Did Hunter Biden get the same deal that would be given to someone who was not the son of the president of the United States?
Douglas Berman, a professor of law at Ohio State University and a sentencing expert, read the court papers unsealed Tuesday morning and said that it was difficult to assess from the filings whether Biden received a sweetheart deal.
The crimes to which Biden is pleading guilty, Berman said, are ones that the average person is rarely prosecuted for because they are usually only brought along with more serious offenses.
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In Biden’s case, they include a charge stemming from lying about drug use on the government form used for his purchase of a handgun. Current and former officials say tens of thousands of Americans, out of the 25 million who buy guns each year, lie on their forms and are not prosecuted.
Prosecutors had pored over Biden’s finances, including examining two years of unpaid taxes. But in 2021, Biden paid the IRS the full amount that his accountants estimated he owed and paid off his liens.
By making the payments, former officials said, Biden complicated the ability of prosecutors to charge him with tax evasion because juries often question why the government has indicted someone who has paid his taxes. That left prosecutors with the options to charge Biden with filing his 2017 and 2018 taxes late — something that Biden’s lawyers argued to prosecutors are often handled without criminal charges and that in this case were handled as misdemeanors.
“If these are the only offenses, most prosecutors are going to say it’s not worth a federal case; they would say, ‘Let’s not make a federal case of it for the average person because it’s not worth it to bring a case unless there’s reason to be concerned that there’s a public safety issue or the trust that everyone is treated equally under the law is at stake,’” Berman said.
Berman said that in this case, federal prosecutors are in a unique situation because there was a very high-profile defendant who was the subject of investigations for a range of activities. The failure to bring some charges when there is no factual dispute, he said, could create the impression of a two-tiered system of justice.
“Everyone is paying attention, and the facts are not in dispute, so a failure to bring charges would create the perception that there was some sort of special treatment or leniency being given to the president’s son,” Berman said.
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