Did you really expect them not to ignore any and/or all facts, period?
Everything is “ammunition” for the fantastical ravings of the delusional. It doesn’t matter what actually happens, it can always be tailored to serve some fantasy.
I’m curious to know if he’s been cooperating with other investigations.
Probably the real metric is to look at slimeballs that he was in business with and count how many of them have been pulled off the street in the last couple of years.
Is a plea deal common with these types of tax charges? That’s really the only thing that matters. What could the average man or woman expect if facing similar charges and responding in similar ways? My completely uneducated guess is that normal procedure is to make the person pay whatever tax they owe with fees and penalties.
The gun charge, in my opinion, deserves more consequences.
It’s been mentioned in other threads that something like 85% of federal charges end up with plea details. It’s far more common than taking it to trial.
In fact, the best part of this is that it shows how these things are supposed to work, in direct contrast to what the Trump Circus is turning out to be.
It’s not a given that, that’s the way to look at the matter.
Imagine that Hunter was embezzling from his business, as well as cheating on his taxes. Let’s say that it’s a slam dunk case on both of those and the prosecution has no fear of court. Really, all that there is for Hunter’s team to negotiate is the price of going to court. Does the government want to reduce their operating costs enough that they’ll accept a reduction of time and penalties by 10%? 20%? It won’t be much.
But now, let’s say that Hunter knows something about the criminal activities of dozens of others. He can dangle this information to the Feds and say, “Hey, I’m just a little fish. I can put you on the tail of these 12 other larger fish. But…I need you to drop some charges and reduce the sentences by 60%.” And, maybe, the government bites. He can get dropped from serving years of time to simply getting a few small fines and community service.
In this latter case, all that we’ll ever see publicly is the charges that stayed on the list and the sentencing recommendations that were negotiated. Without knowing what the trade was, and what all other trades were done with other suspects, it’s pretty hard to compare any two cases. Some will be straight evidence-based, slam dunk prosecutions. Others will be complex agreements that range from fingering the accomplice to wearing a wire to handing over thousands of documents against dozens of others.
This is a problem, though, because it’s going to make it look like someone exerted pressure on the DOJ. And while that could - in theory - be true. It’s more likely that the Biden family leaned on Hunter to such an excessive degree that the guy would probably offer to hand over his underwear if he thought that it would help the DOJ to prove some case.
Realistically, almost any criminal could get a slap on the wrist. They just need to be willing to work as a spy for the FBI. That’s what Trump did for years and years.
What is this in reference to?
Hard to say. Plausibly, nothing. Hunter seems to have been a target for unethical types and unethical types are more likely to be criminals. But that doesn’t mean that they are, nor that they gave Hunter information that would be useful to the DOJ. As said, it might not be the right way to view the situation.
We can’t say, for example, whether something like the below would be related to information provided by Hunter. Maybe in a hundred years, we’ll get FOIA access to everything and know but, for the moment, we have to look at the whole universe of options and stay agnostic to any one of them.
Hunter might be guilty of only those two crimes and be being punished fairly. He might have been guilty of more but traded down to it. We shouldn’t assume either of those to be correct.
When this thread popped up, and I was trying to catch up, I noticed you were here with one hypothetical after another. I don’t know why you’re doing that so often in this thread, but I find it really distracting and annoying, trying to disentangle the actual things Hunter Biden is accused of from the hypotheticals.
That’s my problem, of course. You do you.
So, Hunter Biden made obscene amounts of money by convincing other people to invest their money in his client’s businesses, many of which were located in other countries.
Do you know what that’s called?
Investment banking. It’s a profession that thousands of people engage in, and it’s a very popular career choice for the children of the wealthy and well connected.
It’s a profession that involves a lot of high dollar entertaining, and it’s associated with a high level of drug abuse. But that doesn’t mean the underlying investment activities are illegitimate.
It’s easy to gaslight “regular guys” that make 50k a year managing an automotive store into believing that it’s illegitimate………Hunter Biden got 6 million helping a Chinese company, he must be a criminal!, but that’s really normal investment banking stuff.
I will also add that I’ve read ALL the published Hunter Biden e-mails and if you take them in context, rather than just reading the highlighted sections put on the front page by the NY Post, the Big Guy is a foreign national, not Joe Biden.
And giving a third party a percentage of a business deal in exchange for help, like a contact or referral or in exchange for insights into your client is also a normal business practice - one I engaged in regularly when I was working. As long as it’s not in exchange for an illegal action, it’s pretty standard. In the year after I retired I referred a lot of old clients to former competitors and got a percentage of that business.
ETA- I read the article you posted on Khazastan after I posted this and my main takeaway was that it proves he was working for the salary he took from Burisma, and it wasn’t some sort of bribe.
Let’s say instead that a couple of tax charges and a gun violation aren’t going to lead to any bigger fish and he’ll get pretty much the same slap on the wrist as anyone else facing these charges, but just a little worse so it doesn’t look like he received favorable treatment.
By pleading guilty to these minor charges the government gets out of this ill advised investigation without wasting millions more for no reason. If only the Trump family criminal operation was so easy to put to bed.
I have no issue with any of that.
But imagine if I said that frozen treats can be made without milk - there are deserts like sorbet and frozen bananas. And that’s literary the start and end of the statement. And then a thousand people come out of the walls, making giant diatribes about how much the quality of milk can contribute to ice cream, how grass fed cows make the best ice cream, that Big Milk is just a conspiracy theory that no one has ever proved, and so on. And while, yes, that’s all true - milk is great, ice cream is great, and milk commercials are just made from pooled money by individual dairy farmers - it’s not really relevant to the actual statements that had been made. Nothing in “sorbet exists” is an argument for the Big Milk conspiracy. It’s just a factual statement. You can, literally, go to the store and purchase raspberry sorbet and if someone saying that puts you into crazy defensive mode, that says more about you than them.
Here are the specific claims. If you have any disagreements with any of these claims, then by all means post them. But actually address the things that were said:
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Plea deals can be the product of negotiations to turn witness against others, or NOT. We don’t have any way of knowing. So comparing Hunter’s sentences against others wouldn’t necessarily prove that the DOJ had been leaned on by Joe Biden, even if he seemed to have been given a slap on the wrist compared to others. He could have sold out other executives, he could have sold out his drug dealer, he could have sold out the guy that sold him the gun. You can’t compare two sentences without knowing more information than is publicly available.
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In the case that Biden did seem to have a lighter sentence than average, while we could - if we were right wing conspiracy theorists - assume that it was because of political pressure by Joe Biden on the DOJ. We could also point to the above and just as easily say that it was because the guy turned in evidence against others. It’s part of the legal process. I’d suggest that the latter is more likely - again IF it proved to be that Hunter’s sentencing seemed softer than it should. I am NOT saying that it is.
Or we could apply Occam’s Razor and not go out of our way to explain something with a wild story when everything we see is pretty ordinary on its face.
He didn’t pay taxes for a couple years but he’s already made good on that financially and it’s a non-violent crime. No one goes to jail for that.
I didn’t explain anything. I critiqued an investigatory technique that had been proposed and gave examples for why that technique would not work.
And you invented criminal business partners that Hunter Biden is flipping on to make that point.
Why? Why just summon people out of thin air?
Because I was explicitly asked to do so.
You do realize that I’m defending Hunter Biden against future avenues of attack by the right?
I see your point, but you sure threw a lot of shade around while making it.
I’m pretty quick to defend Hunter, because I know it is possible to have a troubled personal life while still being an effective and successful business person, and so much of the criticism of Hunter Biden rests on the idea that he was totally unqualified for the positions he held and that the only explanation for him holding those positions was “corruption”. I’m quick to maintain that you don’t get an MBA from Harvard Law and a job at Boies Schiller Flexner by being unqualified.
I don’t think he should escape the consequences of his flawed personal behavior and it doesn’t like like he will.
I’m in STRONG agreement with the decision not to prosecute on the gun charge….for two reasons, neither which has anything to do with Hunter Biden.
If I’m to believe the gun owners in my family, that checkbox on the gun application is a joke, and when you go into the gun store you will get explicit instructions ( sometimes there is a poster on the wall) as to how to fill out the application if you want a gun and NO ONE ever checks that box— my family can be a bit outlaw, though, so take it with a grain of salt.
But the stronger reason is that prosecuting that charge is horrible public policy that would lead to felony convictions for thousand of drug addicts are seeking or have completed rehabilitation, and the prospect of facing a felony for seeking rehabilitation would discourage people for doing so.
ETA: It would be different if the gun were used in an underlying crime, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
No.
This is absurd.
So far there’s no evidence Hunter did anything wrong aside from the two tax things and the gun thing. Sure, it’s possible he has a treasure trove of info for the Feds for a million other crimes, but if we’re making things up out of thin air then maybe he’s a space alien too. Who cares? If that’s the case, we’ll find out eventually. It’s probably not the case.
If we assume that conspiracy theorists will say that Hunter got a slap on the wrist - which seems like a safe assumption - then they’re immediately going to use that as evidence of corruption in the White House.
A strong defense - if you’ve a mind to do it - is to show all of the people in Hunter’s circle over the last decade who have been hauled in and arrested. That would plausibly demonstrate that the guy simply did what was right and got a good sentence for it. Any mumbo jumbo around that arrest be as it may, the only thing that matters is that the person got arrested some time after Hunter started to get investigated. If there’s a large number of them, so be it.
It would be purely speculative, but that puts it at a perfectly equal level to the corruption argument.