President Biden’s fiery statement on Sunday announcing his son’s pardon included an eye-opening assertion: that Hunter Biden’s prosecutions on gun and tax charges were the product of political pressure, not the evenhanded administration of justice.
“It is clear that Hunter was treated differently,” he wrote. “The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election.”
The Bidens, their lawyers and their defenders have leveled that accusation against the president’s own appointees at the Justice Department since the summer of 2023, when a plea deal that would have granted Hunter Biden the broad immunity collapsed — leading to the two indictments, and the likelihood he would face significant prison time.
After the pardon announcement, Eric Holder, who served as attorney general under President Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden, wrote in a social media post that no U.S. attorney “would have charged this case given the underlying facts,” and that “Had his name been Joe Smith, the resolution would have been — fundamentally and more fairly — a declination” to prosecute.
U.S. prosecutors have broad discretion when deciding whether to bring cases and are governed by departmental guidelines. But such decisions are subject to a wide range of factors that determine whether they opt to charge, to seek an agreement or to drop the matter altogether, even when there is some evidence of criminality.
The prosecution of the younger Mr. Biden on gun charges was relatively rare. Few people fitting his profile — a first-time, nonviolent offender accused of lying on a federal firearms application, who never used the gun to commit a crime — get serious prison time for the offenses charged in the indictment, according to former and current officials. He held onto the gun, a Colt Cobra .38, for less than two weeks, five years ago.
When officials with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reviewed Hunter Biden’s gun application several years ago, they believed the case most likely would have been dropped if the offender were a lesser-known person, because the gun had not been used in any crime and because Mr. Biden had taken steps to get and stay sober, according to a former law enforcement official familiar with the situation.
It is harder to say whether Mr. Biden’s tax case, stemming from a five-year investigation into his foreign business dealings and profligate spending, was outside of norms. Such cases are not uncommon — although Mr. Biden’s legal team argued that, since he had fully paid his back taxes and the relevant penalties, a trial was unnecessary.
Justice Department officials were incensed by the suggestion that the cases were prosecuted for any reason other than merit. The special counsel in the tax case, David C. Weiss, pushed back against President Biden’s claims in a court filing on Monday, saying there “never has been any evidence of vindictive or selective prosecution in this case.”
Mr. Weiss rejected the idea that the gun and tax cases were politically motivated or represented selective prosecution, noting that judges in both had emphatically rejected such “baseless claims.”
The post Were Hunter Biden’s Prosecutions a Result of Political Pressure? A Look at the Facts appeared first on New York Times.
