USA 2024, Joe Biden Has a Problem: His Son Hunter

The 2024 election campaign will be fought in court. Donald Trump risks decades of prison due to numerous criminal charges, starting with having attempted to overturn an election, while Joe Biden is seeing increasing trouble from the investigations of his son Hunter, in both the judicial system and in Congress.

Rather than defending himself on the merits, Trump is counterattacking politically, and seeking to push his trials back until after the election. Thus, it is still unclear as to whether a final legal decision will be reached on Trump’s actions before November. Not to mention the doubts regarding how much a criminal conviction of the former president would actually affect his support among voters. As of January, the country awaits the intervention of the Supreme Court, on the question of immunity and also of keeping Trump off the ballot in various states. For Joe Biden, the extent of the damage remains to be seen. His son Hunter has been at the center of attention for years due to his questionable business dealings and his troubled personal life. Since they took control of the House of Representatives at the start of 2023, Republicans have conducted intense investigations seeking to pin down the president’s son, without doing much to hide their political motivations. Now, in addition to the facts of the case, we must consider the potential consequences for the country, at a time when anxiety pervades the US institutions as regards the potential return of Donald Trump to the White House.

The role of Hunter Biden initially came under the spotlight during the first impeachment of Donald Trump in 2019-2020. The then-president had asked his counterpart in Ukraine to provide information on Joe Biden’s role in firing the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, accused by the Obama Administration and others of taking insufficient action against corruption in the country.

The problem is that Shokin was also responsible for the investigation of the energy company Burisma, from which Hunter and his business partner Devon Archer had received millions of dollars in their roles as board members, positions they were appointed to shortly after the regime change in Kiev, following the Euromaidan revolution. The details are well-known, but their meaning is heavily debated. For Republicans, this was the first of many indications of Biden family corruption, in which the powerful father facilitated his son’s business dealings. For the Democrats, it is merely an attempt to damage Biden politically, while at the same time playing down Trump’s legal problems.

In the final weeks of the 2020 election campaign, the Hunter Biden laptop scandal emerged – a computer taken in for repairs but full of pictures of the younger Biden with drugs, weapons, and often naked. The laptop also contained numerous e-mail messages regarding his business deals, with references that in some cases seem to implicate his father. The Republicans hoped to use this episode to damage Joe Biden in the run-up to the November 2020 elections, but the scandal was largely ignored by the mainstream media, with the convenient justification that it smelled like a Russian disinformation operation. Confirmation would come later that the data on the computer was authentic, and the evidence would be considered in both the criminal investigations and the inquiry in the House of Representatives.

For Democrats these were merely minor crimes that didn’t affect the president, while for Republicans Hunter’s shenanigans were a scandal that could lead to the impeachment of Joe Biden. Initially, Hunter had reached a plea bargain agreement with prosecutors, in order to settle the charges of tax evasion – despite having subsequently paid up – and having failed to state that he was using drugs when he bought a gun. The political reaction from the Republicans blocked the deal, and now Hunter has been formally charged, with new revelations on how, instead of paying taxes, he spent almost $700,000 on “various women,” $190,000 on “adult entertainment,” and hundreds of thousands more on living a “life of luxury,” racking up a tax evasion bill of $1.4 million.

To this point his father wasn’t involved, although the White House has had to implicitly acknowledge that Joe favored his son’s business dealings. The administration insists, though, on the lack of any proof of actual corruption, i.e., any money going to the now-president. The Republicans continue to seek evidence of some form of bribery, a smoking gun that could justify their decision – already taken – to open a formal investigation aimed at removing the president from office. In this context, the impression on the public may be more important than the formal crime. It is clear to everyone that Hunter Biden exploited his father’s power to get rich, and his father lent himself to this game at least in part, showing up at lunches or greeting his son’s potential partners by phone. It is important to remember that making money based on connections with powerful people isn’t necessarily a crime. But using the Biden name to get rich is in any event an example of political corruption in the eyes of the public. Yes, the Trump family did it in other ways while Donald was in the White House – the Democrats respond – but putting the two on the same level is already a victory for the defenders of the former president. Various Republicans have admitted their political goals in investigating Biden, and many Democrats hope to exclude Trump from the elections by legal means.

At this point, the question to be posed is whether or not it is legitimate to pursue a political goal through the judicial system. It would be preferable to answer “no,” but this is no ordinary time.

Since the 2016 election campaign, there have been attempts to stop Trump in the name of national security, with FBI officials and others in the intelligence community having violated procedures and relied on very weak evidence as justification to pursue Trump. Just as in 2020 the fear of Russia was invoked to nip the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in the bud. It is not the first time that institutional considerations have influenced the proceedings of justice, but the anti-Trump campaign marked the start of a new phase, offering the right additional justification for setting aside any qualms in using investigations for political aims.

Today Donald Trump is seen as a threat to the republic, because he put himself before the Constitution and has shown that he has no respect at all for the rule of law. There is a strong temptation to stop him through the Courts, and the pressure to do so will certainly intensify the closer he gets to returning to the White House. This is a double-edged sword, which in democracy can have an unanticipated outcome, as we see in the case of Hunter Biden, whose misdeeds risk making his father’s re-election in November 2024 even more difficult than expected.