Breakdown of Legal Scandals Hanging Over Hunter Biden’s Head Before Dad’s Pardon
Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter Sunday before jetting off on a trip to Africa, signing the pardon despite repeated pledges “not to interfere” with the DoJ’s work. What was Hunter convicted of? What other crimes has he been accused of? As the Bidens’ decades-long career in Washington nears its end, Sputnik recalls the scandals facing the family.
Hunter Biden, the first child of a sitting US president ever to be criminally charged and convicted, was found guilty of two counts of willful tax evasion, and a separate charge related to lying about his illegal drug use while purchasing a handgun.
He was to be sentenced in both cases in mid-December before Sunday’s surprise pardon by his dad clearing the 54-year-old of legal responsibility for the crimes. The maximum penalty in the tax case was 17 years, while the gun charge carried a punishment of up to 25 years behind bars.
Along with the criminal tax charges, Hunter also faced six misdemeanor tax offenses, including failing to pay his taxes on time and making false business deductions in returns.
The pardon “confirms” that “under Democrat governance, there truly is a dual system of justice. One that protects Democrats and another weaponized against their political opponents,” Republican Senator Ron Johnson tweeted, referring to the series of criminal prosecutions targeting Trump in the now failed bid to stop his return to office.
“Democrats said there was nothing to our impeachment inquiry. If that’s the case, why did Joe Biden just issue Hunter Biden a pardon for the very things we were inquiring about?” GOP Congressman and House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan asked.
MAGA Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene reacted to the pardon by digging up an old X post by Biden about “no one” being “above the law,” tweeting “come to find out, Hunter is,” and asking “but who is going to pardon Joe?”
Even some Democrats expressed regret over Biden’s decision, with Colorado Governor Jared Polis writing that while “as a father” he “understand[s] President Biden’s natural desire to help his son by pardoning him,” he was “disappointed” that the president “put his family ahead of the country.” The decision sets “a bad precedent that could be abused by later presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation,” Polis argued.
Gun and Tax Convictions Covering Up Bigger Crimes?
Through the course of the criminal investigations and trials into Hunter Biden, some observers have been peeved about the Justice Department’s focus on comparatively trivial tax and gun charges instead of potentially far more serious crimes.
Representative James Comer, chairman of a House Oversight Committee investigation into the Biden family over suspicious business activities revolving around an pay-to-play corruption scheme by Hunter which allegedly saw the collection of over $20 million in bribes to secure access to his powerful father during the Obama years, hinted as much in his reaction to Sunday’s pardon.
“Joe Biden has lied from start to finish about his family’s corrupt influence peddling activities. Not only has he falsely claimed that he never met with his son’s foreign business associates and that his son did nothing wrong, but he also lied when he said he would not pardon Hunter Biden,” Comer said.
“The charges Hunter faced were just the tip of the iceberg in the blatant corruption that President Biden and the Biden Crime Family have lied about to the American people. It’s unfortunate that, rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability,” Comer added.
In August 2024, Comer’s investigators released a damning 300-page report detailing “impeachable conduct” by the president and alleged criminal activity by his son. This included allegations related to Hunter Biden’s lucrative no-show job on the board of a Ukrainian energy company beginning in 2014 (which culminated in the post-coup government’s firing of a local prosecutor investigating suspected money-laundering activity), and charges of similar pay-to-play schemes involving corrupt business dealings with actors across Eurasia.
President Biden was revealed to have been directly implicated in the schemes thanks to reporting on the so-called “laptop from hell,” a computer abandoned by Hunter Biden in a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019, where he was referred to in a series of back and forth emails between Hunter and associates as the “big guy.” The elder Biden was also confirmed to have engaged in juggling aliases including “Robert L. Peters,” “Robin Ware” and JRB Ware” in online communications with his son.
The New York Post received access to the laptop’s files ahead of the 2020 election, publishing a series of damning October Surprise stories highlighting alleged Biden family corruption. Big Tech companies including Google, Facebook parent Meta* and Twitter suppressed and censored the stories on the instructions of the FBI, which falsely characterized it as “Russian disinformation.”
A 2022 poll found that 79% of Americans believed “truthful” coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop saga would have altered the outcome of the 2020 election. A separate poll found that 28% of voters were “very likely” to have changed their votes, with another 25% “somewhat likely” to do so, had they known about the laptop story. President-Elect Trump has repeatedly mentioned the FBI Hunter Biden laptop coverup as evidence that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.
International Conspiracy
Besides cheating on his taxes, lying about his drug use to buy a gun and allegedly operating a lucrative pay-to-play scheme with foreign actors across the globe, Hunter Biden has also been accused of getting mixed up in an international criminal conspiracy.
In 2022, the Russian military seized and began to publish a damning series documents in on US military biological activity in Ukraine. These reports included revelations that Hunter Biden-linked investment fund Rosemont Seneca had engaged in the co-financing of research into deadly pathogens at Ukraine-based biolabs.
While Western media initially dismisses the claims as more “Russian disinformation,” The Daily Mail soon independently corroborated the Russian military’s findings after rifling through emails from the seized laptop files.
The laptop has proven a source of no end of political and legal troubles and embarrassment for the Biden family.
Besides the grossly criminal behavior related to play-to-play corruption contained therein, the computer detailed Hunter’s ‘highly active’ personal life – from smoking crack on camera while waving a gun around and cavorting with strippers and prostitutes, to terrorizing and intimidating his ex-wife and withholding child support.