Show Notes
The big news this week was Hunter Biden’s conviction by a Delaware jury on three federal felony gun charges. For Peter Schweizer, though, that looks more like pulling over a bank robber to give him a speeding ticket.
The jury took three hours to agree on guilty verdicts for all charges in what proved a cut-and-dry case. Hunter Biden bought a gun, then lied on the background form by checking “no” when asked if he was a drug user, and possessed the gun while addicted to crack cocaine. The judge said Hunter, the son of President Joe Biden, will be sentenced within the usual 120 days, which would fall prior to the November election.
For Schweizer, who has covered corruption by the Biden family since 2018, this is a sideshow. “To me, this is the equivalent of somebody robbing a bank and then fleeing the scene, then a cop pulls them over to issue a speeding ticket… Then the bank robber goes to court to contest the speeding ticket,” he said on the most recent podcast episode of The Drill Down. “I’m glad the charges were brought. He violated the law. But I think it’s really a distraction from the larger scheme of things.”
For starters, Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers recall that the Biden Justice Department tried to defer all of this away last year as part of a deal surrounding Hunter Biden’s tax-evasion charges, until Judge Maryellen Norieka took a hard look at the agreement and denied the deal.
But there’s a lot more. As the Government Accountability Institute and other investigative reporters have documented many times since 2018, Hunter Biden was running an influence-peddling scheme that had foreign governments and businesses as clients, with nothing to sell them except… access to his then Vice President father.
Hunter Biden’s business activities during the period of his father’s vice presidency, documented through bank and corporate records as well as the infamous laptop computer, show numerous examples of when he was acting as the agent of a foreign government without being registered as such under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Republican operatives such as Paul Manafort have been charged and convicted under this law.
Schweizer stresses that the problems Hunter is facing now, with his conviction on gun charges and further charges pending for tax evasion and possibly others, could have been prevented by wise words from his father at the time. “Joe could have said: ‘Son, I love you, but don’t put me on the phone with a business partner. Absolutely not.’”
Schweizer continued: “And we know Joe never did that. He never said that. He allowed that conduct to continue. So, he is complicit, I would argue, in this behavior and an accessory to these crimes,” Schweizer said.
As House oversight committee chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY) has said during his investigation into these matters:
“The scam is simple: the Biden family promises they can make a foreign partner’s problems go away by engaging the U.S. Government. The problems can be anything: a Ukrainian corruption investigation, moving Russian money to the United States, a Romanian criminal prosecution, access for China to American energy sources.
“Joe shows up, shakes a few hands in front of his son, and says, ‘Take care of my boy,’ or something similar, and the money flows to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. It is done over and over again. The Biden family promises Joe’s power, Joe Biden shows up, and millions of dollars come into the Bidens’ pockets. Joe Biden is the family’s closer. How could he not be?”
