By Mike Huckabee
December 8, 2023
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By now, you’re no doubt aware that late Thursday, news broke of first son Hunter Biden facing indictment in the Central District of California on nine counts of tax-related criminal activity, including three felonies. As ABC NEWS reports, Hunter allegedly spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills, engaging “in 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, from in or about January 2017 through in or about October 15, 2020, and to evade the assessment of taxes for tax year 2018, when he filed false returns in or about February 2020.”
Note that charges stemming from the years 2014 and 2015, when Hunter was raking in huge monthly income --- a reported $83,000 a month --- for being on the board of corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, are not included in the indictment, as Attorney General Merrick Garland’s “Justice” Department let the statute of limitations run out on those years.
The charges against Hunter claim that rather than fulfill his tax obligations, he spent oodles of cash --- well, they don’t use the word “oodles” --- on an “extravagant lifestyle” including memberships in sex clubs and over $188,000 for “adult entertainment.” (This sort of thing is ironically known as cheap sex.) In just the year 2018, Hunter hemorrhaged money, spending $1.8 million on lavish personal expenses instead of paying Uncle Sam. That more than qualifies as oodles.
Weirdly, Special Counsel David Weiss reportedly said he “didn’t want” to bring charges against Hunter because “the average American would not be prosecuted for them.” I beg to differ. These are serious charges, carrying a maximum sentence of 17 years. If you or I had handled our tax liabilities as Hunter did --- and didn’t have a powerful father and a wealthy Hollywood “sugar daddy” to pay off our back taxes --- we would no doubt be sitting in prison right now, wondering if today’s baloney sandwich would be on white or wheat bread.
https://nypost.com/2023/12/07/
If you read the newsletter, you know the background of the Hunter case from this summer. He was supposed to be all set to plead guilty in Delaware to a gun charge and two misdemeanor tax charges in what has accurately been described as a “sweetheart deal” that would have given him immunity from future charges (!) stemming from the investigation, but that deal collapsed after presiding Judge Maryellen Noreika read the fine print and called attention to it. Prosecutors had to admit they’d never before seen anything like this very special deal. Weiss, who as U.S. Attorney for Delaware had been tasked in 2018 with investigating the financial allegations against Hunter, refiled the tax charges in the California court.
https://discernreport.com/
We weren’t sure anything would come of this, as the U.S. attorney for that district, Martin Estrada, was one of two Biden-appointed prosecutors (DC U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves was the other) who refused to work with Weiss on bringing charges against Hunter. But apparently Weiss has been working quite diligently with a grand jury in Los Angeles to gather the evidence for potential tax charges.
As the NEW YORK POST reported in August, Weiss was not planning to bring charges against Hunter at all until two IRS investigators assigned to the case, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, came forward and blew the whistle, citing political interference and claiming they had faced unique roadblocks in investigating Hunter, particularly when the trail would have led them to Joe Biden. Shapley testified that Weiss had said his hands were tied regarding whether or not to bring charges in other districts; Weiss denied this but the story was not consistent.
The timing is intriguing. This comes just as the GOP-led House Committees were cracking down on his lawyers’ efforts to thwart a subpoena to Hunter demanding he appear to testify in closed-door hearings. Lead attorney Abbe Lowell had told them his client would appear for a public hearing but not in a deposition behind closed doors, a more detailed and down-to-business examination which is typically done first. Hunter was being threatened with contempt of Congress charges if he didn’t appear for questioning on the scheduled date of December 13.
And this coming week, the full Congress (as opposed to the GOP-led committees, which were already investigating) was expected to hold a floor vote on initiating a formal impeachment inquiry into President Biden’s involvement into his son’s foreign business dealings. House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer of Kentucky announced that subpoenaed bank records showed Joe Biden had received $1,390-a-month payments from a business entity of Hunter’s that received money directly from a Chinese company. Hunter’s attorneys tried to pass this off as Hunter repaying his father for the use of a truck, but that doesn’t really matter; for whatever reason, Joe Biden was being paid through Hunter’s Chinese source of income.
As Sean Hannity said Thursday night, “This is not about Hunter Biden. Instead, this has always been and continues to be an effort to protect ‘the Big Guy,’ the brand, Joe Biden. Remember, without Joe Biden, there is no Biden brand,” the one we heard about from Hunter’s former business partners Devon Archer and Tony Bobulinski. There was no product for sale other than the connection with then-VP Joe Biden; access to him was the reason for the multimillion-dollar payments from China, Ukraine, Romania, Russia and Kazakhstan.
Even as the House committees are putting together bank records that show the family’s many shell companies and the flow of money, President Biden is still lying about his knowledge and involvement.
“And now,” Hannity said, “in order to save Joe and keep his campaign afloat, Hunter is likely being offered up as the ‘sacrificial lamb.’ They will prosecute Hunter, they will distance him and his crimes from his father, and then declare, ‘Oh, justice has been served.’ That’s what the new plan is.”
We thought it was especially interesting that this went down just as Hunter was being pressured to come in for hours of testimony next week. That is precisely what Hunter’s attorneys and the Biden campaign DO NOT want. And the announcement just happened (ha) to come on the same day House Republicans released the 14-page text of their upcoming resolution on an impeachment inquiry against President Biden. It’s expected to be brought to the floor next Wednesday.
https://dailycaller.com/2023/
FOX NEWS’ David Spunt explained more about the charges against Hunter last night, saying they were brought in California’s Central District because that encompasses Los Angeles, where Hunter has lived since April of 2018. Weiss is alleging that Hunter willfully chose not to pay his taxes and used a “scheme” to avoid paying them. Spunt also mentioned that Hunter has not been charged with a FARA violation, meaning failure to register as a foreign agent. Weiss is, however, planning to bring federal gun charges against Hunter in Delaware and says the investigation is still “ongoing.” Abbe Lowell, as Hunter’s attorney, had made no statement as of this writing early Friday morning.
But on Thursday night, investigative journalist John Solomon of JUST THE NEWS joined Hannity to offer more details, saying that this indictment “affirms every fact that the whistleblowers...gave. They’ve been tormented by some in the media, and certainly by Hunter Biden’s defenders. Their truthfulness is 100 percent confirmed in this indictment tonight.” (So is Solomon’s, by the way.)
He gives these whistleblowers credit for changing the course of history by refusing to stay silent. And right now, Joe Biden has “a very bad mark on his record.” As for son Hunter, he’s been shown in the indictment to be “a quintessential tax cheat.” Solomon says that in 2019, the Ukrainians tried to tell the U.S. government that Hunter hadn’t paid his taxes on the Burisma income, but “they were turned away.”
Let’s see...2019. Wasn’t that also the year Joe Biden started running for President? The year the FBI confiscated and hid Hunter’s abandoned laptop? (Gosh, 51 intelligence experts later said the laptop had all the “classic earmarks” of Russian disinformation, but WE were right about it in this newsletter --- yet we’re the ones who got flagged by Google, with help from them!)
So, with Hunter’s indictment, what happens to his testimony before Congress? He’s been threatened with contempt of Congress if he doesn’t appear December 13, so now his attorneys may tell him to just show up and take the Fifth.
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