Hunter Biden and his lawyers are still playing games about whether he will deign to comply with a congressional subpoena.
You would wish that Republicans were as ruthless about enforcing the rules as Democrats, but when faced with a 53-year-old man as entitled and spoiled as the president’s son, they are in new territory.
The contrast with the Trump family could not be more stark.
Unlike Hunter, who defied a House Oversight Committee subpoena to stage a press conference on Capitol Hill and later gate-crash a hearing, Don Trump Jr. testified five times for more than 40 hours to Democrat-led congressional committees without pulling any stupid stunts.
The then-first son complied with subpoenas from five committees, including the stacked J6 star chamber, and dishonest Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee that was pushing the Russia hoax.
Stunts are all the Bidens and their defenders, like Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), have left to try to distract from damaging evidence piling up about President Biden’s corrupt involvement in his family’s foreign-influence-peddling scheme, which reaped millions of dollars from China, Russia, Ukraine and other corrupt countries.
The latest ruse from Raskin, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, is to claim Biden’s sins are actually his predecessor’s, unveiling a mendacious “report” last week claiming that Trump corruptly raked in millions from foreign governments when he was president.
Merely rent payments
Eric Trump, the former president’s second son, who runs the family business with his brother, responded to Raskin’s claims with a scathing letter Wednesday, pointing out that most of the foreign money received by The Trump Organization during his father’s presidency was rent payments for a 20-year commercial-office lease that began in 2008 — “more than eight years prior to President Trump taking office.”
Apart from that, Eric says he signed a check every year to the US Treasury donating 100% of estimated profits from “foreign patronage” at their hotels.
“We donated every dollar of foreign profit,” he told The Post, adding that his father was “the first president to donate his salary while in office to various federal agencies.”
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Eric contrasts his scrupulous accounting of foreign money with Biden family foreign enrichment for “providing no goods and services” and with the antics of “Gold Bar Menendez.” (Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez has been indicted on federal bribery charges and for acting as a foreign agent of the Egyptian government.)
“Hunter is selling finger paintings for hundreds of thousands apiece while we’re donating [millions] to the US Treasury.”
House Democrats released their “sham report” to take the focus off a mountain of evidence that has exploded the self-created myth of “honest Joe” Biden, the one-time “poorest man in Congress.”
In reality, Biden and his family have lived lives of immense privilege, cashing in on his power at the expense of America’s national security.
The evidence comes not just from Republican-led congressional investigations, but from two federal cases against Hunter brought by Delaware US Attorney David Weiss.
Weiss was upgraded to special counsel last August after he and Attorney General Merrick Garland were embarrassed by two IRS agents who blew the whistle on favorable treatment the president’s son received from the DOJ during a five-year investigation into Hunter’s business activities. An outrageous sweetheart plea deal collapsed last year under the weight of the documentary evidence the IRS whistleblowers provided to Congress.
Thanks to them, Hunter now is finding the special privilege and protections his father has provided all his life may be running out, although his high-priced lawyer Abbe Lowell still has plenty of tricks up his sleeve.
But for now, the first son has been charged with felony tax-fraud and tax-evasion charges in California and a felony charge in Delaware for lying on a federal gun-purchase form that he was not on drugs at a time, 2018, when he was addicted to crack cocaine.
So much for “my son has done nothing wrong,” as Joe kept insisting, putting a chill on the DOJ’s investigations of Hunter.
Now the lies are being exposed in court.
Just this week, the DOJ confirmed in a new filing in Delaware on the gun charge that Hunter’s laptop is real, that he left it at a computer store, and that the contents matched what the feds obtained from a search warrant of his iCloud account.
“In August 2019, IRS and FBI investigators obtained a search warrant for tax violations for the defendant’s [Hunter’s] Apple iCloud account. In response to that warrant, in September 2019, Apple produced backups of data from various of the defendant’s electronic devices that he had backed up to his iCloud account.”
‘Slam dunk’ of evidence
“Investigators also later came into possession of the defendant’s Apple MacBook Pro, which he had left at a computer store. A search warrant was also obtained for his laptop and the results of the search were largely duplicative of information investigators had already obtained from Apple.”
That’s what you call a slam dunk.
But don’t hold your breath for a retraction from the president, who lied during the 2020 campaign that the laptop was a “Russian plant,” nor from the “Dirty 51” former intelligence officials or myriad dishonest Democrats who also blamed Russia when the Bidens knew all along it was Hunter’s laptop — and so did the FBI, which had taken possession of the MacBook and quietly authenticated it in December 2019.
None of this would have come to light or been prosecuted if it were not for the integrity and tenacity of the IRS agents, Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler, who exposed the two-tiered justice system protecting the Bidens that has helped undermine the public’s faith in the justice system.
Now the Republicans in Congress need to match the whistleblowers’ courage.
Source link: https://nypost.com/2024/01/17/opinion/firing-back-at-hunter-bidens-bs-games-as-drama-over-his-congressional-subpoena-drags-on/