After a high-level IRS agent blew the whistle on the Justice Department’s attempts to protect Hunter Biden, and by extension, his presidential daddy, the media — taking a tip from President Joe Biden himself — quickly got to work trying to convince the public the real story isn’t the blatant corruption but that Hunter is a tragic drug addict and his father still loves him anyway.
Aww!
Sorry, but the fact that Hunter is an admitted cokehead and prostitute hound is just a salacious side story; the obviously more urgent matter is that he, using his father’s high-government connections, raked in money by doing favors for foreign actors.
And that instead of any serious prosecution to see if he broke the law, DOJ gave him a junk plea deal wherein Hunter gets probation and must pinky promise to stay sober and never buy another gun.
It’s one of the biggest scandals of recent years, yet ignore it all: Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times writes that the “main takeaway” is that the president offers the country “a fine model of the love and support that people with addictions need.”
That echoed the news write-up his paper did last week, drumming up sympathy for Hunter by noting that the IRS’s investigation “focused on a particularly chaotic and unseemly period in Hunter Biden’s life when he was addicted to crack cocaine.”
Poor thing.
Ana Navarro of ABC’s “The View” nearly broke down in tears Monday to say “the Hunter Biden story — the scandal, the this, the that — is also the story of a father’s love.”
And The Washington Post ran a syrupy article under the headline, “The complicated relationship between a presidential father and a struggling son.”
Yes, it’s all very complicated.
IRS supervising investigator Gary Shapley produced a 2017 screen shot of a text message wherein Hunter tells a Chinese Communist Party official that he’s “with my father” at that moment and that if a certain “commitment” isn’t fulfilled, “I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”
MSNBC Legal Analyst Barbara McQuade called that ditty “awfully flimsy” as far as using it to launch any additional investigations by Congress. “It just simply is some sort of puffery by Hunter Biden.”
The WaPo described “a complex relationship between a presidential father and a son recovering from addiction.”
Hunter’s name-dropping his then-former vice president dad to the Chinese isn’t complex. It’s Rolodex.
And if this is a story about a debilitated son down on his luck, then the millions of dollars Hunter was pulling in from China, Ukraine and others surely couldn’t have been because of his expertise in the field or intelligence.
It was more clearly than ever because his daddy was a high roller.
Nobody needed Hunter. They needed his father. And Dad’s connections and influence.
DOJ didn’t want to focus on that, no matter how incriminating it might’ve been.
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The evidence is overwhelming: Shapley, the IRS agent who was part of the probe into Hunter’s shady streams of foreign income, has testified to Congress under oath, with names, dates and emails, that the DOJ blocked and dropped leads that would have likely led to big criminal charges against the president’s son.
He said there appeared to be a disinterest in uncovering any material that would prove Joe Biden was directly involved in any of Hunter’s overseas business dealing.
The sworn testimony extensively details and documents Shapley’s experience “investigating” Hunter, with obstacle after obstacle thwarting the probe.
Shapley said the process was “inconsistent” with past procedure and, in effect, that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s sworn testimony that Delaware US Attorney David Weiss had full authority over the matter was a big fat lie.
“Whatever the motivations, at every stage decisions were made that had the effect of benefiting the subject of the investigation,” Shapley said, referring to Hunter.
“These decisions included slow-walking investigative steps, not allowing enforcement actions to be executed, limiting investigators’ line of questioning for witnesses, misleading investigators on charging authority, delaying any and all actions months before [the 2020 election] to ensure the investigation did not go overt well before policy memorandum mandated the pause.”
The media want this to be a sob story about drug addiction. If only it were.
Eddie Scarry is a columnist for The Federalist.
