Hunter Biden Found Guilty of Multiple Charges, But Trial Controversy Casts Shadow over White House
No matter what the White House says, everyone believes Joe Biden will pardon his son Hunter and spare him significant jail time, after his guilty plea to felony tax crimes last week, on top of his felony gun conviction in June.
Hunter’s bizarre legal strategy only makes sense in light of the get-out-of jail free card his powerful father has ready for him. He will cry victim and escape accountability for his misdeeds yet again, like he has done all his life.
But the twin convictions are important because they stand forever as an antidote to the lies and gaslighting that are a Biden family specialty.
The president is implicated in every part of the prosecution case that was set to unfold this week — Joe Biden was both the product Hunter sold for millions of dollars to shady foreign interests throughout his vice presidency and beyond, and an active partner who met with Hunter’s Chinese, Ukrainian, Russian and Kazakhstani paymasters for breakfast lunch and dinner, for coffees and handshakes and for chats about the “weather” on speakerphone. If Joe were still running for re-election, the five-week trial so close to the election would have been a political liability that even the most partisan media outlets would have been forced to cover.
The trial also would have hurt Kamala Harris’ campaign if it had gone ahead, as a reminder that she denied knowledge of Joe’s corruption just as she denied his cognitive decline. As it happens, the fallout of the aborted trial still adds to a taint around the White House, as much as the Democrats’ media handmaidens might pretend it has nothing to do with Joe.
Honest Joe to Big Guy
The charges against Hunter (pictured leaving court with his wife, Melissa) in California and Delaware were just the tip of the iceberg of corruption that was partially revealed in Hunter’s “laptop from hell” and then expanded on in the House impeachment committees’ painstaking investigations.
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</aside>In the process, “Honest Joe,” the self-proclaimed “poorest man in Congress,” has been exposed for posterity as the “Big Guy,” the central figure in an influence-peddling operation that stretches back to his earliest days as the senator for Delaware and has afforded his extended family a lifestyle of entitlement and luxury befitting billionaires, including Du Pont mansions, a ritzy lakefront estate, a $3 million beach house, elite private schools, Ivy League tuition and such baubles as the massive diamond ring sported by First Lady Jill Biden at a Ralph Lauren soirée at the Hamptons over the weekend.
For 90 minutes in Los Angeles federal court Thursday, Judge Mark Scarsi forced Hunter to listen as prosecutors read aloud to the court the entire indictment against him before he was allowed him to enter a guilty plea to all nine charges for tax evasion and other crimes.
“Do you agree you committed every element of every crime in the indictment?” Scarsi asked.
“Yes,” Hunter responded.
It was the moment all the Biden lies of the past five years turned to dust.
Even Hunter’s own pricy lead lawyer Abbe Lowell had to admit the prosecution case was overwhelming.
It served as some measure of vindication for the whistleblowers who stood up for the rule of law against the most powerful man in the world — and the shadowy cabal of CIA, FBI, DOJ and IRS operatives who perverted the course of justice and interfered with an election to protect the Bidens.
Blowing the whistle
Without IRS investigators Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler blowing the whistle at enormous personal expense, Hunter would have escaped scot free. That clearly was the intention of the DOJ and David Weiss, Delaware’s US attorney-turned-special counsel, who allowed the statute of limitations to expire on the most serious potential charges, including bribery and illegal foreign lobbying.
Every word of the indictment read into the public record last week was the product of Shapley and Ziegler’s integrity and hard work. It was proof that the charges they were ready to bring before the 2022 midterms were solid and never should have been rejected by the DOJ and Weiss, who offered Hunter a sweetheart plea deal that would have seen him charged with nothing at all.
Only when Weiss got wind of Shapley’s upcoming testimony to Congress did he panic and tell his minions that they had to charge Hunter at least with a misdemeanor or two.
Even this extraordinary gift from prosecutors was not good enough for the pampered son of Joe Biden, so the plea deal collapsed in court, thanks to an honest judge, Maryellen Noreika, who had no doubt read the amicus brief containing Shapley and Ziegler’s damning testimony of prosecutorial misconduct throughout the five-year investigation of the first son.
The nation owes the two whistleblowers an enormous debt of gratitude.
The IRS perversely was congratulating itself last week for a job well done when the guilty verdicts came in.
And yet IRS leadership has been tormenting Shapley and Ziegler, subjecting them to death by a thousand cuts. Everything that can legally be done to force them out of their jobs has been tried.
They have been denied promotions, frozen out, snubbed in public, and two big tax cases that Shapley’s team was working on have been ordered closed, letting tax cheats off the hook.
Despite having lodged whistleblower complaints with three different watchdog organizations, the retaliation continues.
‘Followed my heart’
The stress on both men has affected every aspect of their lives.
“I’m frustrated that the promises of protection for blowing the whistle are not being honored,” says Shapley, the supervisory agent in charge of Hunter’s case, who leads the crack IRS team dubbed the “Seal Team 6” of tax fraud investigations: the International Financial Tax Crimes group. “My career is ruined because it’s clear that lack of leadership at IRS enabled politics at DOJ to improperly infect the case. . . . The IRS is more interested in saving face than seeking truth and justice.”
Ziegler, the talented lead special agent on the Hunter investigation from its inception in 2018, and a registered Democrat, has seen his marriage fall apart under the stress and friends abandon him.
“I have gone through a deep depression filled with isolation and a questioning of whether what I was doing was right,” he says. “As a gay man, members of my community shunned me and cast me as a person against them and their beliefs. . . . But at the end of the day, I followed my heart and followed the principles I was raised on in doing what was right no matter the cost.”
It is disgusting that these two good men are being punished for doing the right thing.
But as long as the public stands up for them as they stood up for all of us, their cowardly bosses cannot go too far. And if Donald Trump wins the election, you can bet that he will clean out the entire IRS leadership.
Although he is too modest to agree, there would be no better criminal investigation chief than Shapley. What an encouraging message that would send to whistleblowers in the future.
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