Why it had to happen.
As James reports, Hunter Biden is pleading guilty.
“The Hunter Biden Tax Indictment Is a Disaster for the White House.” That is the headline we put on my column last December. Hunter’s firearms case, on which he was convicted in June, was a big problem for Hunter himself. The tax case was a looming catastrophe for President Joe Biden, who was then mounting a reelection bid.
Since then, top Democrats have strong-armed our senescent chief executive into abandoning his campaign — no doubt factoring in the tax case. Notwithstanding the herculean effort by David Weiss, the complaisant Biden-Harris DOJ special counsel, to keep references to Biden out of the tax indictment to the extent possible, Joe Biden pervaded the charges.
“Hunter’s” business was the Biden family business in which Joe was a willing participant — the one person who was in a position to stop it instantly if he opposed it. That business was to sell access to the senior Biden and his powerful political influence to agents of corrupt and anti-American regimes. To have that yearslong scheme aired out in a five-week trial that the media would have little choice but to cover in the run-up to the election would have been crushing for the Biden campaign. It is such classic corruption that it would derivatively have undermined the campaign of Harris — who is already weighed down by her years of covering up the president’s mental and physical deterioration.
That is why, a couple of weeks ago, after explaining why Hunter Biden failed in his last-ditch effort to get the tax indictment against him thrown out, I opined that I still believed a guilty plea was likely and was still Hunter’s best option, even though the window for it seemed to be closing with jury selection scheduled to start September 5 — i.e., today:
Until a month ago, Joe Biden was the president and Democratic presidential nominee; now, he’s a nominal president who’s been put out to pasture — only after Democrats pushed his incomprehensible convention speech safely out of prime time. Meanwhile, House Republicans have issued a duly scathing 291-page report detailing the unseemliness of the Biden family influence-peddling business — the activity that led to Hunter’s tax charges. Given those developments, the Hunter Biden trial is not apt to garner the public attention anticipated when it was first scheduled to be tried just two months before Election Day.
Still, if there is no pretrial resolution by guilty plea, the trial is sure to get some attention — especially with the Democrats’ anti-Trump lawfare in suspended animation, meaning no more trials and probably no sentencing. That attention to Hunter and the Biden family business would be a grave embarrassment to the White House and, derivatively, to Democrats and Kamala Harris — who is trying to make voters forget that she is a prominent part of the unpopular Biden-Harris administration.
The evidence against the president’s son is overwhelming. Of course, it was overwhelming in the gun case, too, yet Hunter went to trial anyway — and was swiftly found guilty on all counts. Hunter knows that the president, despite his unenforceable insistence to the contrary, can pardon him without political consequence once the election is over. That increases the younger Biden’s incentive to roll the dice at trial. Perhaps he’s planning to do just that, given the combative Geragos’s recent addition to the defense team.
Still, it is hard to believe the president’s son will go through with a weeks-long public airing of damning conduct that would blot his father’s legacy and could hurt Harris’s chances in a tight election. I’m still expecting a guilty plea . . . but admittedly, the window for one is closing. Whether the convictions come by plea or jury verdict, get ready for another nauseating victory lap from David Weiss, the very “special counsel” who did his best to keep Hunter out of legal jeopardy.
The only thing that seems more inevitable than Hunter’s plea is Hunter’s pardon. Election Day is November 5. Christmas is about six weeks later. I’d keep my eye on that promiscuous part of the political calendar.