by Victor Davis Hanson
President Joe Biden, the Biden grifting conglomerate, the Department of Justice, and the FBI under its fourth consecutive weaponized director, are in danger of subverting the American system of law.
They are in various ways undermining the tradition of self-reported income tax computation and voluntary compliance.
Our tax institutions, of course, are based on the real deterrence of a disinterested, uncompromised Internal Revenue Service. Without it, the income revenues of the United States are existentially threatened.
So far, any negative reputation of the IRS has rested with natural complaints that it is too zealous in hounding out American taxpayers in all walks of life. Or citizens often object that the IRS must enforce a tax code that is innately unfair.
But not until now, has the IRS itself ever been under a shadow of such corruption?
Has it been in the past ever found to have applied so blatantly and deliberately one standard of tax enforcement to elites and quite another to everyday Americans?
Again, if that charge of unequal treatment in tax compliance were to prove true, then Humpy-Dumpty like, the entire American system of revenue collection would shatter.
In other words, millions of Americans might shrug, “If Joe Biden, President of the United States and his criminally minded son, can get away with avoiding millions of dollars in taxes, then should not I, a nobody, at least have the right to avoid hundreds of dollars in taxes?”
So the Bidens, along with Attorney General Merrick Garland and the FBI, are treading on dangerous ground in imperiling a hallowed American tradition — one vital to the very governance and operation of the United States.
The current president of the United States, despite his monotonous calls for the well-off to “pay their fair share,” has likely deliberately connived to avoid taxes on sizable amounts of unreported taxable foreign income.
In the case of his son, “likely” is an unneeded adverb.
By Hunter Biden’s recent own admissions and corroborating evidence, he seems not only to have schemed to hide millions of dollars in foreign shake-down profiteering, but to have set up all sorts of paywalls, firewalls, and phony “loans” to ensure auditors would take years to unravel his illegal schemes — until well after the expiration of the statute of limitations. And his criminality succeeded so well that he has permanently gotten off not paying thousands of dollars in overdue taxes.
Joe Biden has serially lied that he did not know anything of his son’s business dealings.
That assertion is contrary to photographic evidence of him with Hunter Biden’s business associates, sworn statements from at least one of Hunter Biden’s former business partners, clear evidence from Hunter’s own laptop, and now recent disclosures from FBI documents and whistleblower testimonies. And yet the President continues to lie, and the media continues to shrug that dads often do such things.
It is almost beyond belief, but increasingly likely, that Hunter Biden in the past conducted his illicit business over the phone in the presence, and with the complicity, of current president Joe Biden himself. And the full trove of evidence is still trickling in.
This sordid scenario is part of the larger Biden criminal landscape. Joe and Hunter may well have received $10 million from Chinese consortia for doing nothing other than monetizing Joe Biden’s Vice-Presidency and his apparent then trajectory to the presidency.
There is no longer any doubt that Hunter Biden received fabulous amounts of money from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. That lucre was again based on nothing other than the willingness of his own father, now the current president, to be directed to where and how to employ his own purchased influence.
Accordingly, Joe Biden is on record boasting of his own power to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor — through personal threats of withholding congressional approved U.S. foreign aid to Ukraine.
Biden was furious that Ukrainian auditors were probing too deeply into matters that now are increasingly clear to have been central to his own family’s nefarious influence peddling.
Note well: the U.S. House of Representatives impeached a former president on two grounds: one, an allegation that Donald Trump used his office to threaten to delay (not to cancel) Ukrainian military aid; and, two, that he did so to harm a potential political rival in the next election.
Joe Biden has now trumped Trump on both counts.
One, he is involved in criminal enterprises with his entire family, whose shake-down payouts from Ukrainian moneyed interests depended on precisely the current President’s past willingness to use his then vice-presidential office to strongarm Ukrainian officials.
Two, Biden did not so much just seek to uncover wrongdoing by his likely presidential rival, as have him indicted by his own justice department for alleged violations of presidential records statutes.
Yet unauthorized removal of classified government records is a crime that Biden himself by his own admission also has committed — and for far longer a time, and perhaps involving far greater volumes of archival material.
Critics of the Bidens have long been puzzled about the opulent spending habits and costly acquisitions of Joe and Jill Biden, Hunter Biden, Jim Biden, and other lesser family satellites on the clan’s dole.
Such wonderment about the abyss between lifestyles led and taxes reported apparently reached the highest echelons of the IRS. Its special investigating teams recommended numerous felony indictments of Hunter Biden for conspiratorial tax fraud. It requested in vain to extend their investigations to Joe Biden himself.
We now also have good reason to believe that Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, both himself and through his subordinates, used their powers unlawfully to sidetrack Justice Department attorneys from legitimately and fully investigating Joe Biden, and/or to delay and obfuscate the full prosecution of Hunter Biden.
The result is that Hunter Biden successfully used his family influence to escape taxes on hundreds of thousands of dollars of disguised income through manipulating statute-of-limitations laws.
For years, he has also escaped paying taxes, by phony claims of loans, on other known millions of dollars in income that were still likely only a portion of all his foreign quid pro quo revenue schemes.
Note, however, the greatest damage the Bidens have done to this nation.
Joe Biden’s own past lucrative financial dealings with suspect Chinese interests, with connections to the ruling Chinese communist party, cast a shadow over current American foreign policy itself.
The American people are bewildered over why the Biden administration is appeasing the Chinese government. It keeps insisting, contrary to evidence, that bilateral relations are in great shape — after successful and unapologetic Chinese overt espionage efforts to send a spy balloon across sensitive areas of the United States.
China has defiantly stonewalled any request to explain how and why a porous Chinese virology lab incompetently let escape a gain-of-function virus, a virtual bioweapon, that killed over a million Americans and sickened over 300 million.
Its jets now play chicken with our own in the skies above the South China Sea. And its ships do the same with our vessels in the same environs.
It threatens to escalate to nuclear weapons if the United States should protect its de facto ally Taiwan from envisioned Chinese aggression.
All the above is in addition to years of Chinese copyright infringement, patent violations, manipulation of Chinese currency, trade dumping, and systematic espionage operations throughout sensitive areas of the U.S. military and general economy.
Again, Biden’s response is increasingly to downplay these mounting aggressions in direct proportion to their increased frequency.
The “why” of that bizarre exculpation raises the question of how exactly would it be possible so dramatically to influence, or “get to” a U.S. President. The answer may be buried in thousands of suppressed government documents and the data of now cancelled investigations.
Note again: America in vain recently spent $40 million and 22-months on a special prosecutor to pursue, on no evidence (but relying on plenty of disinformation, fraud, and criminality) the smear that Donald Trump was a Russian puppet, and his (demonstrably tough) treatment of the Russians was supposed proof of his collusion with Vladimir Putin.
In sum, every American now knows that he would have gone to prison for several years for even attempting, much less getting away with, the fraudulent tax avoidance schemes of Hunter Biden, who likely will never spend a single day in jail.
The IRS does not give passes for divots. The law treats the attempt or preempted scheme to violate it, almost as severely as the actuality of successfully breaking tax laws.
Again, all this will not, cannot, must not stand.
We can no longer have a United States if its President almost weekly demonstrably lies with impunity about his relationships with the Biden family’s nefarious foreign business interests.
You can no longer have an American nation, if the son of the President of the United States successfully connives to rake in millions for his extended family by selling his father’s influence to foreign governments — a gambit that may currently affect the foreign policy of the United States. Adding insult to injury, Hunter Biden is now a White House fixture, as if the closer he clings to the nexus of American power and influence, the more likely he will continue to be exempted from American law.
There is no such thing as the America we once knew if the Bidens and their surrogates with impunity used the levers of the FBI and the Department of Justice to cover up, and escape prosecution of, crimes that would otherwise have sent any citizen under such liability to prison for several years.
This unfolding Biden melodrama has the potential to destroy the current presidency.
It will tarnish for generations the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the IRS.
And yet it will not die because the U.S. itself will not die, and so the scandal eventually will convict Joe, Hunter, and Jim Biden of serious felonies.
Finally, unless radical changes occur, the unapologetic Biden nefariousness will discredit permanently an obsequious and biased media that knowingly chose not to report on what they equally knew were historic transgressions against their United States.
– – –
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004.
Photo “President Biden, Joined by First Lady Dr. Jill Biden and Their Children Ashley Biden and Hunter Biden, Takes the Oath of Office as President of the United States” by The White House.
