What Hunter Biden made
Byron York
WHAT HUNTER BIDEN MADE. The government still has not released the original plea agreement between the Justice Department and Hunter Biden, even though it was the subject of three hours of discussion and debate in open court this week. Fortunately, Politico has published a bootleg copy — cellphone photos of a printout of the document — or otherwise, we would not know the lengths to which the DOJ went to accommodate the president’s son.
The major accommodation was the DOJ’s agreement “not to criminally prosecute Biden … for any federal crimes” involving his actions during the period he was not paying his taxes and for which he agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges. The provision, buried deep inside a side document, “offer[ed] Hunter Biden broad immunity from prosecution, in perpetuity, for a range of matters scrutinized by the Justice Department during its five-year investigation,” in the words of a New York Times report. Such a provision, and the way it was offered, was “totally unprecedented,” said Sol Wisenberg, a former prosecutor with independent counsel Kenneth Starr.
But there’s a lot more in the plea agreement. For one thing, the document shows, for the first time, just how lucrative Hunter Biden’s trading on his father’s name was. According to the DOJ, Biden’s total 2016 income reported to the IRS was $1,580,283. For 2017, it was $2,376,436. For 2018, it was $2,187,286. And for 2019, it was $1,045,850.
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Where did the money come from? For two of the years, 2016 and 2019, the DOJ did not offer any details. But for 2017 and 2018, there is some information in the plea document. From the DOJ:
“During calendar year 2017, Biden earned substantial income, including: just under $1 million from a company he formed with the CEO of a Chinese business conglomerate; $666,666 from his domestic business interests; approximately $664,000 from a Chinese infrastructure investment company; $500,000 in director’s fees from a Ukrainian energy company; $70,000 relating to a Romanian business; and $48,000 from the multi-national law firm.”
In 2018, the plea agreement said Biden “continued to earn handsomely and spend wildly. He received a little over $2.6 million in business and consulting fees from the company he formed with the CEO of a Chinese business conglomerate and the Ukrainian energy company.” Notice that the $2.6 million is significantly more than the $2,187,286 Biden reported to the IRS in 2018 income. It’s not clear from the document what accounted for that discrepancy. And of course, the legal problem for Biden is that he paid little or no taxes on all that income.
In any event, Hunter Biden, by continuing to cash in on the connections he had made when his father was a senator and then vice president, made a lot of money in that time period. And even when he famously became addicted to drugs and fell further into total debauchery, in 2017 and 2018, the money kept coming. The fact that he wasted it all on crack and prostitutes is less surprising than the fact that the foreign entities kept paying him. That, apparently, is how influence peddling works.
Another thing to note in the plea agreement is that Hunter Biden’s unlawful behavior, which defenders sometimes attribute to his drug addiction, continued after he got sober. After kicking his crack addiction, Biden never woke up one morning and said, “I think it’s time to pay my taxes. It would be the right thing to do.” Instead, he was forced into it when he fathered a child with a stripper in Arkansas and faced paternity and child-support litigation.
“Biden got sober in May 2019,” the plea agreement says. “He has remained sober since.” But it was not until November 2019 that he engaged an accountant in California to prepare income tax returns for 2017 and 2018, which Biden had never filed. Why do it? Because he was under a court order. “By that time, the domestic-relations lawsuits had progressed, and having failed to do so previously, Biden was under court order to provide his tax returns or face potential sanctions, including imprisonment,” the agreement says.
But just filing a tax return did not mean that Biden would report his finances truthfully. The plea agreement continues: “Biden miscategorized certain personal expenses as legitimate business expenses, resulting in a reduction in his tax liability.” The plea agreement did not say it, but we have learned from IRS whistleblowers that Biden falsely claimed expenses for prostitutes and a sex club as deductible business expenses. And of course, he spent a lot on prostitutes and the sex club.
Now, the judge has rejected the plea agreement and given both sides a month to come up with something better. In the original agreement, it appeared to mean a lot to Biden to win perpetual immunity for anything else he might have done in his associations with shady overseas businessmen. The DOJ was ready to give it to him. Now, it’s unclear what will happen.
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