Hunter Biden’s New, More Serious Indictment
It’s a very unusual case, although the charges stem from an addiction crisis that will sound painfully familiar to many Americans.
ON THURSDAY, SPECIAL COUNSEL DAVID WEISS secured a federal grand jury indictment in California charging Hunter Biden with nine criminal counts—three felonies and six misdemeanors—allegedly arising from “a four-year scheme to not pay at least $1.4 million in self-assessed federal taxes he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019.” The indictment claims that Biden didn’t pay his taxes while simultaneously spending money “on drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature”; that he repeatedly failed to file federal tax form 1040; and that he failed to identify a slew of personal expenses that were wrongfully paid with corporate funds. (He reportedly paid these owed back taxes—plus penalties and interest, reaching a total of about $2 million—in 2021.)
The indictment feels like an unmistakable “eff you” from Weiss after a deal to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors fell apart in open court in July, with Hunter Biden’s lawyer heard saying to prosecutors, “Rip it up.” During the hearing, Delaware U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika balked at the proposed agreement’s terms, which would have made her the arbiter of Biden’s compliance with what’s known as a “diversion agreement,” under which the Justice Department would hold off on future gun charges if Biden met certain terms—a matter of prosecutorial discretion that theoretically should fall to the executive branch, not the courts.
Paragraph 15 of that scuttled deal was the real problem. It stated that the government “agrees not to criminally prosecute Biden, outside of the terms of this Agreement, for any crimes encompassed [by the diversion agreement], and the Statement of Facts attached as Exhibit 1 to the Memorandum of Plea Agreement.” Exhibit 1 of the plea agreement—which is distinct from the diversion agreement, mind you—described how Hunter Biden allegedly earned millions from doing business in Ukraine, China, and Romania during 2017 and 2018 when, according to the prosecutor during the hearing, “in the throes of addiction, Biden essentially ignored his tax obligations” despite spending lavishly.
The judge sought to clarify whether the immunity part—that is, the agreement not to prosecute Biden—was also contingent on his compliance with the diversion agreement’s requirements that he not own a firearm and refrain from alcohol, among other things—or whether he was instead to receive broad immunity, full stop, with no conditions. If the latter, then Weiss would have been agreeing not to charge Biden with anything relating to the shady business dealings that congressional Republicans have been howling about forever (and which it turns out Weiss didn’t charge in the latest indictment anyway). When the parties realized they had different understandings of the scope of immunity, the deal fell apart, with Noreika giving them 30 days to work it out. A clearer deal didn’t emerge, with Weiss indicting Biden instead on gun charges in Delaware in September, and now on much more serious tax charges in California, which carry a maximum prison sentence of 17 years.
THE LATEST INDICTMENT details how in his 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things, “the Defendant described 2018 as being dominated by crack cocaine use ‘twenty-four hours a day, smoking every fifteen minutes, seven days a week.’” But, it adds, Hunter Biden “never told [his] CA Accountants about his extensive drug and alcohol abuse in 2018 which might have prompted greater scrutiny of his claims of hundreds of thousands of dollars in business expenses.”
Biden’s book suggests that he may have just been too incapacitated by his addiction to responsibly manage his taxes. During the penultimate year of the Obama administration, while his father Joe Biden was vice president, his brother Beau died of brain cancer. The next year, in 2016, Hunter Biden’s personal life imploded, and despite seven successful years out of rehab, he relapsed, ultimately finding himself on twelve-to-sixteen-hour benders, losing twenty pounds, and surviving on vodka, Doritos, pork rinds, and ramen noodles. He became addicted to crack cocaine after buying it from a homeless addict.
The indictment alleges that for that same tax year, 2016, “the Defendant ROBERT HUNTER BIDEN had and received taxable income of $1,276,499, on which taxable income there was owing to the United States of America an income tax of $45,661” that “he was required by law to pay, on or before April 18, 2017”; but that “did willfully fail” to pay it “on June 12, 2020”—a date that presumably brings the claim within the three-to-six year statute of limitations for federal tax crimes.
Hunter Biden has reportedly been sober since 2019—the final tax year covered by the indictment—after he met his current wife, Melissa Cohen, whom he credits for his recovery. Hunter Biden explained his years of troubles this way in a 2021 interview:
The thing that I think trapped me in my addiction was this idea that no one could possibly understand me. No one could possibly have gone through what I’ve gone through—the degradation, the feeling of shame and guilt, the feeling of just abject loneliness that you feel in addiction. . . . And you think, I don’t have anybody to talk to, no one could possibly understand me.
Setting aside for a moment the serious charges against Hunter Biden, his struggle with addiction is a familiar one. Since 2000, there have been over 700,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States. In 2021, 7.3 million people in America over the age of 12 actively had, as Hunter Biden had during his crisis period, both an alcohol and a drug-use disorder; an additional 38.9 million people had one or the other.
The country’s drug crisis—fueled especially by the highly addictive synthetic opioid fentanyl—is a tragedy of epic proportions, affecting many millions of family members. Although Hunter Biden’s story is very unusual—involving international business dealings, a lavish lifestyle, massive tax troubles, and a political family—there are scenes in it that will be painfully familiar to millions of families struggling with substance abuse, like the story of Joe Biden chasing Hunter down the driveway after a family intervention attempt. He wrote, “he grabbed me, swung me around and hugged me. He held me tight in the dark and cried for the longest time.”
THIS NEW HUNTER BIDEN INDICTMENT is hardly routine. For the tax year 2017, for example, IRS audit rates for people within Hunter Biden’s $1–5 million income range hovered at 1.8 percent. But of course, being singled out is precisely what happens when DOJ appoints a special prosecutor just for you, which Attorney General Merrick Garland did with Hunter Biden back in August—although Weiss’s DOJ probe began in 2019 under then-President Donald Trump’s authority.
As for other implications of Weiss’s move, there are too many threads to discuss in detail, including
that the indictment should dispel the notion that DOJ is in Joe Biden’s pocket;
that Hunter Biden’s lawyers may have overplayed their hand at the July plea hearing;
that the Trump family’s tax and financial foibles arguably far exceed the allegations against Hunter Biden in seriousness;
that Hunter Biden, unlike Trump, is not running for president; and
that his dad currently holds the power to pardon federal crimes, including for family members (as both Bill Clinton did in pardoning his half-brother for a drug conviction and Donald Trump did in pardoning son-in-law Jared Kushner’s dad Charles for convictions on tax crimes, witness tampering, and illegal campaign contributions).
Be prepared to hear all of these complications debated ad nauseam in the months ahead, including by political figures acting in bad faith. But along the way, let’s not forget that Hunter Biden’s story—and that of his agonized family—is a human one, familiar in its most painful aspects to millions of other Americans.
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