President Joe Biden reportedly feels “guilty” about his son’s legal troubles, telling aides that Hunter Biden wouldn’t be under fire for the millions he earned from foreign business deals if he hadn’t run for president.
Hunter Biden faces up to 17 years in prison on nine tax charges and is at the center of a House impeachment inquiry into his father. Investigators are probing how the Biden family made millions in China, Ukraine, and other countries, with no apparent services rendered. Special Counsel David Weiss is reportedly not finished investigating Hunter Biden and has yet to say whether he looked into the nature of Hunter’s work for foreign entities.
An Axios report claims the president has experienced mood swings and expressed “anger” and “sadness,” believing his presidential bid brought scrutiny to his family’s questionable foreign business dealings that would otherwise have gone unnoticed.
“The 81-year-old president has suggested to close associates that if he hadn’t run in 2020, Hunter wouldn’t be facing criminal prosecutions or be the target of daily stories by conservative media,” Axios reported. The report suggests that the president may still be denying the investigation’s merits, even privately.
On Thursday, Weiss charged Hunter Biden, alleging he “engaged in a four-year scheme” to avoid paying at least $1.4 million in taxes “he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019 and to evade the assessment of taxes for tax year 2018 when he filed false returns.”
The indictment mentions money flowing from Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings. However, Weiss did not charge Hunter Biden with violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley believes Weiss’s tax indictment should have included FARA charges.
“The steps taken by Hunter to evade taxes are impressive, but not nearly as impressive as the efforts of the Justice Department to evade any reference to his father. In that sense, the indictment itself is a marvel of evasion,” Turley wrote on his blog.
In November 2022, House investigators launched a probe into the Biden family. They revealed that Joe Biden received money from James Biden and Hunter Biden. They also found that nine other Biden family members, including two of the president’s grandchildren, received payments from the family’s foreign business ventures.
