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Republicans took the news earlier this week that Hunter Biden had reached a plea deal with the Justice Department over some misdemeanor tax offenses and one federal gun charge with heroic levels of civility and grace. Ha ha, just kidding, THEY ARE SO FUCKING MAD ABOUT IT THEY COULD JUST POOP.
And by pooping we mean releasing some whistleblower interviews they hope will muddy up the waters surrounding the plea and keep afloat the slowly leaking balloon that is their suspicions that Hunter Biden was the worst tax cheat since Al Capone was forced to spend his golden years dying of syphilis on Alcatraz.
The plea deal was announced while the House Ways and Means committee was sitting on these two interviews, which claim that higher-ups at the Internal Revenue Service meddled with the prime forces of nature investigations into Biden’s alleged tax crimes. The committee had apparently not finished vetting the interviews yet after conducting them in late May.
But then Hunter struck his deal and Joe “Irish Lex Luthor” Biden got the entire United States military to engage in a cover-up of that submersible imploding in order to keep his son’s problems off the front page. So the GOP head of Ways and Means, Rep. Jason Smith, went ahead and released transcripts of the interviews in an effort to refocus the nation’s attention where it belongs: on whether Hunter Biden deducted sexy times with hookers as business expenses.
Might it look pretty silly to release interviews complaining that Hunter Biden’s tax misdeeds were not being investigated the same week that the Justice Department announced Biden would plead guilty to criminal charges related to his tax misdeeds? It might, if anyone felt like thinking about it for more than fifteen seconds. And even then it wouldn’t stop them.
Anyway, the core of the whistleblower complaint is that Biden somehow got preferential treatment from the government because David Weiss, the US Attorney for Delaware, was prevented from filing charges against Biden. This argument falls apart not only because of the fact that Weiss, uh, filed charges against Biden, but also because Weiss himself, who was appointed by Donald Trump, swore up and down to Congress that nuh-uh, liar liar pants on fire:
“I have been granted ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges and for making decisions necessary to preserve the integrity of the prosecution, consistent with federal law, the Principles of Federal Prosecution, and Departmental regulations,” Weiss wrote in the letter.
The rightwing freakout is also undermined by the argument that Hunter Biden was apparently treated more harshly than most people would have been in the same situation, according to former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti, who writes in POLITICO:
As for the misdemeanor tax charges, I prosecuted tax cases and have defended many clients in criminal tax cases, and I’m not familiar with a misdemeanor tax charge ever being brought as the only tax charge in a case. The DOJ’s Tax Division has to approve every tax charge brought by prosecutors, and their practice is to focus on serious felony tax fraud or tax evasion cases. Those serious felony offenses would require evidence of fraud or affirmative efforts to evade taxes. Merely not paying your taxes isn’t enough.
Mariotti went on to note that in his career, he would sometimes file misdemeanor tax charges as a sort of backup, in case he lost on the felony counts:
The most typical misdemeanor that was charged is a failure to file a tax return, and that is trivial to prove. Biden was charged with something even less serious — a failure to pay taxes even though he did file a return. And the amount of his unpaid taxes — approximately $100,000 in 2017 and again in 2018 — is typically dealt with as a civil matter, with penalties and interest, rather than as a federal criminal case.
Still though, yes, in this case, filing sex work under office expenses would be evasion, and thus the criminal charge instead of civil.
We admit, though, we are mightily entertained by the Republican Party suddenly being very concerned with making sure the IRS has all the resources it needs to chase tax cheats.
