid a trial. With early voting about to commence, President Biden’s legacy (such as it is) and the Harris presidential campaign could not afford a five- or six-week, intensely covered exploration of how, for years, Hunter brazenly sold access to his father and then failed to pay $1.4 million in taxes on the resulting windfall.
Relying mainly on incontestable banking records, the hair-raising House impeachment report recently concluded that the Biden family influence-peddling business took in $27 million, mostly from agents of corrupt and anti-American regimes (prominently including China’s), in just the years 2014 through 2019. To be crystal clear, it began when Joe Biden was vice president, with the Obama White House turning a blind eye, at best, to the arrant corruption — a fact that is manifest in the House report but was obscured by Weiss, who allowed the statute of limitations to expire on tax crimes traceable to the Obama years.
In Thursday’s hours-long plea proceeding, Scarsi made a strong record. Ostensibly, he has allowed Hunter to claim innocence. In reality, the court has shredded that claim. The judge had the prosecutors read the entire indictment (all 56 pages) and then exactingly questioned Biden under oath, eliciting his acknowledgment that prosecutors could prove their extensive allegations beyond a reasonable doubt. Scarsi also drew from Hunter’s counsel the concession that a guilty plea to every charge was in the defendant’s best interest. Patently, it is irrational to maintain innocence while admitting what Biden admitted.
Sentencing is scheduled for December 16. As our Andrew C. McCarthy observes, it is unlikely to happen because Hunter is due to be sentenced on the aforementioned gun charges on November 13. Convictions are technically not final judgments until the court imposes sentence. As we’ve seen for decades, Joe Biden’s vows do not have a long shelf-life; we wager his indignant insistence that he will not pardon his son (or commute any sentence) will no longer be operative after the election. A pardon would humiliate the president, so he will want to erase guilty findings on both the tax and gun charges in one fell swoop, and do it before Hunter’s convictions can be formally entered in the record. That suggests a clemency grant in the week between Election Day and the scheduled November 13 gun sentencing.
It would be a scandalous ending to what has been a sordid saga.