Originally published at: Hunter Biden pleads guilty to tax evasion - Boing Boing
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Well done, Mr Biden. Take the consequences of your actions without throwing a tantrum and doing everything to delay them. I doubt that other presidential scions will act with such decorum.
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Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money makes a case that this a purely political prosecution, and Joe Biden should pardon Hunter once the election is over.
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I dunno. As we saw with that retired school teacher in Florida, MAGA judges are not beyond being petty and vindictive. A card-carrying Republican would get off lightly in these circumstances. The son of a Democratic president though?
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Hunter Biden is the only American that Republicans want tax and gun ownership laws to apply to.
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I hope so, but this is what Karine Jean-Pierre said when asked about it yesterday:
“It’s no, it’s still no,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Thursday when they questioned whether the plea had affected President Biden’s decision on whether he would consider a pardon for his son. “I’m not able to comment on it, but I can say that it is still very much a ‘no’ to the questions I have gotten about if the president is going to pardon [Hunter].”
(I won’t link the article because it was Faux News)
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I’m glad that the White House is sticking with this position. Did Hunter get prosecuted for political motivations? Sure. But he’s also apparently guilty of the crimes that he was charged with (he just admitted so, legally!) and he also had many advantages in his legal defense that would not have been available to ordinary folks who get forced to take plea deals all the time.
If President Biden pardoned a close family member for a crime that he’d actually pled guilty to and served little to no time for that’s just sending a terrible message about the legitimacy of the justice system, and an awful precedent that future Presidents could point to when doing their own terrible pardons.
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Hunter did the thing he was accused of doing.
If that isn’t something people should be punished for, then someone ought to be lobbying to change the law.
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Paul Campos has an answer for that:
You’re going to have to search for a long long time to find another criminal trial of somebody for tax evasion in which that person has already paid all the taxes and penalties they owed, especially when the defendant is a former addict who has gotten clean.
This is just federal prosecutorial grandstanding, intended to show that Hunter Biden isn’t being treated any differently than anybody else, just because he’s the president’s son.
Of course the irony is that he is being treated radically differently than similarly situated defendants, precisely because he’s the president’s son.
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I am not so convinced. Hunter Biden has shown contrition - he has already paid back the taxes plus interest - and the circumstances of the avoidance were that he was wallowing in addiction but is now by all reports clean.
If given a light sentence like those received by most white-collar tax avoiders, then I would be inclined to agree. But if Biden receives a harsh, over-the top sentence that is clearly the result of politics, then I think his dad should consider pardoning him. It’s not going to affect how the GOP views them or how right wing media treats the Democrats.
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Likewise he wouldn’t have had all those millions in the first place if he hadn’t been Joe Biden’s son.
I still say that if it is improper to charge people in Hunter’s situation with these kinds of crimes then the law should be changed to reflect that. People get railroaded by the system all the time, and most of them don’t have the resources Hunter does. He’s a grown man and he is taking responsibility for his actions.
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Harris spokesman Ian Sams also said on Meet the Press that Harris has no plans to pardon Hunter Biden.
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This also completely removes quite of a bit of “programming” that FOX and Newsmax had planned for the next few months. No wall-to-wall coverage of a trial. Gosh, whatever will they do now?
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To the above, the AVERAGE sentence for Tax Fraud was 16 months in FY 2023, according to the United States Sentencing Commission. There was a sentence reduction in many of the cases that they looked at.
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So why are you suggesting a pardon rather than commutation? I don’t think President Biden should commute the sentence either, but if his son received the maximum possible sentence (which isn’t likely) then knocking that down to something closer to average would be a bit more justifiable than a pardon. Even then, though, it would be much better to let the process play out without interfering (including any potential appeals) and leave that option to a future President rather than do it himself.
Can Biden commute his sentence instead of pardoning? Especially if the judge decides to be partisan harsh and sentence him to the max or other seemingly excessive amount of jail time?
If they looked hard enough, they could probably do some wall to wall coverage of the crimes of a convicted felon who’s also accused of quite a few other crimes, is about to be sentenced, and is also running for president.
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He needs the conviction to take place before Jan 6, so that his father can pardon him.
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When did Hunter declare? /s
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