This summer, Hunter Biden though he’d put his legal troubles behind him with a plea deal that would have allowed him to avoid jail time. But that plea deal is off, and things have gotten markedly worse for the president’s son.
A quick review on how we got here: A Trump-appointed government attorney has spent five years investigating the president’s son business deals and eventually zeroed in on Biden not paying taxes and lying on a form to purchase a gun. Biden agreed to plead guilty to the tax misdemeanors to essentially get the gun charge off his record. That fell apart in court this summer.
Now this prosecutor, special counsel David Weiss, has decided he will indict Biden on the gun charge later this month. We’re not clear on why Weiss changed his mind, but an indictment might be the next logical step after a plea deal fell through, said Evan Gotlob, a former federal prosecutor.
Why doesn’t Hunter Biden get as much attention as Trump’s legal troubles?
This is a question I got from TikTok and Instagram, and it’s one I imagine many people on the right have.
First, a president’s son getting indicted is a big deal. At The Washington Post, we’ve covered Hunter Biden’s legal ups and downs extensively: Here and here and here and here, including when The Post hired two forensic experts to dig into thousands of Hunter Biden’s personal emails.
But if it feels like Trump’s legal troubles overshadow Biden’s, that’s because a former president getting indicted is bigger news. Other children of presidents have faced legal trouble. But a former president/current presidential candidate has never before been charged with crimes. And Trump hasn’t just been indicted once for a misdemeanor. He faces four indictments totaling 91 charges, including serious allegations that he deliberately hid government secrets and tried to overthrow a free and fair presidential election.
By comparison, Hunter Biden’s looming charges are relatively minor.
What Republicans say they’ve found about Hunter Biden
House Republicans say there is a major scandal with the president’s son. They just have yet to uncover it.
They’ve propped up tons of eyebrow-raising allegations: a Biden family bribery scheme, or that President Biden personally benefitted from his son’s efforts to make money. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump regularly calls Biden “crooked” and makes baseless claims that Biden is bought off by Ukraine or China, reports The Washington Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf.
But after subpoenaing thousands of pages of financial documents and talked to Biden business partners under oath, they have yet to uncover wrongdoing. When Biden was vice president, he did a lot of overseas diplomacy — pushing anti-corruption messages in Romania and Ukraine, for example. Hunter Biden was also doing business in these countries, sometimes at the same time his father was working in them. Unethical? Maybe. Illegal? So far, there’s no evidence of that.
What Republicans have done is shape public opinion fairly drastically. A new CNN poll finds 61 percent of Americans think Biden was involved in his son’s business dealings when he was vice president.
