As is his right, Hunter Biden can, and apparently will, argue that his father’s government is persecuting him. Republicans can afford to sit back and watch.
The implosion of Hunter Biden’s unusually sweet plea deal has put the president’s son in the awkward position of having to act like a criminal defendant. As is his right, Hunter Biden can, and apparently will, argue that his father’s government is persecuting him, overextending its authority, and threatening cherished American freedoms.
Last week, special counsel David Weiss indicted the president’s son on three counts, two of which involve allegations that he misled federal investigators while purchasing a Colt revolver five years ago. Now, Hunter Biden’s attorneys are obliged to defend their client on grounds the plea agreement was designed to avoid — namely, that Hunter’s dad presides over an administration that has treated the Constitution with contempt.
The New York Times outlined the strategy in late May:
His lawyers, including the white-collar defense lawyer Christopher Clark, have argued that any charge against him would likely be thrown out after federal appeals courts rule on two major challenges that cite the Supreme Court decision [in last summer’s New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen] as precedent.
“Now Hunter Biden’s defense may align with the Second Amendment advocates’ goals — and against his father’s calls for tougher gun laws,” NBC News observed. One of the higher-profile members of Hunter Biden’s defense team, Abbe Lowell, said last week that the prosecution of the president’s son represents a flagrant violation of “recent rulings by several federal courts that this statute is unconstitutional.”
In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, the Court invalidated state-level laws requiring applicants to verify that they had “proper cause” to exercise a constitutional right. President Biden attacked the decision, which he argued “contradicts both common sense and the Constitution and should deeply trouble us all.” Now, the president’s son is relying on that ruling and the precedents it established, claiming essentially that his dad’s interpretation of the Constitution is downright tyrannical.
That’s not all. On Monday, Hunter Biden filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. The legal action alleges that IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler contributed to an unlawful effort to disclose his private tax records to the public but that Shapley and Ziegler did not act alone. “The lawsuit is about the decision by IRS employees, their representatives, and others to disregard their obligations and repeatedly and intentionally publicly disclose and disseminate Mr. Biden’s protected tax return information outside the exceptions for making disclosures in the law,” the suit maintains.
Hunter Biden’s assault on one of the nation’s least trusted law-enforcement agencies comes at an inopportune moment for his father’s administration. The White House celebrated the inclusion of $80 billion in new funding for the IRS to facilitate the hiring of 87,000 new agents and increase the tax revenue that would otherwise go uncollected. Republicans who denounced the IRS’s expansion were accused of promoting “conspiracy theories” about the agency’s soon-to-be-expanded auditing target list, and the Biden administration audibly grumbled when Republicans forced it to accept a $20 billion cut to the IRS’s expanded budget in May. The administration’s already strained effort to boost the public’s confidence in the IRS will be made that much more difficult by a court filing in which the president’s son claims he is the victim of the agency’s persecution.
If all this doesn’t quite rise to the level of a Shakespearean betrayal, it’s certainly more than a little awkward. With Hunter Biden’s lawyers making such a sweeping case against his father’s administration, Republicans can afford to sit back and watch.