It’s already an old trope to say if Hunter Biden’s last name were Trump, he’d be going away for a long, long time. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. It’s good to be a Biden.
Bidens get paid millions upon millions of dollars for things that other mortals cannot begin to figure out. You need not provide any known good or service, yet wires from overseas come rolling in like the spring rains. All it takes is the name and an LLC, or perhaps a few dozen.
Do you have any LLCs? Odds are you don’t have any, or perhaps you have one to establish credit for your side-hustle small business. But members of the Biden family have many, many LLCs that don’t seem to do anything other than collect wire transfers from overseas. The media have not been very curious up to now about why that money was sent.
If it’s good to be a Biden, it’s even better to be Hunter Biden. Industries in which you have no knowledge or experience start throwing high-paying jobs your way for reasons known only to them. Women, some of whom you don’t even have to pay, throw themselves at you. Drugs are plentiful and hardly a crime. Gun laws are more suggestions than anything else. Even as your father calls for curtailing innocent people’s Second Amendment rights, you can commit a felony by lying on your federal firearms forms, and you’ll get off with a slap on the wrist.
If you’re Hunter Biden, you don’t even have to file taxes, let alone pay them. It’s a pretty sweet deal — millions in income without the hassle of Uncle Sam taking a cut.
Sure, that doesn’t last forever. You can’t skip taxes permanently without someone noticing. But when you are caught, jail time is taken off the table, and a Hollywood lawyer steps up to foot the reported $2 million bill.
And those child support payments? Don’t worry about it. Joe is backing up Hunter in publicly denying the existence of his seventh grandchild. Hunter, meanwhile, has managed to cut his child support payment by 75 percent — from $20,000 per month to $5,000.
None of this would be possible if the media were more curious — if they tried to impose some accountability. An adversarial media would ask questions, such as, “How is any of this possible?” They would question the legality of such behavior and the leniency with which Hunter is now being treated by daddy’s Justice Department.
But the Bidens have no fear of such things. In fact, the media are now trying to rewrite Hunter’s history to protect his reputation.
The New York Times reported on June 20 that Hunter Biden “went into a downward spiral after his brother, Beau, died in 2015, becoming addicted to crack cocaine and engaging in tawdry, self-destructive behavior.”
But this doesn’t account for Biden’s behavior at all. The Times omitted altogether that Hunter had been discharged from the Navy Reserves in 2014, the year before his brother died, for repeated cocaine use. He lost a commission, by the way, which had required special, unexplored waivers and favors for him to get in the first place.
The Times account also doesn’t square with Hunter’s own claims to have “smoked crack with Marion Barry” in the early 1990s while attending Georgetown. These sorts of inconsistencies would lead people to ask questions, were Hunter’s last name anything besides Biden.
Being a Biden means the New York Times can note, without even calculating your apparently pathetic effective tax rate, that you “earned more than $1.5 million in each of 2017 and 2018 but failed to file income tax returns despite owing the government more than $100,000 each year.” It can say that of Hunter because effective tax rates are for Republicans, certainly not for Bidens.
The media were also surprisingly unfazed by the sweetheart plea deal that Hunter has been given — a deal that mere mortals would never be offered.
That’s why it is good to be a Biden.
Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).