Hunter Biden’s plea deal with federal prosecutors is the latest in a long line of embarrassing escapades, eyebrow-raising foreign deals and legal headaches that have resulted in few consequences for the first son.
Hunter Biden on Tuesday agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax crimes and admit to illegal possession of a firearm in a deal with federal prosecutors that is expected to keep him out of jail.
The plea deal follows incidents ranging from a drug possession charge to allegations of influence-peddling and bribery schemes that have left President Biden’s youngest son unscathed.
There is no evidence Mr. Biden has personally interceded on his son’s behalf, but the string of favorable outcomes has stoked suspicions he is receiving preferential treatment.
“The everyday person wouldn’t be treated this way, but it’s the privileged class that escapes accountability for whatever they do,” said criminal defense attorney James Bopp. “The everyday person would be facing felonies and substantial jail time.”
“The irony of the gun charge is that his dad’s administration is obsessed with gun control. He violated a gun control law and he gets to walk,” Mr. Bopp said.
SEE ALSO: Bribery allegations hurt Biden with independent voters, but his base looks the other way
Hunter Biden’s first brush with the law came in 1988 at age 18 when he was charged with drug possession in Stone Harbor, New Jersey.
“I was cited for possession of a controlled substance. There was a pretrial intervention and the record was expunged,” Hunter Biden wrote in a disclosure after he was nominated to serve on the Amtrak Reform Board in 2006.
The same year Hunter Biden was arrested, Mr. Biden, as a U.S. Senator from Delaware, strongly advocated for stiffer sentences for drug users. Mr. Biden voted for the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which made crack cocaine the only drug with a mandatory penalty for possession. Although it is unclear if Hunter Biden was cited for possession of crack.
While Hunter Biden has acknowledged he spent four years addicted to crack and six stints in rehab, he never spent a day in jail as a result of his crack habit.
More recent headlines about Hunter Biden stem from him pocketing millions of dollars from suspicious deals with foreign companies, often in countries where his father was involved in U.S. foreign policy.
House Republicans say they have evidence Mr. Biden and Hunter Biden participated in a $10 million bribery scheme while Mr. Biden was vice president under President Obama.
One of the most serious allegations directly linking Mr. Biden to a bribe came to the FBI’s attention as early as 2017, but only recently emerged in public.
An informant told the FBI that Mr. Biden was paid $5 million by an executive of the Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings. The same executives made a separate $5 million payment to Hunter Biden, according to Republican lawmakers who viewed a document known as an FD-1023.
Mr. Biden has laughed off the allegations as “malarkey.”
House Republicans also say there is a pattern of Mr. Biden’s family, including Hunter Biden, collecting millions of dollars from entities in countries such as China and Romania.
In the weeks leading up to Hunter Biden’s plea deal, an IRS whistleblower alleged political interference at the Justice Department in investigating the tax crimes.
Hunter Biden was deposed last week in a paternity case with an Arkansas woman with whom he fathered a daughter out of wedlock.
He has asked the court to reduce his $20,000-per-month child support payment for the girl, who is now 4 years old, and opposed the mom’s desire to change the girl’s last name to Biden.
Hunter Biden’s legal team said a “substantial material change” in his financial circumstances warrants lowering child support payments by 75% to less than $5,000 per month. His attorneys have dragged their feet in disclosing all sources of his income, prompting a scolding from the judge in the case.
Hunter Biden isn’t the only Biden family member to score a favorable outcome after an arrest.
First daughter Ashley Biden was charged in New Orleans in 1999 for possession of marijuana, but a conviction was not recorded. She was charged again in Chicago for attempting to obstruct a police officer during a bar fight, but the charge was dropped.
Mr. Biden’s niece, Caroline Biden, also racked up a rap sheet with little consequences. In 2013, she was charged with resisting arrest and harassment in New York. The case was dismissed. Four years later, she was charged with grand and petty larceny for spending more than $110,000 on a stolen credit card. She received two years probation and was ordered to pay restitution.
Caroline Biden was charged again in 2019 for driving under the influence in Pennsylvania. She pleaded guilty and got five months of probation with 20 days of rehab counted toward her sentence.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.