Of course Biden officials are interfering in his son’s case — why else has Hunter skated for five years?
Let’s say you lied on a required federal firearms form to conceal your use of illegal drugs so you could buy a .38 caliber handgun, then you irresponsibly lost that gun across the street from a school, and then the government found video evidence of you waving that gun around while cavorting with a prostitute.
If you had done all those things within a few days in 2018, do you suppose that by five years later, the government would have taken exactly zero action against you?
No arrest.
No indictment.
No prosecution.
In fact, do you think that, if it were you who had done all these things, the only government action would be an apparent attempt by a federal law-enforcement agency — say, the Secret Service — to conceal what had happened?
Do you imagine you’d be that lucky?
Or do you figure that you’d have long ago been charged with making a false statement and illegally possessing a firearm — especially with the government being run by a Democrat, such as President Joe Biden, who has a history of demagogically crusading against Second Amendment rights?
No, you’d be in serious legal trouble. In fact, there’s only one way to get off scot-free for this kind of egregious behavior.
You have to be Joe Biden’s son.
That’s the lesson to take away from the inevitable yet startling news that a whistleblower — a senior Internal Revenue Service criminal investigator who has been overseeing the Hunter Biden probe — has complained to the IRS, to the Justice Department, and now to House and Senate committees that the probe has been undermined by political interference.
A lawyer for the whistleblower has reported that “preferential treatment and politics” have been “improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected.”
Of course, that has to be true.
How else could Hunter Biden have been under investigation for so many years with no charges?
The gun offenses are so straightforward that they’d take a competent investigator five days, not five years, to wrap into a prosecutable case.
Some of the tax offenses, which stretch back seven years or more, are so undeniable that liens were placed on Hunter’s properties, and it has been widely reported that he borrowed millions of dollars from a crony to pay what he owed the government.
It gets worse.
The salient feature of the investigation is not Hunter Biden.
It is the Biden family — specifically, the question of why, when Joe Biden exercised significant influence over U.S. policy regarding several foreign governments, including such anti-American regimes as China and bastions of corruption as Ukraine, people closely tied to those governments believed it was in their interests to pay millions of dollars to Joe Biden’s unstable son, his smooth-operator brother, and other Biden relatives.
The long-awaited though always obvious answer comes from the IRS whistleblower: Political interference from the Biden administration has prevented investigators from taking basic steps they would take in any similar situation where millions of dollars of foreign money had been paid in blatant efforts to influence a U.S. official.
Investigators haven’t been able to look into possible money laundering offenses or failures to register under federal laws requiring disclosure of work done for foreign governments and interests.
Also obvious under the circumstance, albeit dismaying to hear it said aloud by an authoritative source: Suspect testimony has been provided to Congress by Attorney General Merrick Garland (who seems to be the official described by the whistleblower’s lawyer as a “senior political appointee”).
Garland has been adamant that David Weiss, the Delaware U.S. attorney nominally heading up the Biden probe, has not faced any interference from the Justice Department.
The whistleblower counters that there is readily available evidence of a failure “to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case.”
Again, how could there not be?
The conflict of interest in the Biden Justice Department’s investigation of Biden’s son could not be clearer, yet Garland has refused to appoint a special counsel.
Federal regulations call for such an appointment whenever there is evidence warranting investigation or prosecution but the Justice Department is conflicted.
In 2019, a whistleblower provided information about potential wrongdoing by President Trump in a conversation with Ukraine’s president.
The whistleblower’s connection to what he reported was far more attenuated than that of the IRS whistleblower here, and the information the Trump whistleblower disclosed was far less clear.
That didn’t stop Democrats, who then controlled the House, from turbocharging investigations — to the point that Trump was eventually impeached even though no crime had been committed.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) reacted to the IRS whistleblower revelations by asserting that the Biden administration may be obstructing justice — which actually is a crime.
The whistleblower’s lawyer says his client wants to testify about the political roadblocks that have obstructed investigators.
Comer needs to make that happen — preferably in public.
There’s already been too much inaction from behind the scenes.
Andrew C. McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor.
