What's going on with Hunter Biden?
What's going on with Hunter Biden?
A couple months ago the findings against Hunter Biden were nothing, not even worth taking to court, only under GOP pressure did the Trump appointed prosecutor take it to court. Now it seems like a big deal and 17 years (max). What happened? Why the change? Was new evidence found?
This is an incredibly important question to understand if you're American or are ever in the jurisdiction of America. America is not the land of the free or equality or civil rights. Almost everybody commits a handful of crimes every day. Sometimes bigger crimes. Sometimes felony huge crimes. I'm talking ordinary people like your grandma. You know like your grandma, not actual "criminals".
For example when Grandma drives 45mph on the highway, that's a misdemeanor in many places for going too slowly. Then when she fills up her big gulp and takes a few sips then tops it off, that's criminal theft. When she sees a letter addressed to you delivered to her and opens it so she can tell you what it is, that's a felony criminal offense with a 6 month federal prison sentence attached.
Now the police are just snitches. If they see you do something they can ticket and/or arrest you. If you're not doing something wrong, but don't agree to be arrested, congratulations now you've actually committed another crime!
But the end of all of this is the district attorney, the DA. The DA (the office with lots of staff and a main big head honcho) is tasked with looking at these charges, deeming what is really a crime they care about, and bringing forth charges. Of the DA got a report on your grandma committing a felony mail fraud by opening your mail, you'd hope in a sane world they'd laugh it off and ignore it. The problem is this relies on one person or a small group of people making the "right" decision which ironically is illegal itself, and choosing what charges to bring against who.
When things are high profile, they bring all charges because they have to. Not bringing charges is against the law itself, but again is handwaved higher up because that's the stupid system. Then it's up to the actual judicial system to decide the criminality and the punishment, then enforce. The import take away at this point is that in the USA, you can literally be charged and arrested at anytime for anything. That is not hyperbole. If you want an example on the other side of the spectrum, look at the lawyers talking about Trumps crap. Everyone knows he's guilty but getting a jury conviction, somewhat unlikely considering you need 12/12 in agreement. So the pundits correctly say, if we know he's guilty they can charge him with these other random crimes and get him. If he's in jail, who cares what for. This is done ALL THE TIME. Most famous high profile case being Al Capone. Everyone knows he was a mobster and killed people. But they couldn't make it stick. So what do they do? Charge him with tax evasion crimes and give him the maximum penalties for everything. If they want to get you, they can get you.
So back to Hunter. Nothing has changed as the alleged crimes. Everyone is in agreement he did it. His crimes are nothingburgers. Lying on the gun app is something most rednecks do all the time, it's a formality paper. And funny enough, they're happy with him losing his gun rights for drug use, the second amendment doesn't apply to him I guess. That lie on the application is the first crime. He's guilty. It is usually a slap on the wrist, no time, no fine. But it CAN be prison time. So for him, it is.
The other things are tax issues. He misreported and misfiled taxes for many years. Daddy paid the back taxes, he paid Daddy back. In most cases the IRS is happy with that, sometimes they assess a big fine. Everyone goes on their way. But the IRS charges can impose federal prison. And for him it is.
I understand it's a large wall of text. I understand it goes against most of what Americans believe. And most will never experience it. But it is there. And you need to know it.
That was excellent!
Question about the back taxes. Why in the world would it be illegal to let someone else pay them and then reimburse them later?
It isn’t. The point is that accruing back taxes requires payment and may, at the discretion of the IRS, mandate a criminal charge. He wasn’t charge at the time because he paid, but he could have been. So now they want him to have been.
However I think neither party really wants things to go this way, and Republicans are going to see lots of retaliatory investigation and charges brought over missed payments etc. should they pursue this.
A waste of time and money, doesn’t improve anything in the world, just creates more division. Basically the GOP motto.
Just to piggyback with my own anecdote: do you think this ends when you're finally in prison? NOPE. Same deal on the inside. Just change misdemeanor with "minor infraction" and felony with "major infraction."
Source: ex CO.
Minor infractions were at my discretion and unless you were being a dick about it summarily ignored my by me. Majors I had no choice, no matter how stupid. Fortunately though it's only on paper that I didn't have a choice.
One small nitpick: it’s completely legal for a DA decide to charge/not charge for most (all?) crimes. Look up “prosecutorial discretion”.
The Republicans needed something to justify their upcoming impeachment.
"justify"
What changed though? Why was it absolutely nothing a couple months ago and why is it now (seemingly) blowing up? Is it just squawking or did something actually change?
Like many things in politics, it’s basically a minor crime blown up for political reasons. There’s also a lot of conspiracies around Hunter Biden (and some extend to Joe as well), some stemming from his work with Burisma.
That being said, in the midst of a shit ton of politically motivated investigations, it turns out they found that he did lie on his taxes and lied about owning a gun. He was convicted of drug charges and not legally allowed to own a gun. He could go to jail for that, but probably not the tax part. Tax cheats routinely negotiate out of court settlements, which almost happened with Hunter, before a judge decided to block it (maybe for political reasons)
Edit: sorry, he was not convicted of drug charges, but laws prohibit users of some drugs from owning guns and he lied about his drug use to buy a gun (something I’m sure is pretty common given the prevalence of gun use and the opiate epidemic)
There's no new evidence. Republicans are basically actively pursuing max level penalties for charges that are routinely just assessed with a fine or other punishment.
For example, the tax issues, normally the IRS just levy a fine for the unpaid tax crimes and a bit more to be paid, then they're fine with it. Since they're getting their money and then some.
There technically can be criminal charges and jail time assigned to said unpaid taxes, it's just the IRS normally doesn't care to pursue that. Since it doesn't get them their money, which is all that's really at issue.
But Republicans are pushing for the max level jail time charges for these crimes now, rather than how they are normally dealt with.
very little
They're itching for new dick pics
What else is MTG gonna show people to get attention?
Wasn't what she did illegal? Did anything happen with that?
That's the thing about American politics, there doesn't need to be any evidence found. They just need to figure out a way to bring charges.
Been practicing on poor people for decades now...
Not sure. Did they find out why he got 2 billion dollars from the Saudis? Oh, wait....
dude did some combination of drugs / owning a gun / tax evasion, so he should go to jail ig
From what I’ve seen by casually scraping news, evidence of massive corruption in the Biden family continues to be uncovered; I haven’t seen much in these comments about the juicy overseas dealings stuff, the other charges mentioned here are more small fry (but still worth prosecuting). I encourage you to look up the details of the situation yourself because you’re gonna get heavily biased answers from social media, especially since this is a political issue. I’ll probably catch flak just for saying that.
A post from a couple months ago was asking something similar about all the Trump business; one commenter mentioned that it was because one better get everything right before one guns for the king, and it feels like a similar thing here.
I love it when "crime family" is said because it shows how you've fallen for confusing charges against Hunter to be something against a whole family. It's both lol worthy and cringe worthy.
Maybe I misunderstood your question because I read it as referring to all charges made against him, and there’s definitely a corruption case building against both father and son here, which I assumed would fall under the scope of your question. But if you didn’t want to know that case was progressing then there’s been a miscommunication.
If your answer uses the phrase "Biden Family" I'm not sure I'd expect an unbiased answer.
You’re correct, and I’m not going to say I don’t have a bias. But the result I wanted to produce is a more-informed perspective by encouraging people to do their own research, especially after asking a question in a forum where you’ll mainly get answers along the same line of thinking. The rest is just headlines.
It's basically regular Rich person crime, but they did something wrong during the trial proceedings that would normally lead to a deal to lower the sentence.