RUTHFULLY YOURS

The first is that it’s dizzying.

The indictment is scathing in describing the younger Biden’s unsavory lifestyle, his deep dishonesty, and his willful decision to evade tax liabilities on millions of dollars in income and instead spend the money on escorts, drugs, luxury goods, and the like. Hunter is portrayed as exactly the kind of tax cheat who should be prosecuted. In fact, he appears to be just the sort of elitist scoundrel abominated in the rhetoric of his father and Democrats — privileged, addicted to consumption, producing little of real value, and greedily unwilling to pay his “fair share.”

But here’s the problem: Just four months ago, the same David Weiss tried to bury the same tax case against the same Hunter Biden — offering him a no-jail plea to two puny misdemeanors, a sweetheart deal so out of the ordinary that Weiss’s minions could not answer a judge’s simple questions about it, and that the ever-entitled Hunter’s defense lawyers foolishly blew up over fear of a hypothetical prosecution on tougher charges that Weiss patently had no intention to bring.

It is impossible to square Weiss’s slamming of Hunter in the new indictment with the blind eye he turned toward Hunter in the failed plea bargain — a submission in which the only narrative was a statement of facts sympathetic to Hunter, the drafting of which was clearly controlled by Hunter’s lawyers, not the agents who investigated the case.

In the indictment, Weiss scoffs that Hunter only filed his taxes in the relevant years because he’d been dragged into court in civil cases, which resulted in judges forcing him to fess up about his finances and produce tax returns. The irony here is rich. After all, why do we (finally) have this indictment? Only because Weiss could not rationalize the plea bargain he tried to give Hunter to make the case go away and, in his humiliation, was forced to go back to his office and act like a real prosecutor — whereupon he has thrown the book at Hunter as he should have in the first place . . . or at least that portion of the book that was still left after Weiss allowed statutes of limitations to run on offenses from earlier years.

Six of the indictment’s nine charges are misdemeanors, each punishable by up to a year’s imprisonment. They allege willful failures to (a) pay taxes for the years 2016 through 2019, and (b) file returns in 2017 and 2018. The other three charges are felonies. The most serious is tax evasion in 2018, which carries a potential five-year prison sentence. Hunter is also charged with two counts of filing false tax returns in 2018 (involving his personal return and a corporate return), each of which carries a potential three-year term of incarceration. The felonies are the reason Weiss needed an indictment from a grand jury — misdemeanors may be charged by the prosecutor without grand-jury approval but are sometimes, as here, charged in an indictment (when there are a number of them, or when they are combined with felonies).

(The statute defining the misdemeanor charges, §7203 of the tax code, prescribes circumstances in which the misdemeanor could be increased to a felony punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment. It does not appear to me that Hunter’s case triggers those circumstances.)

If my math is right, Hunter is looking at a maximum statutory sentence of 17 years. Under the federal sentencing guidelines, his sentence if convicted would be lighter, but not insignificant. (I presume the president would pardon his son rather than see him sentenced to prison, but that remains to be seen. Hunter, we should recall, has already been charged in a separate indictment on firearms offenses.)

President Biden is not alluded to in the indictment, but his brother Jim is (described as one of the “business associates”), as are other Hunter partners — Rob Walker, James Gilliar, Eric Schwerin, Devon Archer, and Ye Jianming (of CEFC, the Chinese government-affiliated energy company).

If the case were ever to go to trial, it would be very embarrassing for the Biden administration. The indictment’s background allegations get into schemes with various agents of corrupt and anti-American regimes from whom the Biden family business reeled in millions of dollars.

Of course, Hunter is described by Weiss as “a Georgetown- and Yale-educated lawyer, lobbyist, consultant, and businessperson,” and Biden apologists will point to this description in claiming that the millions were legitimately earned. But on the other hand, several of the notorious schemes were laid out in some detail: Burisma, CEFC, Romania (where, in exchange for $3 million, the Bidens and their partners went to bat for corruption suspect Gabriel Popoviciu), the largesse of “sugar bro” Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris, and more.

Joe Biden’s participation in these transactions is not mentioned in the indictment. But we know from various witness accounts and documents that he is here, there, and everywhere — as one would expect, given that it’s his political heft on which Hunter was cashing in.

If you’ve been following the Biden saga, the indictment has some neon-flashing problems for the president. For example, Weiss notes that Burisma, the corrupt Ukrainian energy company, agreed in 2014 to pay then-Vice President Biden’s son $1 million a year. Weiss then deadpans that, in March 2017, “Burisma reduced [Hunter’s] compensation to $500,000 a year[.]” Loud and clear, even if unmentioned, is the reason for the deep pay cut: Once Joe Biden was no longer vice president, as of January 2017, Hunter was no longer as valuable to Burisma — whose top dog, Mykola (Nikolai) Zlochevsky told an FBI informant that he put Hunter on the Burisma board, despite thinking him a dullard, in order to curry favor with Joe Biden, to whom he claimed to have paid $10 million in bribes (for Joe and Hunter combined).

Predictably, Weiss has steered clear of the most serious suspicions of criminal conduct arising out of the Biden influence-peddling scheme — no bribery charges, no money-laundering, no mention of their failure to register as foreign agents. Nevertheless, if the schemes outlined in the tax charges were proved, it would be impossible to avoid evidence of Joe Biden’s participation, to say nothing of the centrality of his political influence to Hunter’s ability to rake in millions of dollars.

The Biden Justice Department tried to bury this case. Weiss was shamed into indicting it because that gambit imploded — because the whistleblower agents went public, and the investigating House committees (building on the scut work previously done by Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson) proved the jaw-dropping transfers of millions of dollars from shady foreign agents to the Bidens. And now it’s obvious why the administration needed the case buried: Hunter is not the only Biden for whom it is a disaster.