The Hunter Biden Plea Deal Leaves House Republicans in a Pickle

The Hunter Biden story is at least three things: a personal saga of a President’s second son, who spiralled into alcoholism, divorce, and drug addiction; a financial story of lucrative business arrangements with foreign interests; and a political soccer ball that the Republicans have been trying to kick down the field and into Joe Biden’s goal for several years. On Tuesday, federal prosecutors blew the whistle on that political game by announcing a deal in which Hunter will plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges of failing to pay income taxes in 2017 and 2018 and be sentenced to two years of probation. The deal will potentially allow him to avoid prosecution on a felony charge of possessing a firearm while being addicted to drugs.

Obviously, the White House would prefer not to see Hunter in the headlines. But the plea deal, which came days after the President made his first 2024 campaign stop, in Philadelphia, delivered him several tangible benefits. First and foremost, it allows his fifty-three-year-old son to avoid any jail time and rebuild his life. (Hunter is now sober and remarried. “He looks forward to continuing his recovery and moving forward,” his lawyer Chris Clark said, in a statement.) On the political front, the plea deal removes the possibility of an indictment and trial during the election, and it almost certainly heralds the end of a five-year investigation that was carried out by David Weiss, a U.S. Attorney who Donald Trump appointed. On Tuesday, a press release from Weiss’s office described the probe as “ongoing,” but Clark said it’s his understanding that “the five-year investigation into Hunter is resolved.”

At the start of his term, President Biden left Weiss in place as the U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware, even though he was a Trump appointee, and Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, delegated his authority over the Hunter Biden investigation, including any charging decisions, to Weiss. These were the right things to do, and they were also smart. The White House can now point out that it let the legal process take its course, which is what has happened.

Of course, the fact that Weiss is a Trump appointee and made his own decisions about the case didn’t prevent leading Republicans from crying foul. “If you are the President’s leading political opponent, the D.O.J. tries to literally put you in jail and give you prison time,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told reporters at the Capitol. “But, if you are the President’s son, you get a sweetheart deal.” Donald Trump called the plea deal a “traffic ticket,” and Ron DeSantis, one of his opponents in the 2024 G.O.P. primary, said, “If Hunter were a Republican, he would have been in jail years ago.”

This unhinged reaction was eminently predictable. So was the pledge by James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who heads the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, to continue its investigation of Hunter and all things related to him. “We will not rest until the full extent of President Biden’s involvement in the family’s schemes are revealed,” Comer said, in a statement. Since the committee’s investigation began earlier this year, its staff has been issuing subpoenas and interviewing witnesses. The committee has already released two batches of bank statements, which showed money being transferred from business figures in China, Ukraine, and Romania to entities controlled by Hunter and his associates.

There’s no doubt that Comer and his G.O.P. colleagues will now step up their efforts to do some serious damage to the President. But, in trying to score politically, the Republicans face several big challenges. Firstly, they haven’t uncovered any evidence that Hunter’s business dealings—which included serving on the board of a Ukrainian energy company while his father was responsible for the Obama Administration’s Ukraine policy—crossed the line from unsavory to illegal. Neither, it seems, have Weiss’s investigators, who spent years looking into Hunter’s finances. The charges he is pleading guilty to relate to his personal taxes rather than the sources of his income.

The House Republicans and their allies also haven’t produced any evidence that the President benefitted monetarily from his son’s financial ventures with foreign actors, or that he took any official actions to aid these ventures. The White House has insisted all along that President Biden had nothing to do with his son’s businesses. The Republicans haven’t put a dent in that claim.

Finally, the very idea of elected Republicans kicking up a stink about Presidential families and their associates receiving money from foreign interests is laughable. While Trump was in the White House, the Trump Organization continued to pursue business deals in many foreign countries, and as Trump runs for reëlection these efforts are continuing. On Tuesday, the Times published a lengthy report on a Trump-branded real-estate venture in the Gulf oil kingdom of Oman, which also involves a Saudi Arabian real-estate developer with close ties to the government of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

The Oman deal is only the tip of the iceberg. After Trump reluctantly left office at the start of 2021, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund invested two billion dollars in a private-equity fund created by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who had fostered close ties with bin Salman, the oil kingdom’s dictatorial ruler, when he was serving in the White House. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund reportedly invested another billion dollars in a separate fund created by Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury Secretary. The fees attached to these huge investments weren’t disclosed, but, if they are typical of the private-equity industry, they could total tens of millions of dollars a year. “The amount of money that Saudi Arabia is directing to former U.S. government officials is unprecedented,” Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of the human-rights group Democracy for the Arab World Now, told me recently. “It just blows out of the water the lobbying-and-influence game that others have been playing in Washington for decades.”

Given all this, it seems likely that the political impact of the Hunter Biden plea deal will be something of a wash. Democrats will be relieved that the Justice Department investigation is ending seventeen months before the election, and hopeful that a year from now other events will be dominating the news. Trump and other Republican candidates will continue to promote the “sweetheart deal” narrative, using Hunter’s name, and his infamous laptop, as a rallying cry and fund-raising device. And, on Capitol Hill, Comer and his colleagues will likely turn their probe into a rehash of the Benghazi investigation of 2014-16. That was another long-running piece of political theatre that got the Republican base fired up but ultimately didn’t amount to much. ♦