In the series ‘the faults of the children fall on the fathers’, he returns to the fore, or to the pillory, Hunter Biden, a slightly reckless and perhaps a little artless son of President Joe Biden. Hunter was indicted and, at least for one branch of the investigation involving him, he pleaded guilty.
A fast track?
If Donald Trump is the first former president indicted on federal charges, Hunter is the first son of a sitting president to be indicted on federal charges. Even if the investigations involving Trump and Biden jr are not comparable to each other due to the seriousness of the crimes alleged.
While Trump is on trial on 37 counts ranging from conspiracy to obstructing justice to improper handling of classified documents, Hunter has reached a preliminary understanding with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two misdemeanors Of tax evasion and one for having bought a gun and not having done so drug use.
According to press leaks, the terms of the agreement, which a federal judge must ratify, would save the president’s son from jail. According to Hunter’s attorney, Christopher Clark, the five-year investigation it is so settled: “My client finds it important to take responsibility for mistakes made during a period of turbulence and addiction in his life… He looks forward to continuing his recovery and moving forward.” The father president is next to his son: “I’m very proud of it”, he replies to reporters who ask if it pushed him to accept the agreement.
A hearing before District Judge Maryellen Noreika, a Trump appointee, has been set for July 26th in Delaware. If endorsed, the agreement will close the investigation launched in 2018, during the Trump administration. The Republicans accuse the Biden administration, under which the investigation then continued, of having had an eye for the president’s son.
According to media advances, the agreement, negotiated by the Delaware prosecutor, also appointed in the Trump era, provides for Hunter to declare himself guilty of two minor tax offenses relating to non-payment of taxes for 2017 and 2018, totaling approximately $1.2 million; he was born in illegal possession of a Colt Cobra 38 special purchased in 2018, despite cocaine addiction issues preventing him from owning a gun. Hopefully, Hunter will get away with two years probation and alternative measures and will avoid prison.
Republicans on the attack
The news of the agreement has unleashed Republican ire, starting with Trump, who for five years has accused Hunter, and therefore his father, of all sorts of crimes: shady trade in China and the work of lobbyist – well paid – for a Ukrainian energy companywhich would have influenced Biden’s position towards that country when he was vice president.
Trump says, “The Justice Department, controlled by Biden, just erased hundreds of years of criminal liability by giving Hunter a simple traffic ticket”; and to Fox News he declares that Biden “has hundreds of boxes of secret documents at home” – a claim not corroborated by evidence. The Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthyin constant balance between ‘Trumpian’ observance and new allies, brands US justice as a “two-level system”: “If you are the main opponent of the president, the Department tries to send you to jail; if you are the president’s son you get an advantageous understanding”.
Republicans have never stopped talking about Hunter and his ‘border line’ vicissitudes between fragility and illegality: in 2019/’20, Trump made a battle horse of his campaign, even risking impeachment for pressuring the Ukrainian government to obtain anti-Biden information; and, since the midterm vote of November 8, 2022, one has never been ruled out committee of inquiry in the Housewhere Republicans are the majority.
On July 25, 2020, Trump told the newly elected Ukrainian president over the phone Volodymyr Zelensky: “Do me the favor: investigates Joe Biden and his son”, said the tycoon, according to what is contained in the official transcripts – Biden was at the time the Democratic candidate for the 2020 presidential election. Shortly before the ‘convict’ phone call, Trump ordered to suspend aid to Ukraine for 391 million dollars: a tool of pressure, if not of blackmail. Zelensky relied on the independence of the judiciary.
In reality, Hunter’s stories are too intricate, and yet rather improbable, to really captivate public opinion – there is also the daring story of one of his decommissioned computers that ended up in the hands of Rudy Giuliani, a loyalist of Trump, from which embarrassing elements would have emerged. But it is equally true that the vicissitudes of the president’s son are not entirely clear, with a theory of entrepreneurial activities that are never spot on, and that an aura of suspicion remains, in particular, on his role in a Ukrainian energy company, the Bourisma Holdingsinvolved in corruption and money laundering investigations, in whose Board of Directors he joined in 2014.
Then there is the fact that to attack Biden on family affections it takes a lot of hair on the stomach: a 13-month-old daughter who died, together with her mother, his first wife, Neilla, in a car accident; the eldest son, Beau, who seemed destined to succeed his father in politics, killed in 2015 at the age of 46 by a brain tumor. Logical that the father’s affection is poured on Hunter, 53 years old, lawyer, businessman, artist, in and out of drugs, flair and weaknesses.
Faced with Trump’s woes, Judge Aileen Cannon has already announced that the trial of the former president for classified papers stolen from the National Archives and taken to Mar-a-Lago will start on August 14th: short times, perhaps also because Cannon, another of Trump’s brood of judges, wishes to escape the suspicion of dragging it out.
Cover photo EPA/TOLGA AKMEN