by WorldTribune Staff, June 14, 2024 Contract With Our Readers
Last month, the judge presiding over Hunter Biden’s tax evasion trial in Los Angeles agreed to delay the start of his trial to Sept. 5, smack in the middle of election season.
Unlike 2020, however, Democrats and their legacy media allies can’t hide or suppress what is contained on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Data extracted from the so-called laptop from hell about the first son’s long history of tax problems will likely be key to federal prosecutors’ case.
No letters from intelligence officials claiming the laptop has all the earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign can save the first son this September. Joe Biden’s own Department of Justice has validated the laptop as real and belonging to Hunter Biden.
Hunter Biden was charged in the Central District of California with three felony and six misdemeanor tax offenses.
According to the indictment, Hunter Biden either failed to file a return or pay his income tax owed for subsequent years, until 2019. During this period, Biden continued to take in millions of dollars from Ukraine energy firm Burisma and his joint ventures with Chinese businessman Ye Jianming, the founder of CEFC China Energy.
A March 15, 2019, email, one of the latest found on the laptop before Hunter Biden left the device at a computer repair shop, shows that he continued to spend large sums of money even as he owed thousands of dollars in taxes.
“The bills in orange are of concern. Red is urgent. It will be another week before Burisma money. Please let me know if there is a new plan for paying these bills or if there is more information that you need,” Katie Dodge, an assistant to Biden wrote to him.
Related — For The Record: Report on the Biden laptop, a series
Some of the bills listed in the email include a $24,262.99 chase credit card bill, a $10,000 American Express credit card bill, and a $395 insurance bill for a $142,000 Porsche sports car given to him by a Kazakh businessman.
Despite the significant evidence of Hunter Biden’s failure to pay the taxes he owed, what the indictment does leave out is any mention of Joe Biden’s role in his son’s business dealings, which is also indicated by the very same email evidence the prosecutors possessed.
IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, who brought concerns to the House Ways and Means Committee last year about irregularities in the Hunter Biden tax investigation, said that U.S. Attorney David Weiss’ office prevented any thorough investigation of the elder Biden’s role.
The two whistleblowers testified that pursuing evidence related to Joe Biden was “off the table” and that they were prevented from investigating any financial transactions between father and son that would normally be investigated. House Republicans reported that Joe Biden did indeed receive payments from his son and brother on separate occasions, likely funded by foreign money.
“Did your gut tell you that Joe Biden was benefiting in any way from any of Hunter’s criminal proceeds?” Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Mike Kelly asked Shapley last year.
“We were interested in following leads that went to Joe Biden – President Biden – not because he was Vice President, but because in any normal investigation, if you see financial transactions between son and father, and email correspondence going back and forth, text messages, and WhatsApp messages, in every investigation we have ever worked, we would follow those leads to the father,” Shapley replied.
“We’ll never know because we weren’t allowed to investigate…For example, we wanted to go and say, ‘location data – we want to look into that.’ And you know, it just wasn’t supported, and things just fell off the priority list,” he continued.
A June 12 letter to the editor in the New York Post from Bo Madden of Jupiter, Florida summed up the difference between the New York and California cases:
President Biden embracing his son Hunter on the tarmac in Delaware made for a great photo (“President’s son Hunter guilty of 3 gun crimes,” June 12).
Biden must be upset that Hunter was convicted for several gun charges. But as the enabler-in-chief, Joe bears a lot of responsibility for his son’s woes.
I think Joe’s tears are really brought on by the thought of Hunter’s next legal battle in California, in which his dealings with Hunter will be scrutinized much more closely than Hunter’s addictive behavior.