President Biden pardoned his son Hunter Biden from two separate criminal cases, claiming they were politically motivated to target the Biden family.
President Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, late Sunday evening, sparing him from being sentenced in a pair of separate court cases in which he was found guilty of illegally purchasing a gun and failing to pay $1.4 million in taxes — convictions the president claimed were politically motivated and a “miscarriage of justice.”
A review of Hunter Biden’s yearslong legal saga, however, shows another story, and those involved in the prosecutions are making sure that side of the story is told in the aftermath of the president’s decision.
“There was none and never has been any evidence of vindictive or selective prosecution in this case”, special prosecutor David Weiss said in a court filing following the pardoning.
Two IRS whistleblowers who sounded the alarm on Hunter Biden’s tax issues also slammed the decision to pardon Hunter Biden, saying, “No amount of lies or spin can hide the simple truth that the Justice Department nearly let the President’s son off the hook for multiple felonies.”
“President Biden has the power to put his thumb on the scales of justice for his son, but at least he had to do it with a pardon explicitly for all the world to see rather than his political appointees doing it secretly behind the scenes. Either way it is a sad day for law abiding taxpayers to witness this special privilege for the powerful”, IRS whistleblowers Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley and Special Agent Joe Ziegler said in a statement Sunday evening.
“No amount of lies or spin can hide the simple truth that the Justice Department nearly let the President’s son off the hook for multiple felonies. We did our duty, told the truth, and followed the law. Anyone reading the President’s excuses now should remember that Hunter Biden admitted to his tax crimes in federal court, that Hunter Biden’s attorneys have targeted us for our lawful whistleblower disclosures, and that we are suing one of those attorneys for smearing us with false accusations”, they continued, referring to their $20 million defamation lawsuit against Hunter Biden’s high-profile attorney Abbe Lowell in September for claiming the IRS investigators illegally leaked Hunter Biden’s private tax information.
The guilty plea, guilty verdict and the president’s pardoning caps off a yearslong legal saga for the first son and his family, with the cases stretching back to 2018 and notably featured the IRS whistleblowers who sounded the alarm on Hunter Biden’s tax issues.
Hunter Biden was found guilty in the gun case in June, with a jury of his peers determining he made a false statement in the purchase of a gun, made a false statement related to information required to be kept by a federally licensed gun dealer, and possession of a gun by a person who is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance.
He has a well-documented history of drug abuse, which was most notably documented in his 2021 memoir, “Beautiful Things”, which walked readers through his previous need to smoke crack cocaine every 20 minutes, how his addiction was so prolific that he referred to himself as a “crack daddy” to drug dealers, and anecdotes revolving around drug deals, such as a Washington, D.C., crack dealer Biden nicknamed “Bicycles.”
In the tax case, Hunter faced another trial regarding three felony tax offenses and six misdemeanor tax offenses regarding the failure to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes. As jury selection was about to kick off in Los Angeles federal court in September, Hunter entered a surprise guilty plea.
The tax case investigation originally kicked off in 2018, when the U.S. attorney in Delaware opened a probe into Hunter Biden’s finances. The first son initially notified the public that he was under investigation one month after his dad won the presidential election over President-elect Donald Trump in 2020.
“I learned yesterday for the first time that the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware advised my legal counsel, also yesterday, that they are investigating my tax affairs”, Hunter Biden said in a statement released in December of 2020.
