The US Department of Justice has a strong case against Hunter Biden for failing to pay federal taxes, making false deductions, and lying about his drug use when filing paperwork to purchase guns. Congress, on the other hand, has no reasonable grounds to bring impeachment proceedings against President Biden for his son’s questionable business dealings and personal conduct, The Washington Post reports.
Despite a lack of hard evidence that the president personally profited from his son’s overseas adventures, Republicans in the House of Representatives will vote on Wednesday to authorise impeachment. The major move is revenge for the two impeachments of President Donald Trump, both of which had legitimate grounds, and an attempt to make Mr Biden look as tainted as Mr Trump on the eve of the 2024 election.
But Republicans in the House don’t have the goods. Take, for example, the failed performance of House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Kyron) last week. He singled out three payments totalling about $4,000 in 2018 to Joe Biden from a Hunter Biden business account that held money from Chinese business interests. Mr Comer called it “part of a scheme to show that Joe Biden knew about, participated in and benefited from his family’s influence peddling schemes”. In fact, it was Hunter Biden who reimbursed his father for the purchase of the Ford F-150 because his son’s poor creditworthiness made it impossible for him to obtain financing.
On the other hand, the charges brought against Hunter Biden by special counsel David Weiss demonstrate the independence of the Justice Department and the seriousness of the younger Mr Biden’s alleged misconduct. Given the racy details contained in the indictment handed down by a California grand jury on Thursday, the plea deal for the president’s son, offered and accepted in June by Mr Weiss, seems overly generous, something that was not the case six months ago. That does not mean, however, that the investigation was compromised or that the deal was corrupt.
An important feature of the criminal justice system is prosecutorial discretion. There were mitigating circumstances, such as the fact that this was Hunter Biden’s first criminal offence and his struggle with addiction. An independent judge, doing her job, scrutinised the constitutionality of an unusual leniency agreement that would have allowed him to plead guilty to two minor offences and avoid jail time. Under her questions, the agreement fell apart, according to The Washington Post.
According to Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, his client would not have been charged if he had a different surname because he had already paid the taxes owed. He claims Mr Weiss caved in to right-wing pressure. That’s debatable. But it’s not a fact that Hunter Biden would never have made much of the money he allegedly evaded paying – $1.4 million in federal taxes over four years – if not for his last name. With no experience in the energy sector, he had no other qualifications to serve on the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian firm that hired him in 2014.
When Joe Biden was vice president, this could have been a scandal. It was also a mistake, albeit an understandable one, for Mr Biden to later insist that his son had “done nothing wrong” while he had done some pretty negative things – both personally and professionally. Nor should the president have falsely claimed in October 2020 that his son “didn’t make money” in China.
However, if Hunter Biden used the illusion of access to make money and used his father’s name in text messages to demand payment from a Chinese business partner, it does not mean that Joe Biden was acting on his son’s orders. Hunter Biden’s fate will now be decided by a lawsuit, but the evidence suggests that the father should not be held responsible for his son’s sins.
Republicans say the purpose of voting to open an investigation into President Biden is fact-finding and that does not mean they will vote for impeachment. House Rules Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma) said at Tuesday’s hearing that the resolution gives the House “the strongest legal ability to obtain the necessary information and enforce subpoenas”. The White House has argued that the GOP investigation lacks “constitutional legitimacy” and cited the Trump-era US Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel’s opinion that impeachment investigations without a formal vote are moot, giving Republicans justification for the move, The Washington Post reports.
Oversight is an important role for Congress, but impeachment should only be used in cases of egregious misconduct by a president in office. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Monday:
“Next to a declaration of war, the impeachment power might be the heaviest that the House has. It is incumbent upon us … to investigate properly, do it methodically, slowly, deliberately, not in a political manner.”
He is right, which is why Republicans should not vote to implement it.
