Why Hunter Biden’s Plea Deal Won’t End GOP Scrutiny, and May Even Intensify It

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In the end, Hunter Biden did the right thing and accepted responsibility, likely sparing his father an election year trial tinged with sex, drugs, and foreign money. But as President Joe Biden gears up for re-election against a Republican Party determined to undermine his credibility with voters, the political environment is one in which proven facts routinely come secondary to gut feelings.

Hunter Biden has agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of tax dodging and one count of lying on a gun-purchase application. His attorney said the plea deal means the federal probe is now “resolved,” although prosecutors stopped short of that assessment. In any event, White House allies are relieved that, at least for now, the threat of a member of the Biden family facing jail seems off the table heading into 2024.

This has been a half-decade coming. The federal probe began in 2018, but the public only learned about it when Hunter Biden confirmed its existence shortly after Joe Biden won the 2020 campaign. When the elder Biden took office in early 2021, he went to work replacing several U.S. Attorneys with picks more closely aligned to his Justice Department’s priorities. Yet the White House left in place the top prosecutor in Delaware, hoping to avoid any suggestion of interference in the investigation. Attorney General Merrick Garland insisted that the prosecutors in Delaware were completely empowered to follow the evidence wherever it led.

Now, a Trump-appointed prosecutor and Hunter Biden have agreed to a deal that includes admissions that the younger Biden willfully failed to pay federal income taxes and lied on a form saying he did not have a drug-abuse problem when he bought a gun. Hunter Biden has already paid back-taxes on the income, roughly $1.2 million in liabilities for tax years 2017 and 2018—money borrowed from his attorney. If the deal is approved by a federal judge, Hunter Biden would get roughly two years of probation and would be barred from owning a gun for the rest of his life. He would also enter a diversion program, which typically includes rehab. (A child-support case in Arkansas remains unresolved.)

For the White House, the end of the Hunter Biden uncertainty—at least for now—gives the West Wing and its pals mounting the re-election infrastructure one less reason to have indigestion and insomnia. Earlier this year, Hunter Biden’s team rolled out an aggressive legal strategy against all those gunning for him, one that stirred some anxiety among the President’s advisers. With the federal investigations closed and zero tangible legal downside for the President, that fierce tension between Team Hunter and Team Joe becomes one of messaging and not of law. Biden himself has largely gotten the defense of Hunter Biden honed at this point. After all, who can disagree with a father expressing unconditional love for a child? At the White House, an aide—not the President or First Lady Jill Biden—released a two-sentence statement on Tuesday: “The President and First Lady love their son and support him as he continues to rebuild his life. We will have no further comment.”

The deal, however, is unlikely to deflate the fevered talk inside conservative circles about the Biden family’s alleged influence peddling with shady figures in Ukraine, China, and beyond. House Republicans are continuing to push its probe into Hunter Biden’s troubled history, his unproven business relationship with his father, or whether the DOJ and the FBI have worked to protect the Bidens. Senators have long called on a special prosecutor to oversee the investigations. Yet there remains little reason to think that Biden’s critics have the goods to prove their claims; if they had proof, they’d have shared it well before Biden entered his third year as President.

Put another way: Hunter Biden’s guilty plea may close the book on an active federal prosecution of the President’s son, but it doesn’t take the issue away from those voters who are looking for any reason to block Biden from winning a second term. Yes, Hunter Biden is the son of a career politician who became Vice President and then President. He is also a Georgetown and Yale Law graduate who in the ’90s served in the Clinton administration, and went on to become a lobbyist and investment banker. Yet conservatives remain convinced the sizable haul of cash he has earned over the years is corrupt in a way that goes well beyond the various other nepotistic gigs that have long peppered the political economy of Washington, including many examples from within the Trump administration.

Hunter Biden for the last few years has been, at times, painfully transparent about his addiction and mental health struggles. He has talked publicly about sharing a Logan Circle condo with his crack dealer and fleeing an intervention the Biden family staged to help him. A laptop alleged to have been Hunter Biden’s contains a trove of embarrassing, uncomfortable, and possibly incriminating photos, videos, and emails. Lawmakers have used that personal device as a basis of ongoing attacks on the Biden family and their allies.

The fact that the Justice Department has spent years combing through the Bidens’ books and came up with nothing meriting more criminal charges can’t be ignored, though. Yet innuendo can carry a lot of water in politics. But Her Emails has become something of a liberal punchline, with even Hillary Clinton hawking swag selling that ubiquitous explanation why voters just couldn’t trust her in 2016. The nuance almost always gets hacked away in order to distill a potential scandal into a one-sentence argument. Just take Trump’s looming and complex federal case about his alleged retention, mishandling, and sharing of classified documents after he left the White House. The indictment and defense are full of constitutional questions and political nuance. Yet Democrats believe He Stole State Secrets And Fought To Hide Them is a winning solution, all but adopting Republicans’ critique of Clinton’s use of a private email account to correspond with her staffers’ State Department addresses—a system also used by Colin Powell.

Trump and those who would try to bait Biden into an emotional defense of Hunter Biden’s faults—and there are many, to be clear—might run into a disciplined wall impenetrable by innuendo alone. Joe Biden is simultaneously cocky and gaffe prone like few others at his level of experience, but he is vigilant about getting it right when it comes to his family. Throughout his presidency, Biden has been intentional in including Hunter Biden in official events, introducing him as a proud father when the family made a return to their homeland of Ireland, and Hunter Biden is often seen at White House events. Even in the face of a sentencing, there are no doubts about the Biden family’s durable embrace of even its most flawed members—nor are there doubts that that clan’s critics will use that love to cast the President as blind to possible shadiness in his own camp.

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