(Washington Examiner) There’s no doubt Hunter Biden had some serious tax problems. In the 2010s, he took in millions from shady overseas business dealings, trading on the name of his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, and had a history of filing his returns late with six-figure amounts of taxes due. There was also his lowlife, high-cost drug addict lifestyle in which he threw away hundreds of thousands of dollars on prostitutes and crack. He had personal financial problems most people don’t share.
Last week, Hunter Biden agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes on time. Republicans quickly dismissed it as a sweetheart deal, and they were right. IRS investigators, who did the key work in the investigation, wanted to charge Hunter Biden with felonies. The Justice Department disagreed, choosing instead to reduce the charges to misdemeanors. But those two misdemeanors do not describe the full extent of Biden’s tax transgressions.
For the story, it’s best to go to two transcripts released last week by the House Ways and Means Committee. The first was from IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, who oversaw the Biden investigation. Shapley’s testimony has received a good bit of attention, in part because he revealed a remarkable WhatsApp message from July 30, 2017, in which Hunter Biden pressured a Chinese business associate for money by threatening to have his father, by then the former vice president, use his influence to retaliate against the associate if the money was not delivered. Hunter Biden said his father was “sitting next to me” as he made the threat, which, if true, would mean that Joe Biden was not telling the truth when he repeatedly denied knowledge of his son’s business affairs.
That was big. But there is a second IRS whistleblower whose testimony was also released last week. This whistleblower, who is anonymous, was the lead case agent for the Hunter Biden investigation. As such, he had a detailed, hands-on knowledge of the evidence in the case. He is the IRS agent who would have testified against Hunter Biden had any case against him gone to trial.
This agent — call him WB2, for whistleblower No. 2 — told House investigators a remarkable story. It started with Hunter Biden before his father became vice president, before becoming a crack addict. “Hunter Biden had had a lot of tax issues, even predating all this stuff,” WB2 testified. “Back in 2002, he filed his Form 1040 late — filing and owing over $100,000 in taxes; 2003, owed more than $100,000 in taxes; 2004, late-filed and owed more than $20,000 in taxes; and then 2005, late-filed his personal return and owed over $100,000 in taxes.”
Fast-forward to 2014, when Joe Biden was vice president and a corrupt Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, put Hunter Biden on its board of directors. According to WB2, Burisma paid Hunter Biden $666,667 that year to do little or no work. Hunter Biden received the money, WB2 explained, and then moved it to a Chinese company run by one of his associates. That company then “loaned” the money to Hunter Biden.
“So imagine this,” WB2 said. “If you are an owner of a company and your friend tells you that, ‘I want to pay my wages to your company, and you’re going to loan the money back to me,’ that’s essentially what happened here. He took loans from that corporation … and he didn’t pay taxes on those loans. … So essentially, for 2014, we found that Hunter didn’t report any of the money he earned from Burisma.” The problem, WB2 said, was: “You can’t loan yourself your own income.”
A House Republican lawyer asked: “So none of this was taxed?” WB2 responded: “None of it was taxed.” The lawyer said: “And to date, none of it has been paid or prosecuted?” WB2 responded: “So none of this has been paid or prosecuted. And I would also like to note that the statute [of limitations] has run out on these tax years or on the 2014 tax year.” The year 2014 was not part of the misdemeanor charges against Hunter Biden. As far as the IRS and Justice Department are concerned, that’s all over.
In an extremely complex arrangement, Hunter Biden did pay some of his taxes on Burisma money in 2015. But then, in 2016, Hunter Biden did not file a personal return at all and did not pay the $581,713 he owed in taxes, according to WB2. Hunter Biden moved to California, entered his drug addict years, and did not file tax returns for 2017 or 2018, either. In 2019, he got sober and faced a child support case for a child he had had with a former stripper in Arkansas. He hired a new accountant and, in February 2020, filed his 2017 and 2018 returns, according to WB2.
The 2018 return, WB2 said, contained false claims for deductions. “Some of the items that he deducted were personal no-show employees,” WB2 said. “He deducted payments that were made to who he called his West Coast assistant, but she was essentially a prostitute. He made payments — there’s an $18,000 wire that is made to one of these individuals, and on the wires, they say $8,000 in wage and $10,000 in golf — $10,000 golf club member deposit. And we know that that $10,000 went to pay for a sex club. He went to a sex club — and we’ve talked to the person that owned that sex club, and they confirmed that he was there. And the [sex club member] has to pay $10,000 … so that was deducted on the tax return.”
Hunter Biden also “deducted expenses for hotel rooms for one of his drug dealers or what we believed to be one of his drug dealers,” WB2 added. “There was a significant amount of expenses deducted related to his girlfriend at the time, Airbnbs related to her, hotel rooms. So he deducted a lot for the Chateau Marmont, and he actually was blacklisted and thrown out of the Chateau Marmont. We actually have … photos of the rooms and the destruction that was done to the rooms.”
In those years, Hunter Biden was in full flight when it came to profiting from his father’s name and influence. The money wasn’t just coming from Ukraine. It was coming from all over the world. “Global income streams for everyone altogether, so it’s for the period 2014 through 2019, our investigative years, so the total global transfers that Hunter and his associates would have received from Ukraine, Romania, and China was $17.3 million, approximately,” WB2 said. But that was for everyone involved in the Hunter Biden enterprise. As for Hunter Biden himself, WB2 said: “Of this amount, for the period 2014 through … the end of 2019 — that’s when income stops coming in — it’s $8.3 million. This is what Hunter would have received of that.” That’s the bottom line for Hunter Biden’s foreign income during that period: $8.3 million.
