Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) questioned this week why Hunter Biden has not gone to jail after allegedly failing to disclose income to the IRS, he told Just the News, Not Noise TV show.
“It’s surprising that he didn’t go to jail,” Issa said. “[W]hen you deliberately don’t disclose income — even in the thousands of dollars, much less the millions of dollars — that’s a crime.”
According to the New York Times, Hunter paid an outstanding $1 million IRS tax bill in 2021 to evade conviction or a long sentence.
“It’s a felony,” Issa said about the allegedly overdue tax bill. “And usually, at best, you get to pay compensation and plead to a crime in lieu of maybe going to jail. That’s not the case [with Hunter Biden],” Issa continued. “He appears as though he’s getting a free pass, and just paying now what he should have paid years ago.”
Trump-appointed United States prosecutor David Weiss has been deliberating for months whether Hunter and associates “violated money laundering, campaign finance, tax and foreign lobbying laws, as well as whether Hunter Biden broke federal firearm and other regulations,” CNN reported. A grand jury has been convened in the probe, whereby a witness who testified before the jury was reportedly asked to identify the “big guy.”
The “big guy” refers to a 2017 email from Hunter’s laptop that shows a business deal between Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, the Biden family, and high-ranking members of the Chinese Communist Party would include ten percent “held by H for the big guy ?” Bobulinski has confirmed ‘the big guy’ in a May 13, 2017 e-mail was referring to Joe Biden.
“And the reality is, the laptop also reveals that this was a man making millions but always in financial trouble … [with] ex-wife payments, child support payments and, quite frankly, his drug addiction,” Issa said in relation to the Biden family business.
Sixty-two percent of registered voters believe Joe Biden likely consulted and perhaps profited from Biden family business deals, recent polling shows. Fifty-eight percent of voters believed Joe Biden played a role in his family’s business. Sixty percent said Hunter Biden has sold “influence and access” to the president. Issa stated:
Hunter Biden was an operative for foreign influence, and did use or at least appears to have used his father and others for that game. Meaning he lobbied, and when you lobby and you don’t disclose that, you’ve committed a crime. So one of the things we’re going to look at is this selective prosecution and whether this law needs to either be scrapped or real teeth to be put into it so that it’s consistent in prosecution. Which unless they prosecute Hunter Biden, certainly it wasn’t.
Issa’s comments about the double standard of justice come as ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), raised questions earlier this month over whether former FBI agent Tim Thibault shut down the FBI’s 2020 probe into Hunter Biden’s laptop. Grassley stated on the Senate floor that Thibault “shut down” a totally separate probe that is likely unrelated to the ongoing criminal probe concerning reported tax fraud by the president’s son.
“Accordingly, the investigative activity and information could not be advanced as it should’ve been, which means the FBI could have gathered more evidence with respect to Hunter Biden but cut bait instead. And the FBI and Thibault cut bait right before the 2020 presidential election,” Grassley said.
“It also calls into question what the FBI’s Baltimore field office is reviewing and whether it’s the full scope of evidence,” Grassley said in relation to Weiss’s reported tax probe.